Three winters in succession the grizzly climbed to a den in an exposed spot on the northern slope of Mount Meeker. It was a low opening beneath a rock, the entrance to which was partially stopped with loose rubble, raked from inside the cave, and every fall he renovated it by chinking the larger cracks and by pawing together loose bits of rock for a bed. As fall approached, his tracks led to it; apparently he napped inside occasionally to try it out. His ultimate retirement for winter hibernation depended upon the weather and the food supply; if the fall were late, with plenty of food, he would still be about the woods as late as December, while one fall when snow came early and deep, and so made food unavailable, he disappeared at the end of October. The grizzly had many individual traits. Not once in the years I followed him, did he show any desire for others of his kind. He preferred being alone. His play consisted chiefly of elaborate stalkings of easily captured animals. If his hunger was appeased for a time he would turn to hunting grasshoppers. Marking the spot where one had alighted he would steal forward and pounce upon it as though it were an animal of size and fighting ability. Again he would take great pains to waylay a chipmunk, lying motionless while the unwary little spermophile ventured closer and closer, then, with a lightning-like slap of a huge paw, he would reduce his victim to the general shape and thinness of a pancake. Though the grizzly was somewhat awkward in appearance he could move with amazing speed, and his strength was incredible. From glimpses I had of him I estimated his weight at six hundred pounds, but he could move the carcass of a cow or horse twice that heavy. Once on Cabin Creek, not many miles from his accustomed haunts, a lion killed a horse. As he approached the kill, the grizzly circled warily around it, stood erect to sniff and listen, and growled warningly, informing all would-be intruders that it was his. When he had eaten his fill, he dragged the carcass nearly a hundred yards uphill over fallen timber, into a thicket, where he covered it against the prying eyes of birds, thinking, I presume, that they would signal other animals of its location. The date of his emergence from his den in the spring, like his holing up in the fall, depended upon the weather. Commonly though, he hibernated about one-third of the year. When he came out after his long sleep he was very thin, the great layers of fat he had taken care to put on before denning up were gone. One year I followed his tracks the day he came out to learn what he first ate, and was surprised to find that he scarcely ate at all. Instead of being ravenous, as I had supposed he would be, he seemed to have no appetite, and barely tasted a green shoot or two, and a little grass. His claws had grown out over winter and the tough soles of his feet soon shed off so that, though born to the wilds, he became a tenderfoot.