28 NORTHERN ZOOLOGY. 
more often met them singly or in pairs. He was only once attacked, and then 
by a female, for the purpose of allowing her cubs time to escape. His gun on 
this oceasion missed fire, but he kept her at bay with the stock of it, until some 
gentlemen of the Hudson’s Bay Company, with whom he was travelling at the 
time, came up and drove her off. In the latter end of June 1826, he observed a 
male caressing a female, and soon afterwards they both came towards him, but 
whether accidentally, or for the purpose of attacking him, he was uncertain. He 
ascended a tree, and as the female drew near, fired at and mortally wounded her. 
She uttered a few loud screams, which threw the male into a furious rage, and he 
reared up against the trunk of the tree in which Mr. Drummond was seated, but 
never attempted to ascend it. The female, in the meanwhile retiring to a short 
distance, lay down, and as the male was proceeding to join her, Mr. Drummond 
shot him also. From the size of their teeth and claws, he judged them to be 
about four years old. The cubs of the Grisly Bear can climb trees, but when 
the animal is fully grown it is unable to do so, as the Indians report, from 
the form of its claws. Two instances are related by Lewis and Clark, and I have 
heard of several others, where a hunter having sought shelter in a tree from the 
pursuit of a Grisly Bear, has been held a close prisoner for many hours, by the 
infuriated animal keeping watch below. The Black and Brown or even the Polar 
Bear ascend trees with facility. Some interesting anecdotes of contests with this 
Bear, selected from the narratives of Lewis and Clark, Major Long, and others, 
are related in Godman’s Natural History, to which the reader is referred. 
The Grisly Bears are carnivorous, but occasionally eat vegetables, and are ob- 
served to be particularly fond of the roots of some species of psoralea and hedysarum. 
They also eat the fruits of various shrubs, such as the bird-cherry, choke-cherry, 
and hippophde Canadensis. The berries of the latter produce a powerful cathartic 
effect upon them. Few of the natives, even of the tribes, who are fond of the flesh 
of the Black Bear, will eat of the Grisly Bear, unless when pressed by hunger. 
Say and Gass mention a method which the Shoshonee or Snake Indians have of 
baking Bear’s flesh in a pit filled with alternate layers of brush-wood and meat, 
and covered with earth *, which is nearly similar to the way in which the natives 
of the South-sea Islands prepare their dogs and hogs. 
The Grisly Bear inhabits the Rocky Mountains and the plains lying to the east- 
ward of them, as far as latitude 61°, and perhaps still farther north. Its southern 
range, according to Lieutenant Pike, extends to Mexico. ‘There is a Brown 
* Gass’s Journal, &c., p. 311. 
