Up in the mountains, however, the wolves do not slink in stealthy groups of twos and threes, but assemble in such mighty packs that sometimes on the high pasturages the snow is found to be trampled down by the tread of many hundred feet, as though large droves of cattle had passed over the place. Officers who have been engaged in the work of going over the country, classifying all horses for purposes of national defence, have told me that in many out-of-the-way places up the hills they used to find the horses frequently bitten or scarred about the nose—as many keepsakes from the wolves, whose invariable habit it is first to spring at the horse’s head. Many are the ruses which the wolf employs in order to induce a horse or foal to detach itself from a drove of grazing animals. Sometimes he will roll himself up into a shapeless mass, and lie thus immovable for hours on the ground, till some young inexperienced colt, bitten with curiosity, wanders from its mother’s side to investigate the strange bundle it espies at a distance. The wily murderer lets himself be approached without moving, and only then, when the hapless victim bends down to snuff the packet, he springs at the throat, and makes of it an easy prey. The more experienced horses have long since learned that their only safety is in numbers; so at the approach of wolves they draw themselves together in a wheel, each head turned inward touching the others, their tails all pointing outward, and with their hind-hoofs dealing out such furious kicks as to enable them to keep at bay several enemies at a time. The Transylvanian bears will rarely attack a man unless provoked, experiencing as much terror from a chance encounter as any they are likely to occasion. A Saxon peasant told me of such a meeting he had some years ago, when up in the mountains with some gentlemen who had come there in quest of deer. As they were to sleep in the open air, he had gone to collect firewood on the ground between a scattered group of fir-trees. When issuing from behind a tree-trunk he suddenly found himself face to face with a gigantic bear—not ten paces off. “We were both so taken aback,” he said, “that for nearly a minute we stood staring at each other without moving. Then I called out, ‘Der Teufel!’ and took to my heels; and the bear, he just gave a grunt, which perhaps also meant ‘Der Teufel’ in his language, and he also turned to run; and when I looked back to see where he was, there, to be sure, he was still running down the hill as hard as ever he could go.”