Ot 
THE GRIZZLY BEAR. 12 
an illustration of the extent of his muscular power is 
afforded by the fact that after having destroyed his 
victim, he will drag its ponderous carcase to some con- 
venient spot, where he will dig a pit for its reception, 
and deposit it for a season, returning to his feast from 
time to time as the calls of hunger may dictate, until 
his store is exhausted and he is again reduced to the 
necessity of looking abroad for a fresh supply. 
But although endowed with so strong a propensity 
for animal food, as well as with the power to gratify the 
appetite thus grafted in his very nature, he is not, like 
the more perfect of the carnivorous tribe, left entirely 
dependent upon that which, in the climate in which he 
has been placed, must of necessity be a precarious, and 
frequently even an impossible, source of subsistence. 
Of a more fierce and sanguinary temper than the other 
bears, he does not hesitate to attack whatever living 
creature may fall in his way, and man himself seems to 
inspire him with little dread: but in the absence of his 
favourite food, he makes a less savoury, but equally 
congenial, meal of vegetable substances, of fruits, or 
more commonly of roots, the latter of which he digs up 
with the greatest facility with his enormous claws; and 
in some parts of the country these more simple produc- 
tions form almost his sole subsistence. On the quality 
of his food depends much of the ferocity of his temper; 
for it appears that the bears of the western side of the 
Rocky Mountains, who live almost entirely upon vege- 
tables, are of a much less fierce and savage disposition 
than their fellows of the eastern side, where animal food 
is more abundant and more easily procured. 
Next to his great size and excessive ferocity, one of 
