Hoping to learn where this mother grizzly and her cubs came from I
back-tracked through the November snows in a dense forest for about
twenty miles. This trail came out of a lake-dotted wooded basin lying
high up between Berthoud Pass and James Peak on the western slope of
the Continental Divide. The three-legged mother grizzly was leaving
the basin, evidently bound for a definite, far-off place. Her tracks
did not wander; there had been no waste of energy. A crippled bear
with two cub children and the ever-possible hunter in mind has enough
to make her serious and definite.
But the care-free cubs, judging from their tracks, had raced and
romped, true to their play nature and to youth. The mother’s tracks
showed that she had stopped once and looked back. Possibly she had
commanded the cubs to come along, but it is more than likely that she
had turned to watch them. Though ever scouting for their safety and
perhaps even now seeking a new home, yet she probably enjoyed their
romping and with satisfaction had awaited their coming.
I had gone along reading the story these bears had written in the snow
without ever thinking to look back. The following morning I realized
that this grizzly may have been following me closely.
I spent that night with a prospector from whom I learned many things
of interest concerning this three-legged grizzly. Truly, she was a
character. She had lived a career in the Berthoud Pass Basin.
Only a few weeks before, so the prospector told me, a trapper had
captured one of her cubs and nearly got the grizzly herself. A grizzly
bear is one of the most curious of animals. In old bears this constant
curiosity is supplemented and almost always safeguarded by extreme
caution. But during cubhood this innate curiosity often proves his
misfortune before he has learned to be wary of man.
The trapper, in moving camp, had set a number of small traps in the
camp rubbish. He felt certain that if a bear with cubs should be
prowling near, the cubs on scenting the place would rush up to
investigate before they could be restrained by the mother. There would
be little to rouse her suspicion, she doubtless having smelled over
many abandoned camp sites, and she, too, might be trapped.
One of this grizzly’s three cubs was caught. She and the two other
cubs were waiting with the trapped one when the trapper came on his
rounds, but at his appearance they made off into the woods. The
trapper set a large steel trap and left the trapped cub as a decoy.