724 
THE BLACK BEAR. 
to handle the trap. A stout chain, with a 
grapnel or a large block of wood attached, is 
fastened to the trap. Even with this an old 
bear often manages to escape altogether, his 
sagacity teaching him to return and liberate 
the grapnel or block whenever it catches 
upon anything and checks him. He dies 
eventually, of course, if unable to free him- 
reach it. The string has connection with a 
piece of wood which props up the dead-fall, 
consisting of a heavy log of beech or birch 
timber, weighted with other logs. When the 
bear pulls at the bait, the prop is drawn from 
under the heavy timber, which falls across 
his back. It sometimes happens that the 
hunter, to his discomfort, finds that his dead- 
BEAR AND CUBS. 
self from the trap, but in some cases he has 
been known to gnaw off a part of his paw 
and leave it in the trap. This mode of capt- 
ure is open to the charge of cruelty, as the 
bear is usually caught by a paw, and some- 
times by the snout, and the injury not being 
immediately fatal, the animal may die a lin- 
gering death of great agony. The set-gun, 
if properly arranged, kills the bear instantly. 
The gun is placed in a horizontal position, 
about on a level with a bear's height; one 
end of a cord is fastened to the trigger, and 
brought forward in such a way that when 
the bait is attached to the other end of the 
cord it hangs over the muzzle of the gun, 
and the least pull on the bait discharges the 
gun, which is protected from the weather by 
a screen of bark. The ordinary dead-fall con- 
sists of a number of stout poles driven in the 
ground in the form of a U. In front of the 
opening is placed a heavy log. The bait is 
suspended from a string within the inclosure, 
so that it will be necessary for the bear to 
place his fore legs over the log in order to 
fall has proved fatal to one of his o\vn or his 
neighbors' cattle. 
In the autumn, bear-hunters take advantage 
of Bruin's known partiality for raspberries, 
blackberries, and blueberries, and set traps 
and dead-falls in the approaches to the 
patches. He also frequents the beech-forests, 
and his expertness as a climber enables him 
to obtain the rich mast on which he grows 
corpulent. In the spring, when he first comes 
from his winter quarters, he feasts upon the 
ants and grubs he discovers by industrious 
digging, or by turning over decayed logs. 
Later in the season, when the herrings and 
alewives run up the streams to spawn. Bruin 
turns fisherman, and captures the fish by in- 
tercepting them as they pass over shallow 
places, and scooping them out with his paws. 
His taste for pork and molasses often encour- 
ages him to visit the camps of lumbermen. 
If captured when ver)' young and carefully 
trained, the black bear becomes tame, but I 
doubt if he ought to be trusted as a pet. My 
own efforts to tame young bears have not 
