THE GUN AT HOME AND ABROAD 
now kill more than two or three in a season, whereas twenty years ago 
twelve to twenty were the usual number. In Labrador it is still common, 
but not so common as in Cartwright’s time, who reported seeing twenty 
or thirty in a single day. In Ontario and Manitoba it is numerous and is 
probably more abundant throughout British Columbia and Southern 
Alaska than in any part of the new world. 
During the latter part of the nineteenth century some 14,000 black bears* 
skins were annually exported by the Hudson Bay and other companies, 
whilst it is certain that at least as many again were killed in summer, when 
their pelts were not worth taking. The supply of bears is always fluctuating, 
and whilst it is true that the species was far more abundant in former 
times, they are still in such numbers in out of the way places where only 
trappers go that they must be reckoned as one of the commonest animals 
in North America. 
Black bears undoubtedly migrate to a certain extent, and movements 
have been noted in the Carolinas and elsewhere. These migrations are, 
of course, regulated by scarcity or abundance of food, and are at all times 
fitful and irregular. On the whole, however, this bear is usually as stay-at- 
home as the grizzly, and where food is sufficient it takes up its home in 
thickets or amongst rocks, and works a radius of some fifteen miles around. 
Like all bears, the black bear makes regular worn trails that are usually 
the easiest roads through the rough country in which they dwell. Bears 
make no effort to improve a road once made, for when it is blocked with 
obstacles they merely find the nearest way round. Bear trappers agree 
that the bear is most conservative in its methods of movement. Where a 
bear has passed another always follows the same route, stepping over the 
logs in just the same way. Bears will generally go under obstacles rather 
than over them, and some paths that I have seen in dense thickets in 
Newfoundland were so hollowed and so low that they resembled large 
trails made by gigantic voles. In following a wounded bear there through 
a dense black spruce forest, where the trees were growing so close that it 
was impossible to make a road without the aid of an axe, I had to crawl 
on my hands and knees for over a quarter of a mile without once being 
able to stand up ; and the prospect of meeting even so harmless an animal 
as the black bear under such circumstances was not very pleasant. 
If three bears are going along a trail, the two following always step 
exactly in the footprints of the leader, and they go on year after year using 
the same road until the tracks are deep impressions in the ground. Bears 
378 
