Before the cold weather sets in the bear begins to grow restless,and to roam about seeking for a good place in which to hole up.One will often try and abandon several caves or partially dug-out burrows in succession before finding a place to its taste.It always endeavors to choose a spot where there is little chance of discovery or molestation,taking great care to avoid leaving too evident trace of its work.Hence it is not often that the dens are found.
Once in its den the bear passes the cold months in lethargic sleep;yet,in all but the coldest weather,and sometimes even then,its slumber is but light,and if disturbed it will promptly leave its den,prepared for fight or flight as the occasion may require.Many times when a hunter has stumbled on the winter resting-place of a bear and has left it,as he thought,without his presence being discovered,he has returned only to find that the crafty old fellow was aware of the danger all the time,and sneaked off as soon as the coast was clear.
But in very cold weather hibernating bears can hardly be wakened from their torpid lethargy.
The length of time a bear stays in its den depends of course upon the severity of the season and the latitude and altitude of the country.
In the northernmost and coldest regions all the bears hole up,and spend half the year in a state of lethargy;whereas in the south only the she's with young and the fat he-bears retire for the sleep,and these but for a few weeks,and only if the season is severe.
When the bear first leaves its den the fur is in very fine order,but it speedily becomes thin and poor,and does not recover its condition until the fall.Sometimes the bear does not betray any great hunger for a few days after its appearance;but in a short while it becomes ravenous.During the early spring,when the woods are still entirely barren and lifeless,while the snow yet lies in deep drifts,the bear,hungry brute,both maddened and weakened by long fasting,is more of a flesh eater than at any other time.It is at this period that it is most apt to turn true beast of prey,and show its prowess either at the expense of the wild game,or of the flocks of the settler and the herds of the ranchman.Bears are very capricious in this respect,however.Some are confirmed game,and cattle-killers;others are not;while yet others either are or are not accordingly as the freak seizes them,and their ravages vary almost unaccountably,both with the season and the locality.
Throughout 1889,for instance,no cattle,so far as I heard,were killed by bears anywhere near my range on the Little Missouri in western Dakota;yet I happened to know that during that same season the ravages of the bears among the herds of the cowmen in the Big Hole Basin,in western Montana,were very destructive.
In the spring and early summer of 1888,the bears killed no cattle near my ranch;but in the late summer and early fall of that year a big bear,which we well knew by its tracks,suddenly took to cattle-killing.This was a brute which had its headquarters on some very large brush bottoms a dozen miles below my ranch house,and which ranged to and fro across the broken country flanking the river on each side.It began just before berry time,but continued its career of destruction long after the wild plums and even buffalo berries had ripened.I think that what started it was a feast on a cow which had mired and died in the bed of the creek;at least it was not until after we found that it had been feeding at the carcass and had eaten every scrap,that we discovered traces of its ravages among the livestock.It seemed to attack the animals wholly regardless of their size and strength;its victims including a large bull and a beef steer,as well as cows,yearlings,and gaunt,weak trail "doughgies,"which had been brought in very late by a Texas cow-outfit--for that year several herds were driven up from the overstocked,eaten-out,and drought-stricken ranges of the far south.Judging from the signs,the crafty old grisly,as cunning as he was ferocious,usually lay in wait for the cattle when they came down to water,choosing some thicket of dense underbrush and twisted cottonwoods,through which they had to pass before reaching the sand banks on the river's brink.Sometimes he pounced on them as they fed through the thick,low cover of the bottoms,where an assailant could either lie in ambush by one of the numerous cattle trails,or else creep unobserved towards some browsing beast.When within a few feet a quick rush carried him fairly on the terrified quarry;and though but a clumsy animal compared to the great cats,the grisly is far quicker than one would imagine from viewing his ordinary lumbering gait.In one or two instances the bear had apparently grappled with his victim by seizing it near the loins and striking a disabling blow over the small of the back;in at least one instance he had jumped on the animal's head,grasping it with his fore-paws,while with his fangs he tore open the throat or crunched the neck bone.Some of his victims were slain far from the river,in winding,brushy coulies of the Bad Lands,where the broken nature of the ground rendered stalking easy.Several of the ranchmen,angered at their losses,hunted their foe eagerly,but always with ill success;until one of them put poison in a carcass,and thus at last,in ignoble fashion,slew the cattle-killer.
Mr.Clarence King informs me that he was once eye-witness to a bear's killing a steer,in California.The steer was in a small pasture,and the bear climbed over,partly breaking down,the rails which barred the gateway.The steer started to run,but the grisly overtook it in four or five bounds,and struck it a tremendous blow on the flank with one paw,knocking several ribs clear away from the spine,and killing the animal outright by the shock.
