358 BIG GAME SHOOTING 



for a year or two yet) which appears to be a high tableland, 

 densely timbered and full of caribou, and from this innu- 

 merable gullies and clefts lead down to lower levels, where, at 

 the bottom of steep canyons, are piled rock and stone slide, 

 and debris of dead pine wood. There are opens among the 

 pines at the top, and here in snow-time, if you leave a caribou 

 carcase for a couple of days, you will find plenty of bear-tracks 

 going to and fro. Every day the number of them increases, 

 until it seems to you that the place must be alive with grizzlies ; 

 but you will never see one of the track-makers by day. The 

 bears here have been a good deal hunted, and have become as 

 cunning as monkeys, coming up from the gullies at night but 

 vanishing like spectres at the first peep of day. It was here 

 that a friend of mine killed and left a mule deer, hanging its 

 head up in a tree hard by, to be called for on some future 

 occasion. When that occasion came, the head was missing, 

 and was found a little further on, laid with the carcase and 

 carefully covered up with moss and sticks and snow. 



This, of course, is a common trick of the grizzly's, but it 

 was quaint of this particular beast to gather up the fragments 

 so carefully. By the way, whilst I am on the subject of 

 ' carcases,' I may as well say that it is not my own experience 

 that grizzlies are very gluttonous feeders, upon flesh at any 

 rate. Indeed, it seemed to me that a deer's carcase lasted 

 some bears whom I have known almost as long as it would 

 have lasted an ordinary camp Indian. I knew, for instance, of 

 a mule's carcase in the spring of 1892 which served as an attrac- 

 tion to four bears (two black and two grizzlies) for at least a 

 fortnight in the Kootenay country. 



But to come back to the bear's menu. About the same 

 time that the Erythronium is in bloom, black bears feed freely 

 upon a plant called ' arpa ' by our British Columbian Indians 

 (Heracleum lanatum\ upon skunk cabbage, and upon a plant 

 which Professor Macoun has kindly identified for me as Peuce- 

 danum triternatum. 



What the black bear eats from choice, the grizzly will eat 



