A COLORADO BEAR HUNT 73 



ished also, although not to the same extent. The great 

 grizzlies which were once fairly plentiful here are now 

 very rare, as they are in most places in the United States. 

 There remain plenty of the black and brown bears, which 

 are simply individual color phases of the same species. 



Bears are interesting creatures and their habits are 

 always worth watching. When I used to hunt grizzlies 

 my experience tended to make me lay special emphasis 

 on their variation in temper. There are savage and cow- 

 ardly bears, just as there are big and little ones; and 

 sometimes these variations are very marked among bears 

 of the same district, and at other times all the bears of 

 one district will seem to have a common code of behavior 

 which differs utterly from that of the bears of another 

 district. Readers of Lewis and Clark do not need to be 

 reminded of the great difference they found in ferocity 

 between the bears of the upper Missouri and the bears of 

 the Columbia River country; and those who have lived 

 in the upper Missouri country nowadays know how wide- 

 ly the bears that still remain have altered in character 

 from what they were as recently as the middle of the last 

 century. 



This variability has been shown in the bears which 

 I have stumbled upon at close quarters. On but one oc- 

 casion was I ever regularly charged by a grizzly. To this 

 animal I had given a mortal wound, and without any 

 effort at retaliation he bolted into a thicket of what, in 

 my hurry, I thought was laurel (it being composed in 

 reality, I suppose, of thick-growing berry bushes) . On 

 my following him and giving him a second wound, he 



