
real 
=“ 
A PILFERING GRIZZLY. 
FRANK R. GROVER. 
John Gilbert, of Cooke City, Montana, is 
a bear hunter. In the fall of 1902 he intro- 
duced 2 Chicago lawyers to a family of 5 sil- 
vertips and a job lot of blacks and cinna- 
mons. The lawyers, true to the instincts of 
their profession, carried home the hides of 
the whole silvertip family and of 2 or 3 of 
their black and brown cousins, and the feat 
was the talk of all Northern Wyoming. I 
heard of it in Chicago and engaged Mr. 
Gilbert to duplicate the job. 
In the early part of September my friend, 
Carl Leopold, of Burlington, Iowa, and our 
2 young sons, with Gilbert as guide, were 
camping in Yellowstone park, seeing the 
sights and waiting for the open season in 
Wyoming, September 15th. If all the 
true bear stories that have been told around 
camp fires in Yellowstone park could be 
put in a book, the readers would all agree 
that the author had lost the intellectual 
partition between memory and imagina- 
tion. The reminiscences of our camp fires 
would make one chapter in such a book. 
The evening of September 2d, 1903, we 
were camped in a canyon about 2 miles 
from the great falls of the Yellowstone, and 
the discussion of Bruin in all his aspects 
was the evening’s entertainment; the feroc- 
ity of the grizzly, the shyness, slyness and 
swiftness of foot of the black bear, the 
docility of the Yellowstone-park-garbage- 
pile-hotel bear, the nonsense of the lying 
stories about bears coming tnto camp and 
stealing provisions, were all argued pro and 
con. Gilbert was a modest, unassum- 
ing man, and we were never annoyed 
by the usual guide tales of his own exploits ; 
but on that occasion, we were much inter- 
ested regarding a patriarch of the grizzly 
tribe, weighing some 800 pounds, which 
the season before, near the park line and 
but a few miles from our camp, had left 
about 6 inches square of his right front 
foot in one of Gilbert’s traps. Gilbert’s re- 
mark, “TI’d like to get within 10 rods of 
him and I’d fix him,” was given but pass- 
ing notice at that time. Bedtime arrived 
and after a fina! look at the saddle and pack 
horses and a peering into the darkness in 
the direction of the coyote chorus that had 
been rehearsing all the evening on the 
mountain side, we were ready to crawl into 
the sleeping bags. Gilbert declared he had 
heard so much fiction that evening about 
camp-robbing bears that he and his son 
Clarence would sleep on the ground around 
the wagon and he “should like to see the 
bear that could climb over him and get the 
bacon out of that wagon.” 
About one to 2 o'clock a. m. I awoke 
twice, aroused once by the clatter of a tin 
plate on the dinner table and again by the 
neighing of one of the horses, 
“A bear in camp,” I suggested, but I was 
lulled to sleep by some sarcastic references 
of Mr. L. regarding a similar midnight 
alarm a year before in a Michigan forest, 
when a common wood hare, or snowshoe 
rabbit, was found to be the intruder. 
“Can’t ycu hear Gilbert snore,” said Leo- 
pold. “He is a bear hunter. Do you sup- 
pose a live bear would catch him with his 
eyes shut? Don’t bother me.” 
What was known as the alarm clock in 
camp, namely Gilbert chopping wood for 
the breakfast fire, was usually heard at day- 
break or at latest 6.30 a.m. That morning 
the first sound was the exclamations of the 
Gilbert family, with intervals between deé- 
voted to investigation. 
“The bacon is gone!” “The prunes are 
gone!” “Took the sugar!” “See his tracks!” 
“Say, he took that loaf of bread, too!” “He 
made 5 trips!” “And there I was snorin’ 
like a tenderfoot !” 
The investigation that ensued showed be- 
yond question that Mr. Bear, with his velvet 
feet, had come softly into camp, stepped 
lightly over Gilbert and son and had com- 
mitted 5 distinct burglaries, taking out of 
the wagon and the-panniers and from our 
camp table, and carrying off in turn a sack 
of bacon, a bag of prunes, a loaf of bread, 
baked in camp for breakfast, 1o pounds of 
sugar and a yard or 2 of summer sausage. 
The few uneaten remnants of these supplies, 
found in a heap a few rods from camp, as 
well as the deep prints of Bruin’s teeth 
in the sausage, which did not seem to 
suit his taste, would have convicted him 
of the robbery even before a Chicago jury; 
and the tracks plainly told us he was no 
dwarf. 
This account of stock had just been com- 
pleted when Gilbert began to examine with 
greater care the tracks which this ancient 
marauder had left behind. Both the tracks 
and the expression on Gilbert’s face, to say 
nothing of his exclamations, indicated that 
he had found an old acquaintance, for about 
1% of the tracks were made by a club 
foot that would just make good that part 
of a bear which Gilbert’s trap failed to 
hold the year before. Someone was unkind 
enough to remark: 
“Say, Gilbert! did you get within to rods 
of him?” To which our pilot replied: 
“No, but that durned bear got within 10 
inches of me.” 
