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 tothe 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 them ; 
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 eidewed 
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 lao 
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 lbs.,! presumably upon hog food. It is said that 
the Californian grizzly grows larger than any other, but 1 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 a 
he saw the bear exhibited by a man named Adams in San Francisco; it was 
then said to weigh 1,500 lbs., and Mr. Coles adds, ‘I never heard any doubt 3 
expressed as to its weight.’—C. P.-W. 
Pes te 
a, a es 
