OF WILD ANIMALS idz 



the wolf and the owl. The skunk fears the coyote which joy- 

 ously kills him and devours all of him save his jaws and his 

 tail. The marten, mink and fisher have mighty good reason 

 to fear the wolverine, who in his turn cheerfully gives the road 

 to the gray wolf. The wolf and the lynx carefully avoid the 

 mountain lion and the black bear, and the black bear is careful 

 not to get too close to a grizzly. Today a cotton-tail rabbit 

 is not more afraid of a hound than a grizzly bear is of a man. 

 The polar bear once was bold in the presence of man; but some- 

 body has told him about breech-loading high power rifles; 

 and now he, too, runs in terror from every man that he sees. 

 The lion, the tiger, the leopard and the jaguar all live in whole- 

 some fear of man, and flee from him at sight. The lordly ele- 

 phant does likewise, and so does the rhinoceros, save when he 

 is in doubt about the identity of the biped animal and trots up 

 to get certainty out of a nearer view. Col. Roosevelt became 

 convinced that most of the alleged "charging" of rhinoceroses 

 was due to curiosity and poor vision, and the desire of rhinos 

 to investigate at close range. 



Today the giant brown bears of Alaska exhibit less fear 

 of man than any other land animals that we know, and many 

 individuals have put themselves on record as dangerous fighters. 

 And this opens the door to the great Alaskan controversy 

 that for a year raged,— chiefly upon one side, — ^in certain 

 Alaskan newspapers and letters. 



Early in 1920, certain parties in Alaska publicly asked people 

 to believe that W. T. Homaday in his "published works" 

 had set up the Alaskan brown bear as "a harmless animal." 

 All these statements and insinuations were notoriously false, 

 but the repetition of them went on right merrily, even while 

 the author's article portraying the savage and dangerous char- 

 acter of the brown bear was being widely circulated in the 

 United States through Boys^ Life magazine. 



The indisputable facts regarding the temper of the great 

 Alaskan brown bears are as follows: 



