The Grizzly, Our Greatest Wild Animal — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
The Grizzly, Our Greatest Wild Animal
John Stuart Mill · en
For years I have watched, studied, and enjoyed the grizzly, have seen
his actions under a variety of influences--fighting and playing,
sleeping and food-getting. I have watched him when he was under normal
influences and abnormal ones; when pursuer and when pursued; have kept
him within the focus of my field-glasses for hours at a time, and have
trailed for days with a camera this master animal.
The grizzly is so dignified and so strangely human-like that I have felt
degraded every time I have seen him pursued with dogs. A few times I
have outwitted him; more often he has outwitted me. We have occasionally
met unexpectedly; sometimes each stared without alarm, and at other
times each fled in an opposite direction. Sometimes the grizzly is
guided by instinct, but more often his actions are triumphantly directed
by reason.
Cubs and Mother
The life-story of every bear is a story of adventure. A hunter with whom
I was camping in the No-Summer Mountains of Colorado came in one June
evening with the report that he had killed a mother grizzly. He had
searched for her cubs, which he thought must be near by, but had failed
to discover them. The hunter said he had come upon her unexpectedly in a
thicket and she had at once charged, probably thinking herself cornered.
One well-aimed shot in the head had dropped her.
The following morning I went with the hunter to bring in the grizzly.
She was a beautiful silver-tip of about four hundred pounds. We made
another thorough search for the cubs without finding them. Just as the
hunter was about to start skinning the bear I caught sight of a cub
peeping from beneath large slide rocks not thirty feet away. Then
another frightened cub face appeared.
After hesitating for a moment both cubs came out and stood looking
intently toward us and their dead mother. After a stare, as we did not
move, they took a few steps toward us. Hesitating again, they stopped,
rose up and looked around, and then hastily retreated to the rocks.
Evidently their mother had trained them to stay wherever she left them
until she returned.
But they had waited long. For a while they stood and whimpered very much
like hungry, forsaken children. They could scent their mother, and see
her, too, and were too hungry and lonesome to endure without her longer.
Again they started slowly toward us, walking closely side by side. When
very near they paused, rose on hind legs, and looked intently at us and
in wonder and longing at their lifeless mother. Then they went to her.
One little cub sniffed in a bewildered, puzzled way over her cold, still
body. He gently stroked her fur with his paw and then sat down and began
to whimper and cry.
[Illustration: THE CHALLENGE
_The Cub on the Right is an Alaskan Grizzly of the Big Brown
Bear Type_]