Despite their size, brown bears devote much of their time to hunting such game as mice, ground squirrels, and marmots, which they dig from their burrows with extraordinary rapidity. During the salmon season, when the streams swarm with fish, bears frequent the lowlands and make trails along the watercourses, where they feed fat on this easy prey. During the summer and fall these great carnivores have the strange habit of grazing like cattle on the heavy grasslike growth of sedge in the lowland flats and benches, and also of eating many other plants. Although Alaska was long occupied by the Russians and has been a part of our territory since 1867, not until 1898 was there any definite public knowledge concerning the existence of these bears, notwithstanding their size and abundance. Since that time they have become well known to sportsmen and others as one of the wonders of the remarkable region they occupy. Their comparatively limited and easily accessible territory renders their future precarious unless proper measures for their reasonable protection are continued. They are certain to be exterminated near settlements; but there are ample wild and inhospitable areas where they may range in all their original freedom for centuries to come, provided man permits. =AMERICAN BEAVER= (=Castor canadensis= and its subspecies) When North America was first colonized, beavers existed in great numbers from coast to coast, in almost every locality where trees and bushes bordered streams and lakes, from near the Yukon Delta, in Alaska, and the Mackenzie Delta, on the Arctic coast, south to the mouths of the Colorado and the Rio Grande. Although now exterminated from most of their former range in the eastern United States, they still occur in diminished numbers over nearly all the remainder of their original territory, even in the lower Rio Grande and the delta of the Colorado. Their vertical distribution extends from sea-level to above an altitude of 9,000 feet. Beavers are heavily built, round-bodied animals, with powerful chisel-shaped front teeth, short legs, fully webbed hind feet, and a flat, scaly tail. They are covered with long, coarse hairs overlying the short, dense, and silky underfur to which beaver skins owe their value. Their range covers the northern forested parts of both Old and New Worlds. The American species closely resembles in general appearance its Old World relative, but is distinctly larger, averaging 30 to 40 pounds in weight, but sometimes attaining a weight of more than 60 pounds. Owing to the different physical conditions in its wide range, the American animal has developed a number of geographic races.