A COLORADO BEAR HUNT
In mid-April, nineteen hundred and five, our party, consisting of Philip
B. Stewart, of Colorado Springs, and Dr. Alexander Lambert, of New York,
in addition to myself, left Newcastle, Col., for a bear hunt. As guides
and hunters we had John Goff and Jake Borah, than whom there are no
better men at their work of hunting bear in the mountains with hounds.
Each brought his own dogs; all told, there were twenty-six hounds, and
four half-blood terriers to help worry the bear when at bay. We
travelled in comfort, with a big pack-train, spare horses for each of
us, and a cook, packers, and horse-wranglers. I carried one of the new
model Springfield military rifles, a 30–40, with a soft-nosed bullet—a
very accurate and hard-hitting gun.
[Illustration:
STARTING FOR CAMP
From a stereograph, copyright, 1905, by Underwood and Underwood
]
This first day we rode about twenty miles to where camp was pitched on
the upper waters of East Divide Creek. It was a picturesque spot. At
this altitude it was still late winter and the snow lay in drifts, even
in the creek bottom, while the stream itself was not yet clear from ice.
The tents were pitched in a grove of leafless aspens and great spruces,
beside the rushing, ice-rimmed brook. The cook tent, with its stove, was
an attractive place on the cool mornings and in stormy weather. Fry, the
cook, a most competent man, had rigged up a table, and we had folding
camp-chairs—luxuries utterly unknown to my former camping trips. Each
day we breakfasted early and dined ten or twelve hours later, on
returning from the day’s hunt; and as we carried no lunch, the two meals
were enjoyed with ravenous pleasure by the entire company. The horses
were stout, tough, shaggy beasts, of wonderful staying power, and able
to climb like cats. The country was very steep and rugged; the
mountain-sides were greasy and slippery from the melting snow, while the
snow bucking through the deep drifts on their tops and on the north
sides was exhausting. Only sure-footed animals could avoid serious
tumbles, and only animals of great endurance could have lasted through
the work. Both Johnny Goff and his partner, Brick Wells, who often
accompanied us on the hunts, were frequently mounted on animals of
uncertain temper, with a tendency to buck on insufficient provocation;
but they rode them with entire indifference up and down any incline. One
of the riders, “Al,” a very good-tempered man, a tireless worker, had as
one of his horses a queer, big-headed dun beast, with a black stripe
down its back and traces of zebra-like bands on the backs of his front
legs. He was an atavistic animal, looking much as the horses must have
looked which an age or two ago lived in this very locality and were
preyed on by sabre-toothed tigers, hyenadons, and other strange and
terrible beasts of a long-vanished era. Lambert remarked to him: “Al,
you ought to call that horse of yours ‘Fossil’; he is a hundred thousand
years old.” To which Al, with immovable face, replied: “Gee! and that
man sold him to me for a seven-year-old! I’ll have the law on him!”
The hounds were most interesting, and showed all the variations of
character and temper to be expected in such a pack; a pack in which
performance counted for everything and pedigree for nothing. One of the
best hounds was half fox terrier. Three of Johnny’s had been with us
four years before, when he and I hunted cougars together; these three
being Jim, now an old dog, who dropped behind in a hard run, but still
excellent on a cold trail; Tree’em, who, like Jim, had grown aged, but
was very sure; and Bruno, who had become one of the best of all the pack
on a hot trail, but who was apt to overrun it if it became at all
difficult and cold. The biggest dog of the pack, a very powerful animal,
was Badge, who was half foxhound and half what Johnny called Siberian
bloodhound—I suppose a Great Dane or Ulm dog. His full brother Bill came
next to him. There was a Rowdy in Jake’s pack and another Rowdy in
Johnny’s, and each got badly hurt before the hunt was through. Jake’s
Rowdy, as soon as an animal was killed, became very cross and wished to
attack any dog that came near. One of Jake’s best hounds was old Bruise,
a very sure, although not a particularly fast dog. All the members of
the pack held the usual wild-beast attitude toward one another. They
joined together for the chase and the fight, but once the quarry was
killed, their relations among themselves became those of active
hostility or selfish indifference. At feeding time each took whatever
his strength permitted, and each paid abject deference to whichever
animal was his known superior in prowess. Some of the younger dogs would
now and then run deer or coyote. But the older dogs paid heed only to
bear and bobcat; and the pack, as a body, discriminated sharply between
the hounds they could trust and those which would go off on a wrong
trail. The four terriers included a heavy, liver-colored half-breed
bulldog, a preposterous animal who looked as if his ancestry had
included a toadfish. He was a terrible fighter, but his unvarying
attitude toward mankind was one of effusive and rather foolish
affection. In a fight he could whip any of the hounds save Badge, and he
was far more willing than Badge to accept punishment. There was also a
funny little black and tan, named Skip, a most friendly little fellow,
especially fond of riding in front or behind the saddle of any one of us
who would take him up, although perfectly able to travel forty miles a
day on his own sturdy legs if he had to, and then to join in the worry
of the quarry when once it had been shot. Porcupines abounded in the
woods, and one or two of the terriers and half a dozen of the hounds
positively refused to learn any wisdom, invariably attacking each
porcupine they found; the result being that we had to spend many minutes
in removing the quills from their mouths, eyes, etc. A white
bull-terrier would come in from such a combat with his nose literally
looking like a glorified pincushion, and many of the spines we had to
take out with nippers. The terriers never ran with the hounds, but
stayed behind with the horses until they heard the hounds barking
“bayed” or “treed,” when they forthwith tore toward them. Skip adopted
me as his special master, rode with me whenever I would let him, and
slept on the foot of my bed at night, growling defiance at anything that
came near. I grew attached to the friendly, bright little fellow, and at
the end of the hunt took him home with me as a playmate for the
children.
It was a great, wild country. In the creek bottoms there were a good
many ranches; but we only occasionally passed by these, on our way to
our hunting-grounds in the wilderness along the edge of the snow-line.
The mountains crowded close together in chain, peak, and tableland; all
the higher ones were wrapped in an unrent shroud of snow. We saw a good
many deer, and fresh sign of elk, but no elk themselves, although we
were informed that bands were to be found in the high spruce timber
where the snows were so deep that it would have been impossible to go on
horseback, while going on foot would have been inconceivably fatiguing.
The country was open. The high peaks were bare of trees. Cottonwoods,
and occasionally dwarfed birch or maple and willows, fringed the
streams; aspens grew in groves higher up. There were pinyons and cedars
on the slopes of the foothills; spruce clustered here and there in the
cooler ravines and valleys and high up the mountains. The dense oak
brush and thick-growing cedars were hard on our clothes, and sometimes
on our bodies.
Bear and cougars had once been very plentiful throughout this region,
but during the last three or four years the cougars have greatly
diminished in numbers throughout northern Colorado, and the bears have
diminished also, although not to the same extent. The great grizzlies
which were once fairly plentiful here are now very rare, as they are in
most places in the United States. There remain plenty of the black and
brown bears, which are simply individual color phases of the same
species.
Bears are interesting creatures and their habits are always worth
watching. When I used to hunt grizzlies my experience tended to make me
lay special emphasis on their variation in temper. There are savage and
cowardly bears, just as there are big and little ones; and sometimes
these variations are very marked among bears of the same district, and
at other times all the bears of one district will seem to have a common
code of behavior which differs utterly from that of the bears of another
district. Readers of Lewis and Clark do not need to be reminded of the
great difference they found in ferocity between the bears of the upper
Missouri and the bears of the Columbia River country; and those who have
lived in the upper Missouri country nowadays know how widely the bears
that still remain have altered in character from what they were as
recently as the middle of the last century.
This variability has been shown in the bears which I have stumbled upon
at close quarters. On but one occasion was I ever regularly charged by a
grizzly. To this animal I had given a mortal wound, and without any
effort at retaliation he bolted into a thicket of what, in my hurry, I
thought was laurel (it being composed in reality, I suppose, of
thick-growing berry bushes). On my following him and giving him a second
wound, he charged very determinedly, taking two more bullets without
flinching. I just escaped the charge by jumping to one side, and he died
almost immediately after striking at me as he rushed by. This bear
charged with his mouth open, but made very little noise after the growl
or roar with which he greeted my second bullet. I mention the fact of
his having kept his mouth open, because one or two of my friends who
have been charged have informed me that in their cases they particularly
noticed that the bear charged with his mouth shut. Perhaps the fact that
my bear was shot through the lungs may account for the difference, or it
may simply be another example of individual variation.
On another occasion, in a windfall, I got up within eight or ten feet of
a grizzly, which simply bolted off, paying no heed to a hurried shot
which I delivered as I poised unsteadily on the swaying top of an
overthrown dead pine. On yet another occasion, when I roused a big bear
from his sleep, he at the first moment seemed to pay little or no heed
to me, and then turned toward me in a leisurely way, the only sign of
hostility he betrayed being to ruffle up the hair on his shoulders and
the back of his neck. I hit him square between the eyes, and he dropped
like a pole-axed steer.
[Illustration:
AT DINNER
From a photograph by Philip B. Stewart
]
On another occasion I got up quite close to and mortally wounded a bear,
which ran off without uttering a sound until it fell dead; but another
of these grizzlies, which I shot from ambush, kept squalling and yelling
every time I hit him, making a great rumpus. On one occasion one of my
cow hands and myself were able to run down on foot a she grizzly bear
and her cub, which had obtained a long start of us, simply because of
the foolish conduct of the mother. The cub—or more properly the
yearling, for it was a cub of the second year—ran on far ahead, and
would have escaped if the old she had not continually stopped and sat up
on her hind legs to look back at us. I think she did this partly from
curiosity, but partly also from bad temper, for once or twice she
grinned and roared at us. The upshot of it was that I got within range
and put a bullet in the old she, who afterward charged my companion and
was killed; and we also got the yearling.
One young grizzly which I killed many years ago dropped to the first
bullet, which entered its stomach. It then let myself and my companion
approach closely, looking up at us with alert curiosity, but making no
effort to escape. It was really not crippled at all, but we thought from
its actions that its back was broken, and my companion advanced to kill
it with his pistol. The pistol, however, did not inflict a mortal wound,
and the only effect was to make the young bear jump to its feet as if
unhurt, and race off at full speed through the timber; for though not
full-grown it was beyond cubhood, being probably about eighteen months
old. By desperate running I succeeded in getting another shot, and more
by luck than by anything else knocked it over, this time permanently.
Black bear are not, under normal conditions, formidable brutes. If they
do charge and get home they may maul a man severely, and there are a
number of instances on record in which they have killed men. Ordinarily,
however, a black bear will not charge home, though he may bluster a good
deal. I once shot one very close up which made a most lamentable outcry,
and seemed to lose its head, its efforts to escape resulting in its
bouncing about among the trees with such heedless hurry that I was
easily able to kill it. Another black bear, which I also shot at close
quarters, came straight for my companions and myself, and almost ran
over the white hunter who was with me. This bear made no sound whatever
when I first hit it, and I do not think it was charging. I believe it
was simply dazed, and by accident ran the wrong way, and so almost came
into collision with us. However, when it found itself face to face with
the white hunter, and only four or five feet away, it prepared for
hostilities, and I think would have mauled him if I had not brained it
with another bullet; for I was myself standing but six feet or so to one
side of it. None of the bears shot on this Colorado trip made a sound
when hit; they all died silently, like so many wolves.
Ordinarily, my experience has been that bears were not flurried when I
suddenly came upon them. They impressed me as if they were always
keeping in mind the place toward which they wished to retreat in the
event of danger, and for this place, which was invariably a piece of
rough ground or dense timber, they made off with all possible speed, not
seeming to lose their heads.
[Illustration:
THE PACK STRIKES THE FRESH BEAR TRAIL
From a photograph by Philip B. Stewart
]
Frequently I have been able to watch bears for some time while myself
unobserved. With other game I have very often done this even when within
close range, not wishing to kill creatures needlessly, or without a good
object; but with bears, my experience has been that chances to secure
them come so seldom as to make it very distinctly worth while improving
any that do come, and I have not spent much time watching any bear
unless he was in a place where I could not get at him, or else was so
close at hand that I was not afraid of his getting away. On one occasion
the bear was hard at work digging up squirrel or gopher _caches_ on the
side of a pine-clad hill; while at this work he looked rather like a big
badger. On two other occasions the bear was fussing around a carcass
preparatory to burying it. On these occasions I was very close, and it
was extremely interesting to note the grotesque, half-human movements,
and giant, awkward strength of the great beast. He would twist the
carcass around with the utmost ease, sometimes taking it in his teeth
and dragging it, at other times grasping it in his forepaws and half
lifting, half shoving it. Once the bear lost his grip and rolled over
during the course of some movement, and this made him angry, and he
struck the carcass a savage whack, just as a pettish child will strike a
table against which it has knocked itself. At another time I watched a
black bear some distance off getting his breakfast under stumps and
stones. He was very active, turning the stone or log over, and then
thrusting his muzzle into the empty space to gobble up the small
creatures below before they recovered from their surprise and the sudden
inflow of light. From under one log he put a chipmunk, and danced hither
and thither with even more agility than awkwardness, slapping at the
chipmunk with his paw while it zigzagged about, until finally he scooped
it into his mouth.
All this was in the old days when I was still-hunting, with only the
rifle. This Colorado trip was the first on which I hunted bears with
hounds. If we had run across a grizzly there would doubtless have been a
chance to show some prowess, at least in the way of hard riding. But the
black and brown bears cannot, save under exceptional circumstances,
escape from such a pack as we had with us; and the real merit of the
chase was confined to the hounds and to Jake and Johnny for their skill
in handling them. Perhaps I should add the horses, for their
extraordinary endurance and surefootedness. As for the rest of us, we
needed to do little more than to sit ten or twelve hours in the saddle
and occasionally lead the horses up or down the most precipitous and
cliff-like of the mountain-sides. But it was great fun, nevertheless,
and usually a chase lasted long enough to be interesting.
The first day after reaching camp we rode for eleven hours over a very
difficult country, but without getting above the snow-line. Finally the
dogs got on the fresh trail of a bobcat, and away they went. A bobcat
will often give a good run, much better, on the average, than a cougar;
and this one puzzled the dogs not a little at first. It scrambled out of
one deep valley, crossing and recrossing the rock ledges where its scent
was hard to follow; then plunged into another valley. Meanwhile we had
ridden up on the high mountain spur between the two valleys, and after
scrambling and galloping to and fro as the cry veered from point to
point when the dogs changed directions, we saw them cross into the
second valley. Here again they took a good deal of time to puzzle out
the trail, and became somewhat scattered. We had dismounted and were
standing by the horses’ heads, listening to the baying and trying to
decide which way we should go, when Stewart suddenly pointed us out a
bear. It was on the other side of the valley from us, and perhaps half a
mile away, galloping down hill, with two of the hounds after it, and in
the sunlight its fur looked glossy black. In a minute or two it passed
out of sight in the thick-growing timber at the bottom of the valley;
and as we afterward found, the two hounds, getting momentarily thrown
out, and hearing the others still baying on the cat trail, joined the
latter. Jake started off to go around the head of the valley, while the
rest of us plunged down into it. We found from the track that the bear
had gone up the valley, and Jake found where he had come out on the high
divide, and then turned and retraced his steps. But the hounds were
evidently all after the cat. There was nothing for us to do but follow
them. Sometimes riding, sometimes leading the horses, we went up the
steep hillside, and as soon as we reached the crest heard the hounds
barking treed. Shorty and Skip, who always trotted after the horses
while the hounds were in full cry on a trail, recognized the change of
note immediately, and tore off in the direction of the bay, while we
followed as best we could, hoping to get there in time for Stewart and
Lambert to take photographs of the lynx in a tree. But we were too late.
Both Shorty and Skip could climb trees, and although Skip was too light
to tackle a bobcat by himself, Shorty, a heavy, formidable dog, of
unflinching courage and great physical strength, was altogether too much
for any bobcat. When we reached the place we found the bobcat in the top
of a pinyon, and Shorty steadily working his way up through the branches
and very near the quarry. Evidently the bobcat felt that the situation
needed the taking of desperate chances, and just before Shorty reached
it out it jumped, Shorty yelling with excitement as he plunged down
through the branches after it. But the cat did not jump far enough. One
of the hounds seized it by the hind leg and in another second everything
was over.
Shorty was always the first of the pack to attack dangerous game, and in
attacking bear or cougar even Badge was much less reckless and more
wary. In consequence, Shorty was seamed over with scars; most of them
from bobcats, but one or two from cougars. He could speedily kill a
bobcat single-handed; for these small lynxes are not really formidable
fighters, although they will lacerate a dog quite severely. Shorty found
a badger a much more difficult antagonist than a bobcat. A bobcat in a
hole makes a hard fight, however. On this hunt we once got a bobcat
under a big rock, and Jake’s Rowdy in trying to reach it got so badly
mauled that he had to join the invalid class for several days.
The bobcat we killed this first day was a male, weighing twenty-five
pounds. It was too late to try after the bear, especially as we had only
ten or a dozen dogs out, while the bear’s tracks showed it to be a big
one; and we rode back to camp.
Next morning we rode off early, taking with us all twenty-six hounds and
the four terriers. We wished first to find whether the bear had gone out
of the country in which we had seen him, and so rode up a valley and
then scrambled laboriously up the mountain-side to the top of the
snow-covered divide. Here the snow was three feet deep in places, and
the horses plunged and floundered as we worked our way in single file
through the drifts. But it had frozen hard the previous night, so that a
bear could walk on the crust and leave very little sign. In consequence
we came near passing over the place where the animal we were after had
actually crossed out of the canyon-like ravine in which we had seen him
and gone over the divide into another set of valleys. The trail was so
faint that it puzzled us, as we could not be certain how fresh it was,
and until this point could be cleared up we tried to keep the hounds
from following it. Old Jim, however, slipped off to one side and
speedily satisfied himself that the trail was fresh. Along it he went,
giving tongue, and the other dogs were maddened by the sound, while Jim,
under such circumstances, paid no heed whatever to any effort to make
him come back. Accordingly, the other hounds were slipped after him, and
down they ran into the valley, while we slid, floundered, and scrambled
along the ridge crest parallel to them, until a couple of miles farther
on we worked our way down to some great slopes covered with dwarf
scrub-oak. At the edge of these slopes, where they fell off in abrupt
descent to the stream at the bottom of the valley, we halted. Opposite
us was a high and very rugged mountain-side covered with a growth of
pinyon—never a close-growing tree—its precipitous flanks broken by
ledges and scored by gullies and ravines. It was hard to follow the
scent across such a mountain-side, and the dogs speedily became much
scattered. We could hear them plainly, and now and then could see them,
looking like ants as they ran up and down hill and along the ledges.
Finally we heard some of them barking bayed. The volume of sound
increased steadily as the straggling dogs joined those which had first
reached the hunted animal. At about this time, to our astonishment,
Badge, usually a stanch fighter, rejoined us, followed by one or two
other hounds, who seemed to have had enough of the matter. Immediately
afterward we saw the bear, half-way up the opposite mountain-side. The
hounds were all around him, and occasionally bit at his hind quarters;
but he had evidently no intention of climbing a tree. When we first saw
him he was sitting up on a point of rock surrounded by the pack, his
black fur showing to fine advantage. Then he moved off, threatening the
dogs, and making what in Mississippi is called a walking bay. He was a
sullen, powerful beast, and his leisurely gait showed how little he
feared the pack, and how confident he was in his own burly strength. By
this time the dogs had been after him for a couple of hours, and as
there was no water on the mountain-side we feared they might be getting
exhausted, and rode toward them as rapidly as we could. It was a hard
climb up to where they were, and we had to lead the horses. Just as we
came in sight of him, across a deep gully which ran down the sheer
mountain-side, he broke bay and started off, threatening the foremost of
the pack as they dared to approach him. They were all around him, and
for a minute I could not fire; then as he passed under a pinyon I got a
clear view of his great round stern and pulled trigger. The bullet broke
both his hips, and he rolled down hill, the hounds yelling with
excitement as they closed in on him. He could still play havoc with the
pack, and there was need to kill him at once. I leaped and slid down my
side of the gully as he rolled down his; at the bottom he stopped and
raised himself on his fore quarters; and with another bullet I broke his
back between the shoulders.
[Illustration:
DEATH OF THE BIG BEAR
From a photograph by Philip B. Stewart
]
Immediately all the dogs began to worry the carcass, while their savage
baying echoed so loudly in the narrow, steep gully that we could with
difficulty hear one another speak. It was a wild scene to look upon, as
we scrambled down to where the dead bear lay on his back between the
rocks. He did not die wholly unavenged, for he had killed one of the
terriers and six other dogs were more or less injured. The chase of the
bear is grim work for the pack. Jim, usually a very wary fighter, had a
couple of deep holes in his thigh; but the most mishandled of the
wounded dogs was Shorty. With his usual dauntless courage he had gone
straight at the bear’s head. Being such a heavy, powerful animal, I
think if he had been backed up he could have held the bear’s head down,
and prevented the beast from doing much injury. As it was, the bear bit
through the side of Shorty’s head, and bit him in the shoulder, and
again in the hip, inflicting very bad wounds. Once the fight was over
Shorty lay down on the hillside, unable to move. When we started home we
put him beside a little brook, and left a piece of bear meat by him, as
it was obvious we could not get him to camp that day. Next day one of
the boys went back with a pack-horse to take him in; but half-way out
met him struggling toward camp, and returned. Late in the afternoon
Shorty turned up while we were at dinner, and staggered toward us,
wagging his tail with enthusiastic delight at seeing his friends. We fed
him until he could not hold another mouthful; then he curled up in a dry
corner of the cook tent and slept for forty-eight hours; and two or
three days afterward was able once more to go hunting.
The bear was a big male, weighing three hundred and thirty pounds. On
examination at close quarters, his fur, which was in fine condition, was
not as black as it had seemed when seen afar off, the roots of the hairs
being brown. There was nothing whatever in his stomach. Evidently he had
not yet begun to eat, and had been but a short while out of his hole.
Bear feed very little when they first come out of their dens, sometimes
beginning on grass, sometimes on buds. Occasionally they will feed at
carcasses and try to kill animals within a week or two after they have
left winter quarters, but this is rare, and as a usual thing for the
first few weeks after they have come out they feed much as a deer would.
Although not hog fat, as would probably have been the case in the fall,
this bear was in good condition. In the fall, however, he would
doubtless have weighed over four hundred pounds. The three old females
we got on this trip weighed one hundred and eighty, one hundred and
seventy-five, and one hundred and thirty-five pounds apiece. The
yearlings weighed from thirty-one to forty pounds. The only other black
bears I ever weighed all belonged to the sub-species _Luteolus_, and
were killed on the Little Sunflower River, in Mississippi, in the late
fall of nineteen hundred and two. A big old male, in poor condition,
weighed two hundred and eighty-five pounds, and two very fat females
weighed two hundred and twenty and two hundred and thirty-five pounds
respectively.
The next few days we spent in hunting perseveringly, but unsuccessfully.
Each day we were from six to twelve hours in the saddle, climbing with
weary toil up the mountains and slipping and scrambling down them. On
the tops and on the north slopes there was much snow, so that we had to
pick our trails carefully, and even thus the horses often floundered
belly-deep as we worked along in single file; the men on the horses
which were best at snow bucking took turns in breaking the trail. In the
worst places we had to dismount and lead the horses, often over such bad
ground that nothing less sure-footed than the tough mountain ponies
could even have kept their legs. The weather was cold, with occasional
sharp flurries of snow, and once a regular snow-storm. We found the
tracks of one or two bears, but in each case several days old, and it
was evident either that the bears had gone back to their dens, finding
the season so late, or else that they were lying quiet in sheltered
places, and travelling as little as possible. One day, after a long run
of certainly five or six miles through very difficult country, the dogs
treed a bobcat in a big cedar. It had run so far that it was badly out
of breath. Stewart climbed the tree and took several photographs of it,
pushing the camera up to within about four feet of where the cat sat.
Lambert obtained photographs of both Stewart and the cat. Shorty was at
this time still an invalid from his encounter with the bear, but Skip
worked his way thirty feet up the tree in his effort to get at the
bobcat. Lambert shot the latter with his revolver, the bobcat dying
stuck in the branches; and he then had to climb the tree to get both the
bobcat and Skip, as the latter was at such a height that we thought he
would hurt himself if he fell. Another bobcat when treed sealed his own
fate by stepping on a dead branch and falling right into the jaws of the
pack.
At this camp, as everywhere, the tiny four-striped chipmunks were
plentiful and tame; they are cheerful, attractive little animals. We
also saw white-footed mice and a big meadow mouse around camp; and we
found a young brushy-tailed pack-rat. The snowshoe rabbits were still
white on the mountains, but in the lower valleys they had changed to the
summer pelage. On the mountains we occasionally saw woodchucks and rock
squirrels of two kinds, a large and a small—_Spermophilus grammurus_ and
_armatus_. The noisy, cheerful pine squirrels were common where the
woods were thick. There were eagles and ravens in the mountains, and
once we saw sandhill cranes soaring far above the highest peaks. The
long-crested jays came familiarly around camp, but on this occasion we
only saw the whiskey jacks, Clark’s nutcrackers and magpies, while off
in the mountains. Among the pinyons, we several times came across
straggling flocks of the queer pinyon jays or blue crows, with their
unmistakable calls and almost blackbird-like habits. There were hawks of
several species, and blue grouse, while the smaller birds included
flickers, robins, and the beautiful mountain bluebirds. Juncos and
mountain chickadees were plentiful, and the ruby-crowned kinglets were
singing with astonishing power for such tiny birds. We came on two nests
of the red-tailed hawk; the birds were brooding, and seemed tame and
unwary.
[Illustration:
STEWART AND THE BOBCAT
From a photograph, copyright, 1905, by Alexander Lambert, M.D.
]
After a week of this we came to the conclusion that the snow was too
deep and the weather too cold for us to expect to get any more bear in
the immediate neighborhood, and accordingly shifted camp to where Clear
Creek joins West Divide Creek.
The first day’s hunt from the new camp was successful. We were absent
about eleven hours and rode some forty miles. The day included four
hours’ steady snow bucking, for the bear, as soon as they got the
chance, went through the thick timber where the snow lay deepest. Some
two hours after leaving camp we found the old tracks of a she and a
yearling, but it took us a much longer time before we finally struck the
fresh trail made late the previous night or early in the morning. It was
Jake who first found this fresh track, while Johnny with the pack was a
couple of miles away, slowly but surely puzzling out the cold trail and
keeping the dogs up to their work. As soon as Johnny came up we put all
the hounds on the tracks, and away they went, through and over the snow,
yelling their eager delight. Meanwhile we had fixed our saddles and were
ready for what lay ahead. It was wholly impossible to ride at the tail
of the pack, but we did our best to keep within sound of the baying.
Finally, after much hard work and much point riding through snow, slush,
and deep mud, on the level, and along, up, and down sheer slopes, we
heard the dogs barking treed in the middle of a great grove of aspens
high up the mountain-side. The snow was too deep for the horses, and
leaving them, we trudged heavily up on foot. The yearling was in the top
of a tall aspen. Lambert shot it with his rifle and we then put the dogs
on the trail of the old she. Some of the young ones did not know what to
make of this, evidently feeling that the tracks must be those of the
bear that they had already killed; but the veterans were in full cry at
once. We scrambled after them up the steep mountain, and then downward
along ridges and spurs, getting all the clear ground we could. Finally
we had to take to the snow, and floundered and slid through the drifts
until we were in the valley. Most of the time the dogs were within
hearing, giving tongue as they followed the trail. Finally a total
change in the note showed that they were barking treed; and as rapidly
as possible we made our way toward the sound. Again we found ourselves
unable to bring the horses up to where the bear had treed, and scrambled
thither on foot through the deep snow.
[Illustration:
THE PACK BAYING THE BEAR
From a photograph, copyright, 1905, by Alexander Lambert, M.D.
]
The bear was some thirty or forty feet up a tall spruce; it was a big
she, with a glossy black-brown coat. I was afraid that at our approach
she might come down; but she had been running hard for some four hours,
had been pressed close, and evidently had not the slightest idea of
putting herself of her own free will within the reach of the pack, which
was now frantically baying at the foot of the tree. I shot her through
the heart. As the bullet struck she climbed up through the branches with
great agility for six or eight feet; then her muscles relaxed, and down
she came with a thud, nearly burying herself in the snow. Little Skip
was one of the first dogs to seize her as she came down; and in another
moment he literally disappeared under the hounds as they piled on the
bear. As soon as possible we got off the skin and pushed campward at a
good gait, for we were a long way off. Just at nightfall we came out on
a bluff from which we could overlook the rushing, swirling brown
torrent, on the farther bank of which the tents were pitched.
The stomach of this bear contained nothing but buds. Like the other shes
killed on this trip, she was accompanied by her yearling young, but had
no newly born cub; sometimes bear breed only every other year, but I
have found the mother accompanied not only by her cub but by her young
of the year before. The yearling also had nothing but buds in its
stomach. When its skin was taken off, Stewart looked at it, shook his
head, and turning to Lambert said solemnly, “Alex., that skin isn’t big
enough to use for anything but a doily.” From that time until the end of
the hunt the yearlings were only known as “doily bears.”
Next morning we again went out, and this time for twelve hours steadily,
in the saddle, and now and then on foot. Most of the time we were in
snow, and it was extraordinary that the horses could get through it at
all, especially in working up the steep mountain-sides. But until it got
so deep that they actually floundered—that is, so long as they could get
their legs down to the bottom—I found that they could travel much faster
than I could. On this day some twenty good-natured, hard-riding young
fellows from the ranches within a radius of a dozen miles had joined our
party to “see the President kill a bear.” They were a cheerful and
eagerly friendly crowd, as hardy as so many young moose, and utterly
fearless horsemen; one of them rode his wild, nervous horse bareback,
because it had bucked so when he tried to put the saddle on it that
morning that he feared he would get left behind, and so abandoned the
saddle outright. Whenever they had a chance they all rode at headlong
speed, paying no heed to the slope of the mountain-side or the character
of the ground. In the deep snow they did me a real service, for of
course they had to ride their horses single file through the drifts, and
by the time my turn came we had a good trail.
[Illustration:
A DOILY BEAR
From a photograph, copyright, 1905, by Alexander Lambert, M.D.
]
After a good deal of beating to and fro, we found where an old she-bear
with two yearlings had crossed a hill during the night and put the
hounds on their tracks. Johnny and Jake, with one or two of the cowboys,
followed the hounds over the exceedingly difficult hillside where the
trail led; or rather, they tried to follow them, for the hounds speedily
got clear away, as there were many places where they could run on the
crust of the snow, in which the horses wallowed almost helpless. The
rest of us went down to the valley, where the snow was light and the
going easier. The bear had travelled hither and thither through the
woods on the sidehill, and the dogs became scattered. Moreover, they
jumped several deer, and four or five of the young dogs took after one
of the latter. Finally, however, the rest of the pack put up the three
bears. We had an interesting glimpse of the chase as the bears quartered
up across an open spot of the hillside. The hounds were but a short
distance behind them, strung out in a long string, the more powerful,
those which could do best in the snow bucking, taking the lead. We
pushed up the mountain-side after them, horse after horse getting down
in the snow, and speedily heard the redoubled clamor which told us that
something had been treed. It was half an hour before we could make our
way to the tree, a spruce, in which the two yearlings had taken refuge,
while around the bottom the entire pack was gathered, crazy with
excitement. We could not take the yearlings alive, both because we
lacked the means of carrying them, and because we were anxious to get
after the old bear. We could not leave them where they were, because it
would have been well-nigh impossible to get the dogs away, and because,
even if we had succeeded in getting them away, they would not have run
any other trail as long as they knew the yearlings were in the tree. It
was therefore out of the question to leave them unharmed, as we should
have been glad to do, and Lambert killed them both with his revolver;
the one that was first hit immediately biting its brother. The ranchmen
took them home to eat.
The hounds were immediately put on the trail of the old one and
disappeared over the snow. In a few minutes we followed. It was heavy
work getting up the mountain-side through the drifts, but once on top we
made our way down a nearly bare spur, and then turned to the right,
scrambled a couple of miles along a slippery sidehill, and halted. Below
us lay a great valley, on the farther side of which a spruce forest
stretched up toward the treeless peaks. Snow covered even the bottom of
the valley, and lay deep and solid in the spruce forest on the
mountain-side. The hounds were in full cry, evidently on a hot trail,
and we caught glimpses of them far on the opposite side of the valley,
crossing little open glades in the spruce timber. If the crust was hard
they scattered out. Where it was at all soft they ran in single file. We
worked our way down toward them, and on reaching the bottom of the
valley, went up it as fast as the snow would allow. Finally we heard the
pack again barking treed and started toward them. They had treed the
bear far up the mountain-side in the thick spruce timber, and a short
experiment showed us that the horses could not possibly get through the
snow. Accordingly, off we jumped and went toward the sound on foot, all
the young ranchmen and cowboys rushing ahead, and thereby again making
me an easy trail. On the way to the tree the rider of the bareback horse
pounced on a snowshoe rabbit which was crouched under a bush and caught
it with his hands. It was half an hour before we reached the tree, a big
spruce, up which the bear had gone to a height of some forty feet. I
broke her neck with a single bullet. She was smaller than the one I had
shot the day before, but full-grown. In her stomach, as in those of the
two yearlings, there were buds of rose-bushes and quaking aspens. One
yearling had also swallowed a mouse. It was a long ride to camp, and
darkness had fallen by the time we caught the gleam from the lighted
tents, across the dark stream.
With neither of these last two bear had there been any call for prowess;
my part was merely to kill the bear dead at the first shot, for the sake
of the pack. But the days were very enjoyable, nevertheless. It was good
fun to be twelve hours in the saddle in such wild and beautiful country,
to look at and listen to the hounds as they worked, and finally to see
the bear treed and looking down at the maddened pack baying beneath.
For the next two or three days I was kept in camp by a touch of Cuban
fever. On one of these days Lambert enjoyed the longest hunt we had on
the trip, after an old she-bear and three yearlings. The yearlings treed
one by one, each of course necessitating a stoppage, and it was seven in
the evening before the old bear at last went up a cottonwood and was
shot; she was only wounded, however, and in the fight she crippled
Johnny’s Rowdy before she was killed. When the hunters reached camp it
was thirteen hours since they had left it. The old bear was a very light
brown; the first yearling was reddish-brown, the second light
yellowish-brown, the third dark black-brown, though all were evidently
of the same litter.
Following this came a spell of bad weather, snow-storm and blizzard
steadily succeeding one another. This lasted until my holiday was over.
Some days we had to stay in camp. On other days we hunted; but there was
three feet of new snow on the summits and foothills, making it difficult
to get about. We saw no more bear, and, indeed, no more bear-tracks that
were less than two or three weeks old.
We killed a couple of bobcats. The chase of one was marked by several
incidents. We had been riding through a blizzard on the top of a
plateau, and were glad to plunge down into a steep sheer-sided valley.
By the time we reached the bottom there was a lull in the storm and we
worked our way with considerable difficulty through the snow, down
timber, and lava rock, toward Divide Creek. After a while the valley
widened a little, spruce and aspens fringing the stream at the bottom
while the sides were bare. Here we struck a fresh bobcat trail leading
off up one of the mountain-sides. The hounds followed it nearly to the
top, then turned and came down again, worked through the timber in the
bottom, and struck out on the hillside opposite. Suddenly we saw the
bobcat running ahead of them and doubling and circling. A few minutes
afterward the hounds followed the trail to the creek bottom and then
began to bark treed. But on reaching the point we found there was no cat
in the tree, although the dogs seemed certain that there was; and Johnny
and Jake speedily had them again running on the trail. After making its
way for some distance through the bottom, the cat had again taken to the
sidehill, and the hounds went after it hard. Again they went nearly to
the top, again they streamed down to the bottom and crossed the creek.
Soon afterward we saw the cat ahead of them. For the moment it threw
them off the track by making a circle and galloping around close to the
rearmost hounds. It then made for the creek bottom, where it climbed to
the top of a tall aspen. The hounds soon picked up the trail again, and
followed it full cry; but unfortunately just before they reached where
it had treed they ran on to a porcupine. When we reached the foot of the
aspen, in the top of which the bobcat crouched, with most of the pack
baying beneath, we found the porcupine dead and half a dozen dogs with
their muzzles and throats filled full of quills. Before doing anything
with the cat it was necessary to take these quills out. One of the
terriers, which always found porcupines an irresistible attraction, was
a really extraordinary sight, so thickly were the quills studded over
his face and chest. But a big hound was in even worse condition; the
quills were stuck in abundance into his nose, lips, cheeks, and tongue,
and in the roof of his mouth they were almost as thick as bristles in a
brush. Only by use of pincers was it possible to rid these two dogs of
the quills, and it was a long and bloody job. The others had suffered
less.
[Illustration:
THE BIG BEAR
From a photograph by Philip B. Stewart
]
The dogs seemed to have no sympathy with one another, and apparently all
that the rest of the pack felt was that they were kept a long time
waiting for the cat. They never stopped baying for a minute, and Shorty,
as was his habit, deliberately bit great patches of bark from the
aspens, to show his impatience; for the tree in which the cat stood was
not one which he could climb. After attending to the porcupine dogs one
of the men climbed the tree and with a stick pushed out the cat. It
dropped down through the branches forty or fifty feet, but was so quick
in starting and dodging that it actually rushed through the pack,
crossed the stream, and, doubling and twisting, was off up the creek
through the timber. It ran cunning, and in a minute or two lay down
under a bush and watched the hounds as they went by, overrunning its
trail. Then it took off up the hillside; but the hounds speedily picked
up its track, and running in single file, were almost on it. Then the
cat turned down hill, but too late, for it was overtaken within fifty
yards. This ended our hunting.
One Sunday we rode down some six miles from camp to a little blue
school-house and attended service. The preacher was in the habit of
riding over every alternate Sunday from Rifle, a little town twenty or
twenty-five miles away; and the ranchmen with their wives and children,
some on horseback, some in wagons, had gathered from thirty miles round
to attend the service. The crowd was so large that the exercises had to
take place in the open air, and it was pleasant to look at the strong
frames and rugged, weather-beaten faces of the men; while as for the
women, one respected them even more than the men.
In spite of the snow-storms spring was coming; some of the trees were
beginning to bud and show green, more and more flowers were in bloom,
and bird life was steadily increasing. In the bushes by the streams the
handsome white-crowned sparrows and green-tailed towhees were in full
song, making attractive music; although the song of neither can rightly
be compared in point of plaintive beauty with that of the white-throated
sparrow, which, except some of the thrushes, and perhaps the winter
wren, is the sweetest singer of the Northeastern forests. The spurred
towhees were very plentiful; and one morning a willow-thrush sang among
the willows like a veery. Both the crested jays and the Woodhouse jays
came around camp. Lower down the Western meadow larks were singing
beautifully, and vesper finches were abundant. Say’s flycatcher, a very
attractive bird, with pretty, soft-colored plumage, continually uttering
a plaintive single note, and sometimes a warbling twitter, flitted about
in the neighborhood of the little log ranch houses. Gangs of blackbirds
visited the corrals. I saw but one song sparrow, and curiously enough,
though I think it was merely an individual peculiarity, this particular
bird had a song entirely different from any I have heard from the
familiar Eastern bird—always a favorite of mine.
While up in the mountains hunting, we twice came upon owls, which were
rearing their families in the deserted nests of the red-tailed hawk. One
was a long-eared owl, and the other a great horned owl, of the pale
Western variety. Both were astonishingly tame, and we found it difficult
to make them leave their nests, which were in the tops of cottonwood
trees.
On the last day we rode down to where Glenwood Springs lies, hemmed in
by lofty mountain chains, which are riven in sunder by sheer-sided,
cliff-walled canyons. As we left ever farther behind us the wintry
desolation of our high hunting-grounds we rode into full spring. The
green of the valley was a delight to the eye; bird songs sounded on
every side, from the fields and from the trees and bushes beside the
brooks and irrigation ditches; the air was sweet with the spring-time
breath of many budding things. The sarvice bushes were white with bloom,
like shadblow on the Hudson; the blossoms of the Oregon grape made
yellow mats on the ground. We saw the chunky Say’s ground squirrel,
looking like a big chipmunk, with on each side a conspicuous white
stripe edged with black. In one place we saw quite a large squirrel,
grayish, with red on the lower back. I suppose it was only a pine
squirrel, but it looked like one of the gray squirrels of southern
Colorado. Mountain mockers and the handsome, bold Arkansaw king birds
were numerous. The blacktail sage sparrow was conspicuous in the
sage-brush, and high among the cliffs the white-throated swifts were
soaring. There were numerous warblers, among which I could only make out
the black-throated gray, Audubon’s, and McGillivray’s. In Glenwood
Springs itself the purple finches, house finches, and Bullock’s orioles
were in full song. Flocks of siskins passed with dipping flight. In one
rapid little stream we saw a water ousel. Humming-birds—I suppose the
broad-tailed—were common, and as they flew they made, intermittently and
almost rhythmically, a curious metallic sound; seemingly it was done
with their wings.
But the thing that interested me most in the way of bird life was
something I saw in Denver. To my delight I found that the huge hotel at
which we took dinner was monopolized by the pretty, musical house
finches, to the exclusion of the ordinary city sparrows. The latter are
all too plentiful in Denver, as in every other city, and, as always, are
noisy, quarrelsome—in short, thoroughly unattractive and disreputable.
The house finch, on the contrary, is attractive in looks, in song, and
in ways. It was delightful to hear the males singing, often on the wing.
They went right up to the top stories of the high hotel, and nested
under the eaves and in the cornices. The cities of the Southwestern
States are to be congratulated on having this spirited, attractive
little songster as a familiar dweller around their houses and in their
gardens.