To finish these remarks, and convey, if possible, some idea of hunting the grizzly, let me take a leaf from my note-book, kept in Alaska in the autumn of 1891, whilst hunting with my friend Mr. Arnold Pike. Nature has a way of always suiting her creatures to their environments, but none of her creatures are more exactly suited to their surroundings than _U. horribilis_. Savage and silent and grey as the grizzly is, the forests and waters amongst which he chooses to dwell are more grim, more savage, and more forbidding than himself. The part of Alaska in which we were hunting in 1891 appears to have escaped from that process described in Genesis by which the waters which were above the firmament were divided from the waters which were under the firmament. On the Stickeen river there is no firmament. As a rule, a damp darkness broods upon the face of the deep, and the waters which should be above touch and mingle with the waters which should be below. There is no dry belt between the bottom of the sea and the roof of heaven, at least in that district which lies between Wrangel and Telegraph Creek, in the month of October. We were out for forty days and forty nights, and I cannot swear to more than three and a half moderately fine days in that time: a fine day in Alaska being one in which you wear oilskins and gum boots, and go to bed in a dry shirt; whilst on a wet one you wear gum boots and oilskins, and go to bed to dry your shirt. The river Stickeen runs its rapid course between dank forests, grey at the top with mildew, and hung with dark mosses, in which the devil’s club forms an impenetrable undergrowth, and even the pines are thorny. The pace of the river is such that you make as much in one day, drifting down it, as you made in five pulling and poling up it; and your camping-grounds are of necessity upon barren sandspits, for nothing but a bear could force its way into this timber. In this land no gentle things live: there are no deer, no small birds, no squirrels, no sunlight--nothing but a few wolves, a stray seal, which comes whistling up on the tide in the grey of the morning, great flights of Canada geese, and dying salmon. All along the course of the main river are the mouths of its ice-fed tributaries, little streams of greenish-blue water, rising in a glacier and fringed with narrow strips of glacial mud, upon which a rank growth of _Equisetum_ (horse-tail) flourishes. These banks are the hunting grounds, and the number of huge tracks upon them, as well as the _débris_ of half-eaten salmon, proclaim that there is no scarcity of game; but if the hunter would get a shot he must haunt them at all unseasonable hours, when winds are most chill, and nature is at her gloomiest: for ‘Hoots’ only creeps out upon the creek’s edges with the first shadows of the night, and vanishes from them with the earliest rising mists of morning.