"But Lewis and Clark didn't really kill any grizzlies until they got above the Yellowstone--and then they certainly got among them. Gass records sixteen grizzlies met with between the Yellowstone and the Great Falls of the Missouri. He usually calls them 'brown bears,' which shows the great color range of the grizzly. Lewis and the others call them 'white bears.' The typical grizzly had a light-yellowish coat, often dark underneath. "Of course, color has nothing to do with it. I've seen them almost black. The silvertip is a grizzly. The giant California bear was a grizzly. The great Kadiak bears which you boys saw were grizzlies of a different habitat. I've seen a grizzly with a hide almost red. But of course you know that the 'cinnamon bear' is practically always a black bear; and a black bear mother may have two cubs, one red and one quite black. "Scientists try to establish a dozen or two 'species' of bears--even making different 'species' of the black bears of the southern Mississippi bottoms--Arkansas, Louisiana, etc.--and I don't know how many sorts of 'blue bears' and 'straw bears,' 'glacier bears,' etc., among the grizzlies. Of course, bears differ, just as men do. But the one thing which remains constant is the length of the claws, or front toe nails--what the _Journal_ calls their 'talons.' In a black bear these are always short. In a grizzly they are always long--they get them up to four and one-half inches, and I believe some of your Kadiaks have even longer claws. Colors grade, but claws don't. I even think the polar bear is a grizzly of the North--white because he lives on snow and ice, and with a snaky head because he has to swim. But his claws he needed and kept. "The long-clawed bears were all predatory; the short-clawed ones never were. Not long ago I read a magazine story about a black bear which killed a moose with seven-foot horns. There never was a black bear ever killed any moose, and there never was any moose with horns that wide. Such things are nonsense--like a great part of the magazine animal fiction." Rob was interested. "Too bad they've trapped off about all the grizzlies," he said now. "I've tried a lot of kinds of sport, and of them all, I like grizzly hunting, quail shooting, and fly fishing for trout." "Not a bad selection! Well, the first is hard to get now. The grizzly is closer to extinction than the elk or the buffalo, for the buffalo breed in domestic life, and the grizzly--well, he hasn't domesticated yet. He's the one savage--he and the gray wolf--that would never civilize. And he's gone." "But, Uncle Dick, those bears must have been a different species from grizzlies nowadays. Look how they fought? Even Lewis came near being killed by them more than once."