Bear vary greatly in size and color, no less than in temper and habits. Old hunters speak much of them in their endless talks over the camp-fires and in the snow-bound winter huts. They insist on many species; not merely the black and the grizzly, but the brown, the cinnamon, the gray, the silver-tip, and others with names known only in certain localities, such as the range bear, the roach-back, and the smut-face. But, in spite of popular opinion to the contrary, most old hunters are very untrustworthy in dealing with points of natural history. They usually know only so much about any given game animal as will enable them to kill it. They study its habits solely with this end in view; and once slain they only examine it to see about its condition and fur. With rare exceptions they are quite incapable of passing judgment upon questions of specific identity or difference. When questioned, they not only advance perfectly impossible theories and facts in support of their views, but they rarely even agree as to the views themselves. One hunter will assert that the true grizzly is only found in California, heedless of the fact that the name was first used by Lewis and Clark as one of the titles they applied to the large bears of the plains country round the Upper Missouri, a quarter of a century before the California grizzly was known to fame. Another hunter will call any big brindled bear a grizzly no matter where it is found; and he and his companions will dispute by the hour as to whether a bear of large, but not extreme, size is a grizzly or a silver-tip. In Oregon the cinnamon bear is a phase of the small black bear; in Montana it is the plains variety of the large mountain silver-tip. I have myself seen the skins of two bears killed on the upper waters of Tongue River; one was that of a male, one of a female, and they had evidently just mated; yet one was distinctly a “silver-tip” and the other a “cinnamon.” The skin of one very big bear which I killed in the Bighorn has proved a standing puzzle to almost all the old hunters to whom I have shown it; rarely do any two of them agree as to whether it is a grizzly, a silver-tip, a cinnamon, or a “smut-face.” Any bear with unusually long hair on the spine and shoulders, especially if killed in the spring, when the fur is shaggy, is forthwith dubbed a “roach-back.” The average sporting writer, moreover, joins with the more imaginative members of the “old hunter” variety in ascribing wildly various traits to these different bears. One comments on the superior prowess of the roach-back; the explanation being that a bear in early spring is apt to be ravenous from hunger. The next insists that the California grizzly is the only really dangerous bear; while another stoutly maintains that it does not compare in ferocity with what he calls the “smaller” silver-tip or cinnamon. And so on, and so on, without end. All of which is mere nonsense.