The bear had already received a shot in the stomach before the dogs tackled him, but when they ran him to bay he seemed strong and well. Neither dogs nor bear took any notice of me, though I was standing up to my knees in the water of the ford within a few paces of them; and in five minutes the fight was over without interference on my part. At first the bear cuffed the dogs as they swam up to him, as a man might cuff who knew nothing of hitting out from the shoulder, and once he took the big dog in his jaws and went right under with him. However, the setter came up smiling, and shortly afterwards poor old Bruin was floating down stream, his head under water, and the dogs tugging with impunity at his flanks. I suppose that this bear weighed less than 200 lbs. Captain Baldwin in his excellent book on the game of Bengal describes two kinds of bears: _U. labiatus_ and _U. tibetanus_; and almost everything that he says of the Indian black bear would apply equally well to _U. americanus_ (even to his weakness for yellow raspberries), except that _U. labiatus_ appears to fight upon occasion, whereas _U. americanus_ is hardly ever known to fight even in self-defence, and has never, as far as I know, been accused of making an unprovoked assault upon a human being. Baldwin seems to have been somewhat surprised when he discovered that the Indian black bear fed upon carrion. No one in America would be surprised at anything which _U. americanus_ considered good for him. I have seen a cub take rotten melon, a piece of meat, a cake of chocolate, a plug of T. & B. tobacco, and the end of a half-smoked cigar for breakfast. Being a true American, the cub naturally showed a preference for the plug of T. & B., but none of the other things came amiss to him. In a wild state a black bear will eat any garbage, putrid fish, dead animals, or anything else which comes in his way. In fact, the poor black bear is in all his tastes and habits a thorough hog: a pig without a pig’s pugnacity. As a rule he is a lowland beast, living in swamps and river-bottoms, but I have seen him once or twice even in a mountain sheep country, probably crossing over the divide from one river-bed to another. It is well for him that he generally eschews the open, for once out of the timber everything which has eyes must see him. A man may mistake a burnt log for a bear, but no man could mistake a bear for a burnt log. The intense blackness and gloss of a bear’s coat is not thoroughly appreciated until you see it contrasted with other objects which you are accustomed to call black. Where the sportsman runs any chance of seeing tracks of both black and grizzly in one and the same piece of country, it is as well to be able to distinguish the one from the other.