Black Bruin The Biography of a Bear

Excerpt

INTRODUCTORY

With the possible exception of the deer family, the bear is the most widely disseminated big game, known to hunters.

He makes his home within the Arctic Circle, often living upon the great ice-floe, or dwells within a tropical jungle, and both climates are agreeable to him, while longitudinally he has girdled the world.

Of course bruin varies much, according to the climate in which he lives, and the conditions of his life, but all the way from the poles to the tropics he retains certain characteristics that always proclaim him a bear.

He is a plantigrade, walking like a man upon the soles of his feet. There is more truth than poetry in Kipling's poem, "The Man Who Walks Like a Bear," for some men do walk like a bear.

Bruin's four-footed gait is a shuffle and a shamble, rather clumsy and ludicrous, but it takes him over the ground at a surprising pace. Queer, also, is the fact that the bear combines great dexterity with his seeming clumsiness, as many a hunter has found to his cost. His tree-climbing accomplishments are likewise remarkable, when we consider his great size and weight. The grizzlies, and some other large varieties, do not do tree-climbing, except when they are young. A grizzly cub can climb a tree, but his wrists soon become too stiff to permit of their bending about the trunk.

Bruin's disposition also varies with the climate he inhabits. This in turn is because his diet varies in differing latitudes. The farther south he ranges, the more of a vegetarian he becomes. Consequently, he is not so ferocious. The great white polar bear is largely carnivorous, so he is a creature not to be trifled with; while on the other hand, the little African sun bear is a rollicking, social, good-natured little chap, weighing many times less than his fierce cousin.

Formerly, it has been supposed that the Numidian lion and the Bengal tiger were the largest carnivorous animals in existence, but more recent discoveries show that our Alaskan brown bear, found upon the peninsulas of lower Alaska and Kodiak Island, is easily the master of either, in size or strength. Some of the splendid skins taken from these, the largest of all the bears, measure fourteen feet in length. Alaska also gives us the smallest North American bear, the glacial bear.

Californians are wont to tell us that the only true grizzly is that found upon the cover of the Overland Monthly, but they overlook the fact that the name was given to bears found along the Missouri River by Lewis and Clarke, years before California, with all its wealth, was discovered.

In Russia, a fine specimen of the family is found in the Ural Mountains. His peculiarity is a white collar about the neck, so his Latin name, Ursus collaris, means the bear with a collar. All through the Himalayas, this restless plantigrade has wandered, and even far down upon the low-lying plains of India and China; but all the way he shuffles and shambles and is the same droll fellow.

The bear's vegetable diet consists of berries, nuts and many kinds of roots....