Early next morning we were over at the elk carcass, and as we expected, found that the bear had eaten his fill during the night. His tracks showed him to be an immense fellow and were so fresh that we doubted if he had left long before we arrived; and we made up our minds to follow him up and try to find his lair.
The bears that lived on these mountains had evidently been little disturbed; indeed, the Indians and most of the white hunters are rather chary of meddling with Old Ephraim, as the mountain men style the grizzly, unless they get him at a disadvantage; for the sport is fraught with some danger and but small profit. The bears thus seemed to have very little fear of harm, and we thought it likely that the bed of the one who had fed on the elk would not be far away.
My companion was a skillful tracker, and we took up the trail at once. For some distance it led over the soft carpet of moss and pine needles, and the footprints were quite easily made out, although we could follow them but slowly; for we had, of course, to keep a sharp lookout ahead and around us as we walked noiselessly on in the somber half-light always prevailing under the great pine trees.
We made no sound ourselves, and every little sudden noise sent a thrill through me as I peered about with each sense on the alert. Two or three of the ravens that we had scared from the carcass flew overhead, croaking hoarsely; and the pine tops moaned and sighed in the slight breeze – for pine trees seem to be ever in motion, no matter how light the wind.
After going a few hundred yards the tracks turned off on a well-beaten path made by the elk. The woods were in many places cut up by these game trails, which had often become as distinct as ordinary footpaths. The beast’s footprints were perfectly plain in the dust, and he had lumbered along up the path until near the middle of the hillside where the ground broke away and there were hollows and boulders. Here, the dead trees lay among the living, piled across one another in all directions.
The trail turned off into the tangled thicket, within which it was almost certain we would find our quarry. We could still follow the tracks, by the slight scrapes of the claws on the bark, or by the bent and broken twigs; and we advanced with noiseless caution, slowly climbing over the dead tree trunks and upturned stumps, and not letting a branch rustle or catch on our clothes.
When in the middle of the thicket we crossed what was almost a breastwork of fallen logs, and Merrifield, who was leading, passed by the upright stem of a great pine. As soon as he was by it, he sank suddenly on one knee, turning half round, his face fairly aflame with excitement; and as I strode past him, with my rifle at the ready, there not ten steps off, was the great bear, slowly rising from his bed among the young spruces. He had heard us, but apparently hardly knew exactly where or what we were, for he reared up on his haunches sideways to us. Then he saw us and dropped down again on all fours, the shaggy hair on his neck and shoulders seeming to bristle as he turned toward us.
As he sank down on his forefeet I had raised the rifle; his head was bent slightly down, and when I saw the top of the white bead fairly between his small, glittering, evil eyes, I pulled the trigger. Half-rising up, the huge beast fell over on his side in the death throes, the ball having gone into his brain, striking as fairly between the eyes as if the distance had been measured by a carpenter’s rule.
The whole thing was over in 20 seconds from the time I caught sight of the game; indeed, it was over so quickly that the grizzly did not have time to show fight at all or come a step toward us.
It was the first grizzly I had ever seen, and I felt not a little proud as I stood over the great brindled bulk, which lay stretched out at length in the cool shade of the evergreens. He was a monstrous fellow, much larger than any I have seen since, whether alive or brought in dead by hunters. As near as we could estimate (for of course we had nothing with which to weigh more than very small portions), he must have weighed about twelve hundred pounds, and though this is not as large as some of his kind are said to grow in California, it is yet a very unusual size for a bear. He was a good deal heavier than any of our horses; and it was with the greatest difficulty that we were able to skin him.
He must have been very old, his teeth and claws being all worn down and blunted; but nevertheless, he had been living in plenty, for he was as fat as a prize hog, the layers on his back being a finger’s length in thickness. He was still in the summer coat, his hair being short, and in color a curious brindled brown, somewhat like that of certain bull-dogs; while all the bears we shot afterward had the long thick winter fur, cinnamon or yellowish brown.
By the way, the name of this bear has reference to its character and not to its color, and should, I suppose, be spelt grisly – in the sense of horrible, exactly as we speak of a “grisly spectre” – and not grizzly; but perhaps the latter way of spelling it is too well established to be now changed.
In killing dangerous game, steadiness is more needed than good shooting. No game is dangerous unless a man is close up, for nowadays hardly any wild beast will charge from a distance of a hundred yards but will rather try to run off; and if a man is close, it is easy enough for him to shoot straight if he does not lose his head. A bear’s brain is about the size of a pint bottle; and any one can hit a pint bottle off-hand at 30 or 40 feet.
I have had two shots at bears at close quarters, and each time I fired into the brain, the bullet in one case striking fairly between the eyes, as told above, and in the other going in between the eye and ear. A novice at this kind of sport will find it best and safest to keep in mind the old Norse Viking’s advice in reference to a long sword: “If you go in close enough your sword will be long enough.” If a poor shot goes in close enough, he will find that he shoots straight enough.
I was very proud over my first bear; but Merrifield’s chief feeling seemed to be disappointment that the animal had not had time to show fight. He was rather a reckless fellow, and very confident in his own skill with the rifle; and he really did not seem to have any more fear of the grizzlies than if they had been so many jackrabbits. I did not at all share his feelings, having a hearty respect for my foe’s prowess, and in following and attacking them always took all possible care to get the chances on my side. Merrifield was sincerely sorry that we never had to stand a regular charge; while on this trip we killed five grizzlies with seven bullets, and each was shot about as quickly as it got sight of us.
The last one we got was an old male, which was feeding on an elk carcass. We crept up to within about 60 feet, and as Merrifield had not yet killed a grizzly purely to his own gun, and I had killed three, I told him to take the shot.
He at once whispered gleefully: “I’ll break his leg, and we’ll see what he’ll do!”
Having no ambition to be a participator in the antics of a three-legged bear, I hastily interposed a most emphatic veto; and with a rather injured air he fired, the bullet going through the neck just back of the head. The bear fell to the shot, and could not get up from the ground, dying in a few minutes; but first he seized his left wrist in his teeth and bit clean through it, completely separating the bones of the paw and arm.
Although a smaller bear than the big one I first shot, he would probably have proved a much more ugly foe, for he was less unwieldy, and had much longer and sharper teeth and claws. I think that if my companion had merely broken the beast’s leg, he would have had his curiosity as to its probable conduct more than gratified.
We tried eating the grizzly’s flesh, but it was not good, being coarse and not well flavored. And besides, we could not get over the feeling that it had belonged to a carrion feeder. The flesh of the little black bear, on the other hand, was excellent; it tasted like that of a young pig. Doubtless, if a young grizzly, which had fed merely upon fruits, berries and acorns, was killed, its flesh would prove good eating, but even then, it would probably not be equal to a black bear.
A day or two after the death of the big bear, we went out one afternoon on horseback, intending merely to ride down to see a great canyon lying some six miles west of our camp; indeed, we went more to look at the scenery than for any other reason, though, of course, neither of us ever stirred out of camp without his rifle. We rode down the valley in which we had camped, through pine groves and open glades until we reached the canyon, and then skirted its brink for a mile or so. It was a great chasm, many miles in length, as if the table-land had been rent asunder by some terrible and unknown force; its sides were sheer walls of rock, rising three or 400 feet straight up, and worn by the weather till they looked like the towers and battlements of some vast fortress. Between them at the bottom was a space, in some places nearly a quarter of a mile wide, in others very narrow, through whose middle foamed a deep, rapid torrent of which the sources lay far back among the snow-topped mountains around Cloud Peak.
In this valley, dark-green, somber pines stood in groups, stiff and erect; and here and there among them were groves of poplar and cottonwood, with slender branches and trembling leaves, their bright green already changing to yellow in the sharp fall weather. We went down to where the mouth of the canyon opened out and rode our horses to the end of a great jutting promontory of rock thrust out into the plain; and in the cold, clear air we looked far over the broad valley of the Bighorn as it lay at our very feet, walled in on the other side by the distant chain of the Rocky Mountains.
Turning our horses, we rode back along the edge of another canyon-like valley, with a brook flowing down its center, and its rocky sides covered with an uninterrupted pine forest – the place of all others in whose inaccessible wildness and ruggedness a bear would find a safe retreat. After some time, we came to where other valleys, with steep, grass-grown sides covered with sagebrush, branched out from it, and we followed one of these out. There was plenty of elk sign about, and we saw several black-tail deer. These last were very common on the mountains, but we had not hunted them at all, as we were in no need of meat.
But this afternoon we came across a buck with remarkably fine antlers, and accordingly I shot it, and we stopped to cut off and skin out the horns, throwing the reins over the heads of the horses and leaving them to graze by themselves. The body lay near the crest of one side of a deep ravine, which headed up on the plateau a mile to our left. Except for scattered trees and bushes the valley was bare; but there was heavy timber along the crests of the hills on its opposite side.
It took some time to fix the head properly, and we were just ending when Merrifield sprang to his feet and exclaimed: “Look at the bears!” pointing down into the valley. Sure enough, there were two bears traveling up the bottom of the valley, much too far off for us to shoot.
Grasping our rifles and throwing off our hats, we started off as hard as we could run, diagonally down the hillside, so as to cut them off. It was some little time before they saw us, when they made off at a lumbering gallop up the valley. It would seem impossible to run into two grizzlies in the open, but they were going uphill and we down, and moreover, the old one kept stopping. The cub would forge ahead and could probably have escaped us, but the mother now and then stopped to sit up on her haunches and look round at us, when the cub would run back to her. The upshot was that we got ahead of them, when they turned and went straight up one hillside as we ran straight down the other behind them.
By this time, I was pretty nearly done out, for running along the steep ground through the sagebrush was most exhausting work; and Merrifield kept gaining on me and was well in front. Just as he disappeared over a bank, almost at the bottom of the valley, I tripped over a bush and fell full-length. When I got up, I knew I could never make up the ground I had lost, and besides, could hardly run any longer. Merrifield was out of sight below, and the bears were laboring up the steep hillside directly opposite and about 300 yards off, so I sat down and began to shoot over Merrifield’s head, aiming at the big bear.
She was going very steadily and in a straight line, and each bullet sent up a puff of dust where it struck the dry soil, so that I could keep correcting my aim; and the fourth ball crashed into the old bear’s flank. She lurched heavily forward, but recovered herself and reached the timber, while Merrifield, who had put on a spurt, was not far behind.
I toiled up the hill at a sort of trot, fairly gasping and sobbing for breath, but before I got to the top I heard a couple of shots and a shout. The old bear had turned as soon as she was in the timber, and came towards Merrifield, but he gave her the death wound by firing into her chest, and then shot at the young one, knocking it over.
When I came up he was just walking towards the latter to finish it with the revolver, but it suddenly jumped up as lively as ever and made off at a great pace – for it was nearly full grown. It was impossible to fire where the tree-trunks were so thick, but there was a small opening across which it would have to pass. Collecting all my energies, I made a last run, got into position and covered the opening with my rifle.
The instant the bear appeared I fired, and it turned a dozen somersaults downhill, rolling over and over. The ball had struck it near the tail and had ranged forward through the hollow of the body. Each of us had thus given the fatal wound to the bear into which the other had fired the first bullet.
The run, though short, had been very sharp, and over such awful country that we were completely fagged out and could hardly speak for lack of breath. The sun had already set, and it was too late to skin the animals; so we merely dressed them, caught the ponies – with some trouble, for they were frightened at the smell of the bears’ blood on our hands – and rode home through the darkening woods. Next day we brought the teamster and two of the steadiest packhorses to the carcasses, and took the skins into camp.
We were very loath to leave our hunting grounds, but time was pressing, and we had already many more trophies than we could carry; so one cool morning, when the branches of the evergreens were laden with the feathery snow that had fallen overnight, we struck camp and started out of the mountains, each of us takng his own bedding behind his saddle, while the pack-ponies were loaded down with bearskins, elk and deer antlers, and the hides and furs of other game.
In single file, we moved through the woods, and across the canyons to the edge of the great table-land, and then slowly down the steep slope to its foot, where we found our canvas-topped wagon; and next day saw us setting out on our long journey homewards, across the 300 weary miles of treeless and barren-looking plains country.
Last spring, since this was written, a bear killed a man not very far from my ranch. It was at the time of the floods. Two hunters came down the river by our ranch, on a raft, stopping to take dinner. A score or so of miles below, as we afterwards heard from the survivor, they landed, and found a bear in a small patch of brushwood. After waiting in vain for it to come out, one of the men rashly attempted to enter the thicket and was instantly struck down by the beast, before he could so much as fire his rifle. It broke his skull with one blow of its great paw, and then seized his arm in its jaws, biting it through and through in three places, but leaving the body and retreating into the bushes as soon as the unfortunate man’s companion approached.
We did not hear of the accident until it was too late to go after the bear, as we were just about starting to join the spring roundup on my ranch.
Note: “Old Ephraim” originally appeared as Chapter X in Theodore Roosevelt’s Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, published in 1885.