The Grizzly, Our Greatest Wild Animal — John Shaqi
The Grizzly, Our Greatest Wild AnimalMills, Enos A.
Philosophy
The Grizzly, Our Greatest Wild Animal
Mills, Enos A.
Grizzly bear
Grizzlies often show courage and strategy by hiding and lying in ambush
for a pursuing hunter. On one occasion I had been following a grizzly
for a number of days, trying to get his photograph at short range. He
knew I was in pursuit. Finally, he doubled back on his trail a short
distance and crouched behind a log. His tracks as I followed them passed
along the other side of this log, and continued plainly ahead of me
across the top of a snow-covered moraine. But as I approached the log,
the wind stirred the bear's fur and gave me warning.
A grizzly appears to understand that his tracks reveal his movements. I
was once following one that had been wounded by a hunter to see where
he went and what he did. He circled from his trail and came back to it
over logs and rocks, which left no markings, and hid in a clump of fir
trees. On seeing this possible place of ambush by the trail, I turned
aside and climbed a pine to reconnoitre. When the bear realized that I
had discovered him, he made off in anger.
Round the foot of Long's Peak I followed a bear through a shallow snow,
hoping to overtake and photograph him. Most of the snow had melted off
the logs and bowlders. After trailing him four or five miles I came to a
bowlder where he had climbed up and looked around. Possibly he wished to
see how close I was to him; possibly he was deciding just where he would
carry out a plan for outwitting me. At any rate, he jumped from the
bowlder, walked round it, traveled a short distance slowly, then set off
on a run, going east. After I had followed his trail for more than a
mile, his tracks ceased in a rocky, snowless area where his footprints
did not show.
I thought I should find his tracks in the snow on the farther edge of
the rocky space; but they were not there. Then, in the snow, I went
entirely round the edge of the rocky space without seeing a track.
Thinking that possibly the grizzly was hiding in this small rocky area,
I at once cautiously circled every place behind which he might be
concealed, but without finding him.
Out in the snow I made a larger circle and at last discovered his
tracks. Entering the rocky space, he had turned abruptly to the left and
traveled about one hundred feet. Then, from the rocks, he had made a
long leap into a clump of bushes, from this leaped into another clump of
bushes, and finally into the snow. He thus left the rocky place without
leaving any telltale tracks within thirty feet of it.
He started westward--back toward the bowlder--alongside his first trail,
and traveled for about a mile parallel to it and less than one hundred
feet from it. Near the bowlder he waited in concealment at a point where
he could watch his former trail, and evidently stayed there until I
passed.
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