360 BIG GAME SHOOTING 



( O, chouicha) turns up the streams, and a few of this ' run ' 

 stay all through the season ; later on come the humpies 

 (Onchorhynchus gorbuscha\ and of these, the Indians say, none 

 return to the sea. In October, then, in Alaska and elsewhere, 

 the glacial streams, tributary to the main rivers, are full of 

 these misshapen salmon, crimson and purple, and patched 

 with all manner of vivid leprous patches, their dorsal fins 

 frayed and rotting as they swim. The streams stink of therti ; 

 your paddle strikes one which is already broken up and drift- 

 ing seaward ; others, swollen with decay, are standing, tail 

 upwards, on the river bottom ; whilst others, driven by some 

 strange madness, diseased and dying, still struggle up the 

 shallows towards the glacier. 



At this time of year, the dense woods of grey and mildewed 

 pines and prickly devil's club, which crowd down to the river's 

 edge, are full of bears ; the mud flats between forest and 

 stream are pitted with huge tracks (I have measured many 

 12 ins. by 9 ins.), and the filthy gorged American eagle sits 

 puking and moping with ruffled feathers among cleaned back 

 bones and rejected heads and tails of humpies, left over from 

 the grizzlies' last meal. 



And here, at the end of their year's feeding, it seems appro- 

 priate to say something of the weight to which grizzlies attain, 

 and the size to which they grow. Like human beings, they 

 seem to fatten most in a civilised or domestic state, the great 

 grizzly of San Francisco having really attained to the enormous 

 weight of 1,500 Ibs., 1 presumably upon hog food. It is said that 

 the Californian grizzly grows larger than any other, but I doubt 

 whether he much exceeds the Alaskan in size, and I am abso- 

 lutely certain that all the largest grizzlies have grown to their 

 fabulous proportions in the whisky- scented atmosphere of 

 Western saloons. 'If you will hear them,' as the 'boys' say, 



1 Tradition puts this bear at 1,900 Ibs., but Mr. John Coles writes me that 

 he saw the bear exhibited by a man named Adams in San Francisco ; it was 

 then said to weigh ij5Oo Ibs., and Mr. Coles adds, ' I never heard any doubt 

 expressed as to its weight.' C. P.-W. 



