BIG GAME OF NORTH AMERICA
BY CLIVE PHILLIPPS-WOLLEY
Many statements to the contrary notwithstanding, I venture to
assert that, in spite of the evil doings of the ‘scallawag’ and the
meat-hunter, there is still quite enough big game in many parts of the
American continent to amply satisfy the desires of any reasonable big
game hunter, meaning by that term one who is content to work moderately
hard in an exquisite climate, free from fever and other Oriental
troubles, for a few good trophies every season, and enough meat to keep
his camp supplied.
It is undoubtedly true that you cannot any longer kill hundreds of
head of big game to your own rifle in one season; it is also true that
the game laws of Canada and the United States have somewhat curtailed
the liberty of the sportsman; but it is true too that amongst English
sportsmen the number of those who would care to shoot down hundreds of
stags, &c. in one season is limited, and that not a few of them realise
that the game laws of America, though often ill-framed and always badly
enforced, are still in the best interests of those whom they control.
There are, of course, mistakes in every code of laws. For instance, it
is a mistake I think to protect sheep absolutely in Colorado, while
wapiti are not similarly protected; for sheep are now more numerous
there than wapiti, are much less easily obtained by the meat-hunter,
and are less profitable to him when he has obtained them.
Still, if the Americans would enforce their own laws as rigidly against
the native meat-hunter who makes a profit out of shooting as against
the alien who pays for his sport, I think no one could justly complain.
Of course the buffalo has disappeared, and the antelope is not as
plentiful as he was, while some of the old shooting grounds dear to the
memories of the fortunate hunters of twenty years ago have been very
much shot out. This is true; but it is also true that if the successors
of the Williamsons, Buxtons, Jamiesons, and others of an earlier day
would display as much enterprise as those gentlemen did before them,
they would probably find fairly good sport still.
The man who follows another to an old shooting ground, getting there
by a well-cut trail, or even by railway, to find camps made and the
country thoroughly surveyed, naturally does not get as good sport as
the ‘first man in,’ and does not deserve it.
An old friend, whose reputation as an Indian sportsman stands as high
as any man’s, told me that, though the old grounds were certainly a
good deal shot out in India, he knew that close to them were other
grounds unvisited which were almost as good (if not quite as good) as
the old ones, and this he proved by sending a subaltern nephew off an
old route for a very short distance into a country usually passed by,
with the result that he got almost as good sport in the nineties as his
uncle had had in the sixties.
So it is in America to-day. One man follows another, as sheep follow
their leader, and if you trust to guides they will, of course, take you
to the places they know from experience, an experience which has been
obtained at considerable cost to the game of the district.
As I write I am reminded of an excellent example of that of which I am
writing. There is in British Columbia a certain Irish baronet, a most
excellent sportsman, who has probably had better sport with cariboo and
grizzly than anyone else in the country. His two favourite grounds are
now overrun by his followers, but in the year that _he cut the trail
to his_ cariboo ground (it took him several days) he had excellent
sport, and in Alaska he did so well with bear that next year a friend
and myself found that all the skin-hunters in the country were on Sir
Richard’s tracks. Of course we went elsewhere. So it is always. On the
grounds which you find for yourself you may get excellent sport: on the
grounds found for you by other people you have hardly a right to expect
it.
Before dealing then with the game list of North America in detail,
let me say to the intending sportsman, Don’t be discouraged by every
evil report: go and see for yourself: if possible get a hint as to
where game is likely to be and then look for a country yourself, not
slavishly following your predecessors or entirely depending upon men
whom perhaps you don’t know very well to present a stranger with an
accurate chart of the best hunting grounds they are acquainted with,
the way to which they have discovered by their own hard work.
As in everything else in life, so it is in sport: if you want to get
anything worth having, you have got to earn it yourself in one way or
another.
There is no royal road to success in the mountains, but there is the
old road still for the self-reliant and adventurous who don’t stick
to old trails and the railroad, and there is still plenty of game,
for those who know how to seek it, in Colorado, British Columbia,
Washington Territory, Ontario, Alaska, and even in parts of the
province of Quebec. So much I dare personally guarantee.
I. PANTHER (_Felis concolor_)
[Illustration: Puma (_Felis concolor_)]
The American Panther (_Felis concolor_) is a beast of many _aliases_
but of few virtues. He is the ‘painter,’ ‘catamount,’ ‘mountain lion,’
‘cougar,’ ‘Californian lion,’ or ‘puma’ of early American legends;
but, in spite of his many high-sounding titles, he is a mean, sneaking
beast, hiding in dense timber by day, stealing or destroying more
sheep in one night than he can eat in six months, affording no sport
to anyone, and very little profit even to the fur dealer. Those who
hunt the panther generally hunt him with dogs, and no dog is too small
for the work, for the American lion will tree before a terrier and
let himself be shot by a boy with ‘bird-shot.’ I am not traducing
the beast, for I have myself hunted him with terriers in the States.
But let an American authority be heard upon the question. A book
was published in 1890 called ‘Big Game of North America,’ to which
several well-known authorities contributed, such as Caton, Van Dyke,
and Fannin. The authority referred to, however, is not one of these
three, but a Mr. Perry, who maintains that the American lion is not a
cowardly animal, and cites in support of his contention six or seven
instances in which panthers attacked human beings unprovoked. In the
first instance (p. 413) the ferocious animal was defeated and driven
off by an heroic boy of twelve armed with an empty brandy-bottle. In
the second case a blue-jacket who had deserted from Esquimault and
‘found his way through the woods until he rested under the domain
of the starry flag,’ killed the panther which attacked him there by
a ‘gladiatorial thrust’ with a spade (p. 415). The third and fourth
of Mr. Perry’s pugnacious panthers behaved somewhat differently--one
followed a gentleman, the other followed a lady, and in both cases
showed the human beings somewhat marked attentions, licking their
hands, gazing ‘intently’ into their eyes, and tearing off most of their
clothes, but nothing more. The fifth panther was caned by a gentleman
from Snohomish, and the sixth was stared out of countenance and put
to flight by someone from Brownsville, whom the panther had knocked
off his horse; but it was reserved for another hero from Snohomish to
perform the marvellous feat of catching a panther on the wing (‘as it
was passing in the air’) with ‘his left arm round its body just behind
the forelegs.’ Of course, having got his grip, the gentleman from
Snohomish thumped the head of that poor panther with his gun-barrels
till it died. In this Homeric struggle the victor lost nothing but the
tail of his night-shirt.
Now, no doubt all these stories are quite true, and they undoubtedly
prove great courage in someone, but not, it seems, in the panther; so
that in spite of Mr. Perry I am obliged to accept the general opinion
upon this subject as the correct one, backed as it is by a statement
just made to me by Mr. John Fannin, the curator of the British
Columbian Museum--an accepted authority in the American press upon such
matters, and an ‘old timer’ who has had many opportunities of observing
this beast--that he had never come across a well-authenticated story
of a panther showing fight to (much less attacking) a man. From Mr.
Fannin I obtained the measurements of the largest panthers out of the
twenty-five or so which have been sent to him in late years to be
skinned. The longest of these was a male from the mainland of British
Columbia, killed on the Frazer river, which measured 8 ft. 2 ins. from
the tip of the nose to the tip of the tail. The largest killed upon
the island and sent to my friend was also a male which measured 7 ft.
3 ins. One hundred and fifty pounds is the weight of a large panther
as given by Mr. J. E. Harting, in some notes published by him upon
American mammalia, and I have no doubt that this is about what an
average male would weigh, but I am only judging by my eye, and not from
any accepted record of the actual weight of any particular beast.
The panther’s food consists of small game of all kinds, deer, and more
especially sheep and pigs, and other farm produce. In nine cases out of
ten the panthers which are killed are found near a sheep ranch, and it
is notorious that the men who get panthers are not hunters, explorers,
or men on a survey party where only wild game is likely to be found,
but rather farmers and others who have stock to look after near a
settlement.
It may be that in Montana and Wyoming the panther grows larger and is
more courageous than he is on the Pacific coast; but even there he is
held in some contempt by the mountain-men who know him. He has a habit,
it is said, of following a belated hunter to camp howling in the most
diabolical manner, but he never proceeds to extremities.
Some idea of the number of these beasts upon Vancouver Island and
in British Columbia generally may be derived from the fact that
the British Columbian Government paid bounties for the scalps of
seventy-two in 1892, all but two, I believe, having been killed upon
the island.
II. THE GRIZZLY (_Ursus horribilis_)
Mr. Sclater, the Secretary of the Zoological Society of London, writes
me that the best naturalists only recognise three species of bears in
North America, namely: the Grizzly (_Ursus horribilis_), the Black
Bear (_Ursus americanus_), and the Polar Bear (_Ursus maritimus_).
My correspondent adds that ‘a lot of varieties and sub-species have
been made, but not upon any certain characters.’ Among these varieties
and sub-species may, I suppose, be reckoned _Ursus Richardsonii_,
the Alaskan grizzly, as well as a whole host of bears, best known
to Western trappers as cinnamon bears, silver-tips, roach-backs,
bald-faces, and range bears.
Luckily for me, the question of species is one for naturalists rather
than for sportsmen to decide; the claim to rank as a distinct species
appearing to rest rather upon a beast’s anatomy than upon his outward
appearance and manner of life.
[Illustration: Dead grizzly]
Having studied bears with some care and under favourable circumstances
in more than one portion of the globe, I incline to the belief that
the different species cross almost as freely as do different breeds
of dogs; and certainly it seems probable that upon the North American
continent all the different varieties owe their origin to the grizzly
or the black, or to a union between the two. In this view I am
supported by such a practical field naturalist and sportsman as Dr.
Rainsford, as well as by a number of the best hunters and trappers
whom I have met, and by certain very significant facts. Dr. Rainsford
alludes to the first of these facts in his admirable article upon the
Grizzly Bear in ‘The Big Game of North America.’ He says: ‘I myself
have shot three young bears going with one sow, one almost yellow,
one almost black, and another nearly grey. I have seen ordinary black
bears, with year-old grizzly cubs, shaped differently from the mother,
unmistakably owing both their shape and colour to the parentage of the
male grizzly.’ This is the evidence of Dr. Rainsford, and I have heard
similar statements as to the occurrence of different coloured cubs in
the same litter, not once but a score of times, from Indians and white
men who had passed their lives in the mountains; and I have round me
in my house at the present moment a number of skins of bears killed
by myself, which, if colour be any criterion as to species, represent
almost as many species as there are skins.
But if anyone wishes to judge of the futility of trying to ‘place’ a
bear by his colour, he should visit the drying-yard of our principal
merchant in furs, here in Victoria. In that yard on a sunny day, when
the bear skins are laid out to air, he will see skins of every shade
between black, white, and red, all collected from a comparatively
limited district, and all shading so gradually into one another, that
you cannot yourself decide where the smoky grey of the true grizzly
has changed into the reddish brown of the cinnamon, or where that has
become dark enough to be considered a rather brownish black.
As it is with the colour so it is with the shape of the beasts, and
with the shape and colour of their claws. The typical grizzly should
be higher at the shoulder, somewhat shorter in the back, and generally
more massive than the black bear. He should be so high at the shoulder
as to appear almost humpbacked, whilst his head should be heavy and
massive, broad between the ears, short in proportion to its size
as compared to the head of the black bear, sharp at the snout, and
somewhat flat behind the eyes; the whole expression of the head being
as unmistakably pugnacious and dangerous as the expression of the long
shallow head of the black bear is weak and inoffensive. As most people
are aware, naturalists rely for purposes of identification more upon
the shape of a bear’s skull than upon any external characteristics, and
for that reason I have inserted here an engraving from a photograph
of two skulls placed side by side, the larger one being that of a
medium-sized grizzly bitch (or sow) from Alaska, the other that of a
very large black bear (male) from British Columbia.
[Illustration: Black bear, Grizzly bear]
As far as the general expression of the beast goes, it seems to me that
that is no better guide than his colour, for even amongst grizzlies I
have in one trip come across one specimen with a head as full of vice
as a viper’s, and another as mild as a Chinese cook’s. It is true that
the sexes differed; the mild face naturally belonging to the lady.
As to the claws again, the typical Californian grizzly should have
extremely long flat claws of a bony whiteness--claws obviously meant
for digging and not for climbing; while the genuine black bear should
have claws to climb and fish with, sharply curved, small and dark
coloured.
But here again the characteristics are not constant. The Alaskan
grizzly (if it is a true grizzly) has claws far too arched or curved
to be typical; whilst in colour, all those which I have seen were a
light brown or slate colour growing white towards the tips. A bear
shot by me in the Hope Mountains is a good illustration of the strange
varieties which sometimes arise from crosses between black bear and
grizzly. This little fellow would have weighed about 350 lbs. live
weight, and was a full-grown bear when killed. His head was a typical
black bear’s as far as shape went, and he had not a distinctly marked
‘lift’ or hump at the shoulder; his claws were very light coloured
(almost white); his face and shoulders were a rich straw colour, fading
into a very light grey towards the rump, whilst his arms, belly, cheeks
and ears were a deep rich brown, almost black in places.
The Indians said he was a grizzly; the trapper who was with me called
him a cinnamon; a friend who wished to belittle my bear said he was
only ‘a rum-coloured black and a little one at that.’ I only venture to
suggest that he was ‘very much mixed.’
But perhaps I have already said too much upon this point, and I will
therefore only pause to add this significant fact. No cinnamon or other
similar variety seems to be found where both black and grizzly do not
exist together. For example, upon Vancouver Island, no grizzly has ever
been heard of, no cinnamon has ever been reported, but black bears
swarm. The same, I believe, may be said of the island of Anticosti,
and elsewhere. In habits bears differ, of course, considerably, and
yet even here the points in which they resemble one another are more
numerous than those in which they differ.
All bears appear to be omnivorous, but the grizzly is said to be more
of a flesh-eater than _Ursus americanus_. Perhaps he is. No doubt he
dearly loves to gorge himself upon a carcase, and he does occasionally
kill a weak beast or a young one for himself; but like his cousin he
is a great vegetarian, grubbing up roots and devouring berries by
the gallon. But a black bear is not by any means a total abstainer
from meat diet, more especially if that meat be pork; indeed, if the
pig needs killing, and the farmer neglects to play the butcher, the
mild-mannered gentleman in black will not be slow to do the killing and
help himself.
To furnish an exhaustive or even adequate list of the things upon which
bears feed is by no means an easy task, but it is so essential to
success that a man should know where to look for his game (game always
being where its food is) that this must be attempted.
Let me begin at the beginning of the bear’s year. As most men know, all
bears on this continent (except, perhaps, the Polar) lie dormant during
the winter. The den, as a rule, is at the head of one of the hundred
gulches which seem to radiate from a common source amongst the snow
peaks, the grizzly and the cinnamon choosing their lairs at a higher
altitude than the black bear.
The road to a grizzly’s den, as I remember it, is generally up a
snow-slide, through a dense belt of noisy brush, which the weight of
the winter’s snow has laid as a thunderstorm lays ripe wheat; and above
this belt, under a sheer bluff, sheltered from the wind and hidden by
the snow, lies the den itself.
Up here, mist and snow, a few stunted pines, and the sleeping bear have
the world to themselves from November to April, the exact date of the
bear’s retirement to winter quarters, as well as of his reappearance
above ground, depending somewhat upon the seasons. This much, at any
rate, seems to be generally admitted amongst mountain men--that, some
time in November bears begin to ‘hole up,’ the black bears being first
and the grizzlies following a week or two later; whilst in spring the
grizzlies are up and out before their ‘softer’ cousins.
When they first come out of their dens both bears feed entirely upon
vegetable matter, even the grizzly being too weak to wander round to
look for the carcases of beasts which have perished during the past
winter. This he becomes strong enough to do a week or so later, but at
first he is every bit as sorry a spectacle as _Ursus americanus_ under
similar conditions, being almost too weak to stand, and sitting down to
groan and wag his old head from sheer exhaustion after every few yards
he walks. If at this time the weather looks unpropitious, both bears
not infrequently come to the conclusion that it is not yet time to get
up, and therefore turn in for one more nap.
In early April (that is, on first leaving their dens) both _Ursus
americanus_ and _Ursus horribilis_ frequent the river bottoms to feed
upon the rank herbage which grows there; and a little later find food
very much to their taste in the young mountain grass which springs
wherever the snow leaves the hill-sides bare.
It is in April that the hunter gets some of his best chances at bear,
for if he be lucky enough to find one of the earliest of these mountain
pastures, and patient enough to watch it for a few days, he is almost
certain of his reward.
At this time, too, a bear is worth killing, for his hide is at its very
best when he leaves his winter quarters, though it deteriorates very
rapidly as summer advances.
Towards the end of April (in an average year) when the bear has purged
his system with a diet of mountain grasses, Nature provides him with
somewhat stronger food, in the buds of the olali bushes (service berry,
&c.), in the roots of the wild parsnip, and a little later in the
catkins which come upon the willows. Later still (in May), when the
woods begin to swarm with ticks and other insects, the bears follow
the snow in its retreat to the high places, finding at its very edge
great patches of golden lilies (_Erythronium giganteum_) and the
small pinkish blossom of _Claytonia carolineana_ (Indian potato),
both blossoms springing from bulbs of which bears are as fond as the
Indians, with whose women folk the former not seldom clash in their
morning operations in these wild potato fields.
But to find the bear feeding either upon bulbs or grasses, or any
stronger meat, the hunter must be out early and up late, for bears
are reasonable beings, rarely if ever feeding grossly at midday, but
breakfasting at dawn and dining after dark.
Indeed, bears are more or less nocturnal in their habits, and this is
especially true of grizzlies, who, when much hunted, become purely
nocturnal in their feeding and in their wanderings.
I know a country (the name of it I prefer to keep to myself for a year
or two yet) which appears to be a high tableland, densely timbered and
full of caribou, and from this innumerable gullies and clefts lead down
to lower levels, where, at the bottom of steep canyons, are piled rock
and stone slide, and débris of dead pine wood. There are opens among
the pines at the top, and here in snow-time, if you leave a caribou
carcase for a couple of days, you will find plenty of bear-tracks going
to and fro. Every day the number of them increases, until it seems to
you that the place must be alive with grizzlies; but you will never
see one of the track-makers by day. The bears here have been a good
deal hunted, and have become as cunning as monkeys, coming up from
the gullies at night but vanishing like spectres at the first peep of
day. It was here that a friend of mine killed and left a mule deer,
hanging its head up in a tree hard by, to be called for on some future
occasion. When that occasion came, the head was missing, and was found
a little further on, laid with the carcase and carefully covered up
with moss and sticks and snow.
This, of course, is a common trick of the grizzly’s, but it was quaint
of this particular beast to gather up the fragments so carefully. By
the way, whilst I am on the subject of ‘carcases,’ I may as well say
that it is not my own experience that grizzlies are very gluttonous
feeders, upon flesh at any rate. Indeed, it seemed to me that a deer’s
carcase lasted some bears whom I have known almost as long as it would
have lasted an ordinary camp Indian. I knew, for instance, of a mule’s
carcase in the spring of 1892 which served as an attraction to four
bears (two black and two grizzlies) for at least a fortnight in the
Kootenay country.
But to come back to the bear’s menu. About the same time that the
_Erythronium_ is in bloom, black bears feed freely upon a plant called
‘arpa’ by our British Columbian Indians (_Heracleum lanatum_) upon
skunk cabbage, and upon a plant which Professor Macoun has kindly
identified for me as _Peucedanum triternatum_.
What the black bear eats from choice, the grizzly will eat from
necessity; so that if there are no carcases about, and few or no bulbs
in the country, the hunter may expect to find _U. horribilis_ making
the best of ‘arpa’ and skunk cabbage. As the season advances, the
bear changes his diet somewhat, and before his great autumn harvests
of fish, fruits and nuts, we find him tearing up rotten logs for ants
and beetles, turning over boulders for the larvæ which lie below them,
digging up yellow jackets’(wasps, &c.) nests for the sake of the grubs
inside, and occasionally burrowing in the hill-sides for marmots or
ground hogs.
The bear’s season of plenty begins with the ripening of the first
fruits on the flats by the river bottoms, when those who care to shoot
game out of season may find some sport in killing both varieties of
bear as they wander over the sand bars of Alaskan rivers, looking
for fruit and a cold bath to allay the irritation of their bald and
mangy-looking hides.
The berry season in British Columbia begins at midsummer, and from
that time until late in the fall there is always plenty of bear food
in the woods: raspberries (which bears love beyond all things),
currants, gooseberries, soapberries, service, wine, salmon, bil- and
black-berries, strawberries, choke-cherries, and a score of others,
whose flavour I can remember but whose names I never knew.
I have never seen, except in the Caucasus, such a land for wild fruit
as British Columbia. Compared with it, Colorado, for instance, is a
most unfruitful country; but, to make amends, Colorado abounds in
acorns and pine nuts, of which there are few, if any, in British
Columbia. Where the acorns are, there will the bears be also, but
acorns are an uncertain crop, failing utterly one year and abounding
another.
By the way, just before the acorn crop comes in, the silver-tips
of Colorado seem to devote a good deal of their time to digging in
woodland bogs, but whether they dig for roots or insects I am not
sure. In Alaska, in British Columbia, and all along the Pacific Coast
the bear’s _bonne bouche_ is kept until nearly the end of the year.
In spring the ‘tyhee’ salmon (_O. chouicha_) turns up the streams,
and a few of this ‘run’ stay all through the season; later on come the
humpies (_Onchorhynchus gorbuscha_), and of these, the Indians say,
none return to the sea. In October, then, in Alaska and elsewhere,
the glacial streams, tributary to the main rivers, are full of these
misshapen salmon, crimson and purple, and patched with all manner of
vivid leprous patches, their dorsal fins frayed and rotting as they
swim. The streams stink of them; your paddle strikes one which is
already broken up and drifting seaward; others, swollen with decay,
are standing, tail upwards, on the river bottom; whilst others, driven
by some strange madness, diseased and dying, still struggle up the
shallows towards the glacier.
At this time of year, the dense woods of grey and mildewed pines and
prickly devil’s club, which crowd down to the river’s edge, are full
of bears; the mud flats between forest and stream are pitted with huge
tracks (I have measured many 12 ins. by 9 ins.), and the filthy gorged
American eagle sits puking and moping with ruffled feathers among
cleaned back bones and rejected heads and tails of humpies, left over
from the grizzlies’ last meal.
And here, at the end of their year’s feeding, it seems appropriate to
say something of the weight to which grizzlies attain, and the size
to which they grow. Like human beings, they seem to fatten most in a
civilised or domestic state, the great grizzly of San Francisco having
really attained to the enormous weight of 1,500 lbs.,[15] presumably
upon hog food. It is said that the Californian grizzly grows larger
than any other, but I doubt whether he much exceeds the Alaskan in
size, and I am absolutely certain that all the largest grizzlies have
grown to their fabulous proportions in the whisky-scented atmosphere of
Western saloons. ‘If you will hear them,’ as the ‘boys’ say, 2,000-lb.
grizzlies are quite common, and ‘as big as a bull’ is but a mild way of
describing nine bears out of ten shot by them.
As a matter of fact, I am by no means prepared to doubt all their
stories. There are unquestionably some exceptional monsters met with
now and again, but too many of those instanced have been described
merely from the impression made on the hunter’s mind by the sight of
a gigantic track which has spread in soft snow or mud. The largest
grizzly of which I have had anything like trustworthy information in my
own wanderings was shot in Alaska, at English Bay, Kodak Island, by Mr.
J. C. Tolman, now Customs officer at Wrangel. As Mr. Tolman allows his
name to appear, and as he enjoyed an enviable reputation for veracity
among men who had known him for years, I give the dimensions of his
big bear as he gave them to me, extracted from notes made in his diary
at the time at which he killed him. The bear was killed only a few
miles from a settlement, and was actually weighed, turning the scales
at 1,656 lbs. dead weight not cleaned; his hide when freshly skinned
measured 13 ft. 6 ins. from nose to anus; from ear to ear he measured
13 ins.; from poll to nose, 20 ins.; the length of the hind-foot was 18
ins., and the breadth of the forefoot 12 ins. He was killed by a single
shot in the head from a Winchester rifle.
The largest bear which I have myself shot was also an Alaskan, but
infinitely smaller than the above; still, even this bear gave four
strong men all they could do, with a rope round her neck, to drag her,
when dead, down a sloping mud bank into a canoe laid over on its side
to receive her. Her forearm, when skinned, measured 23 ins., fair
measurement, the tape being stretched as tight as it would go. The
Indians put this bear at from 1,000 to 1,500 lbs., and I dare say she
really weighed nearly 800 or possibly 900 lbs., but I am no judge of
an animal’s weight, and had no means of weighing her. I have myself
measured skins in Mr. Boscowitz’s store at Victoria (also brought down
from Alaska) which measured 9 ft. 10 ins. from end to end, but then
some 6 ins. must be allowed for on all American skins, as they are
skinned up the hind legs in such a way as to give quite that length
of hide beyond the anus. Of course, too, a skin may be so laced and
strained upon its frame in skinning as to stretch it a good deal beyond
its natural dimensions.
In Colorado the bears appear to be mostly silver-tips, and if you can
rely upon the verdict of the local hunters whom I met (and I have no
reason to doubt their word) a Colorado silver-tip weighing 600 lbs.
would be a big bear.
The stories of the ferocity of _U. horribilis_ owe something to the
vivid imaginations of hunters and the sombre surroundings in which
they meet their prey; but there can be no doubt that on occasion this
bear will face a man (or men), and fight with intense ferocity. As
a rule, like all bears, the grizzly will run rather than fight, and
very rarely attacks without provocation, but when surprised near a
carcase, when cornered, when wounded, or with cubs, _U. horribilis_
is apt to be dangerous. I know of a good many deaths due to bears
under such circumstances, and only last year (1891) a very well-known
meat-hunter in Colorado was attacked in green timber by a silver-tip
and regularly worried by him, although the man had a companion with
him, and had not even seen the bear until he was charged. I have myself
seen the marks of this bear’s teeth in the leg and forearm of my old
guide, who explained the unprovoked attack by saying that the bear had
supped on a carcase poisoned for coyotes, and was ‘feelin’ pretty mean
from belly-ache’ when found. The Alaskan grizzly has a peculiarly bad
reputation among the Indians in that country, who upon dry land can
hardly be induced to face ‘Hoots’ or ‘Noon,’ as they call the grizzly
and cinnamon. Most of the skins sent to Wrangel are those of bears
strangled in nooses, like big rabbit-snares, which are set in their
paths, or else of bears shot down by men on snow-shoes in the deep
snow of early spring, or shot on the river banks from a canoe. Here
it is as well to say that I know of two instances in which grizzly
bitches have, when hunted, deserted their cubs, and left them up a tree
at the mercy of the hunters; but this is, of course, unusual. As a
rule, grizzlies are distinctly ‘ugly’ when they have young with them,
and will defend them to the last. However, _with_ cubs or without, a
man with a good rifle and a steady nerve need never let a bear go in
the open. In thick brush there are times when caution is better than
courage. As I write, a picture comes before my eyes of a willow swamp,
high up on the head-waters of a mountain stream in the States. An old
guide of mine is on the edge of the timber watching, whilst the brush
swings and rattles, and an unseen form shakes down the yellow leaves
and fills the gulch with her growls. It is only a bitch silver-tip, who
has got the man’s wind and is trying to collect her cubs; but, although
it is exasperating to stand while the old lady makes her escape up the
gully, there is nothing else to be done. If she does not mean to face
the open, none but a greenhorn would attempt to go to her when she was
‘fighting mad,’ in bush too thick to walk through, and in places over
six feet high. All the old authorities talk of grizzlies rising to an
upright position on closing with a man, but I have never met a man who
had seen anything of this habit, although I have known more than one
man who has been struck down by a bear. I have myself come suddenly
upon a grizzly, and seen him rise and face me in the position I refer
to, but he did not stop in that position long enough for me to dismount
and fire, and I am convinced that his only object in rising upon his
hind legs was to get a better view of the intruder, not to attack him.
There is no doubt that a bear’s sight is his weak point. In bright
moonlight I have had one walk past myself and another man in the open
at forty yards without seeing us; but if his sight is indifferent,
he has the ears of a hare and the nose of a caribou, and this is
especially the case with the black bear, whose timidity has possibly
somewhat sharpened his senses.
That grizzlies do not climb, except as cubs, appears to be true; not
that it matters much to the hunter, as anyone will allow who gets his
friend to give him 100 or 150 yards’ start and then tries to ‘tree’ in
time to escape him. The right tree never grows in the right place, and
climbing in a hurry sounds easier than it is. It will be found that
most men can run 100 yards in less time than they can choose their tree
and climb it to such a height that their _feet_ are ten feet above the
ground. A bear, too, travels faster even than a frightened man on the
flat. If you are charged, the best thing you can do is to stand fast
and go on shooting; and if there are two of you, and both of one mind,
and _not standing too close together_, there should not be much danger;
but better than that is to take pains about your first shot: or go
close to your bear and shoot him in the head or neck, as the natives
do. If you hit him in either of these places, you can kill him at once
with an ordinary Winchester (45·90); whilst if you are using a Paradox
or a big English Express, a shot ranging forward from behind the
shoulder or (with a solid bullet) through the shoulder is good enough.
Don’t shoot at a bear above you unless you are sure of killing him; a
wounded beast will almost always come down hill and may take you on the
way; and don’t shoot at a bear in the brush as if you were ‘browning’
a covey of partridges; nor follow a wounded bear into thick covert
unless you are well insured, about to be married, or at the end of your
ordinary resources for supporting your family.
Opinions vary as to the comparative ferocity and vitality of the
different species, but perhaps individuals vary at least as much as
species. I have known a black bear take a bullet from an English rifle
fired by me point blank into her chest at ten paces, and then turn
and _gallop_ uphill for 200 yards before dying; and I have known a
two-year-old black bear take three bullets, scattered indiscriminately
over his back by my friend’s Paradox (12-bore), and then turn and
charge like a hero. He charged the wrong man, though, and got shot in
the head for his impudence.
To finish these remarks, and convey, if possible, some idea of hunting
the grizzly, let me take a leaf from my note-book, kept in Alaska in
the autumn of 1891, whilst hunting with my friend Mr. Arnold Pike.
Nature has a way of always suiting her creatures to their environments,
but none of her creatures are more exactly suited to their surroundings
than _U. horribilis_. Savage and silent and grey as the grizzly is, the
forests and waters amongst which he chooses to dwell are more grim,
more savage, and more forbidding than himself. The part of Alaska in
which we were hunting in 1891 appears to have escaped from that process
described in Genesis by which the waters which were above the firmament
were divided from the waters which were under the firmament. On the
Stickeen river there is no firmament. As a rule, a damp darkness broods
upon the face of the deep, and the waters which should be above touch
and mingle with the waters which should be below. There is no dry
belt between the bottom of the sea and the roof of heaven, at least
in that district which lies between Wrangel and Telegraph Creek, in
the month of October. We were out for forty days and forty nights, and
I cannot swear to more than three and a half moderately fine days in
that time: a fine day in Alaska being one in which you wear oilskins
and gum boots, and go to bed in a dry shirt; whilst on a wet one you
wear gum boots and oilskins, and go to bed to dry your shirt. The river
Stickeen runs its rapid course between dank forests, grey at the top
with mildew, and hung with dark mosses, in which the devil’s club forms
an impenetrable undergrowth, and even the pines are thorny. The pace of
the river is such that you make as much in one day, drifting down it,
as you made in five pulling and poling up it; and your camping-grounds
are of necessity upon barren sandspits, for nothing but a bear could
force its way into this timber. In this land no gentle things live:
there are no deer, no small birds, no squirrels, no sunlight--nothing
but a few wolves, a stray seal, which comes whistling up on the tide
in the grey of the morning, great flights of Canada geese, and dying
salmon. All along the course of the main river are the mouths of its
ice-fed tributaries, little streams of greenish-blue water, rising in
a glacier and fringed with narrow strips of glacial mud, upon which a
rank growth of _Equisetum_ (horse-tail) flourishes. These banks are the
hunting grounds, and the number of huge tracks upon them, as well as
the _débris_ of half-eaten salmon, proclaim that there is no scarcity
of game; but if the hunter would get a shot he must haunt them at all
unseasonable hours, when winds are most chill, and nature is at her
gloomiest: for ‘Hoots’ only creeps out upon the creek’s edges with the
first shadows of the night, and vanishes from them with the earliest
rising mists of morning.
In this land it was that one evening we pitched our tents upon a
sandspit, cut wet brush in the rain to make our bedding for the night,
and then, tired with a hard day and dispirited by weeks of failure,
stepped once more into the canoe and paddled for all we were worth up
and across the stream to the mouth of a salmon creek.
Once in the green water, pipes were put out, conversation ceased, Pike
and I laid down our paddles and took up our rifles, and only the Indian
worked, the canoe gliding up the still waters without a sound.
At the mouth of the stream, a few flashing shadows beneath the water
attracted our Indian’s attention, and a few quick thrusts with his
spear provided us with enough fresh salmon to last us for a day or two.
A blow or two with the axe silenced them, and again the canoe stole up
stream, the men in it noting fresh tracks upon the banks, and peering
into the shadowy woods, which grew darker and more impenetrable every
minute.
Once or twice on our way up stream the canoe ran aground, and all hands
had to get out to push their craft through the sands (quicksands as
often as not) into which we sank over the tops of our waders.
But these are small matters. Pike sitting with one leg dangling over
the side, always ready to jump out, seemed rather to like it--it
reminded him of days among the ice near Spitzbergen--and all of us had
long since become amphibious.
At last the stream ceased to be navigable even for our shallow craft,
which we beached upon certain muddy shallows, among stunted bushes and
dead equisetum, and our watch began. All round us stretched the swamp,
and above it rose the densely timbered hills, while far above them
again towered the triple peaks of snowy Sacoclè. For an hour and a half
no one stirred, though our fingers were numb, and we were too cold to
feel cold. A good Siwash (Indian) won’t move a muscle for hours, nor
sneeze, nor cough, nor do any of the hundred and one things which no
one ever wants to do except upon such a vigil as this. For an hour and
a half the rain went on, the darkness deepened, and the silence became
intense, broken only by the occasional splash of a ‘humpy’ who had run
himself aground, and could not get off again into deep water.
At last Jim came to the conclusion that no bears would come that night,
and as a glance at our sights proved to us that we should probably miss
them even if they came, we signalled him to push off, and in a minute
the canoe was again fleeting over the waters in breathless silence,
the thin line of forest seeming to glide by us while we stood still.
An Indian in the bows was looking out for ‘snags ahead’ or shallows,
and for my part I had played this game so often before that I had given
up hope, and was dreaming of other things. All at once the canoe was
violently shaken from stem to stern. ‘D---- the fellow,’ I muttered, ‘I
suppose he has run aground,’ and I went on dreaming. Again the canoe
trembled under me, and this time I remembered that this was to be the
signal for game ahead. At the same moment I noticed that the Siwash’s
face was working, and his hands were drawing his Winchester from its
case, when my friend crept up to him, and made him understand that if
he fired it would hurt him more than the bears, and then at last I saw
_them_. Until then the Indian’s body had been in my way, but now they
were in full view, standing almost up to their shoulders in the stream,
still as stone images in the dark shadow of the overhanging bank, their
heads turned over their shoulders looking in our direction, and the
long silvery ripples running from their legs down stream. It was lucky
for me that night that I carried a Paradox, with which a man can shoot
at short ranges as if he were snap-shooting at rabbits in covert, for
I had to stand up to get a clean shot, I had not a second to lose, and
the canoe rocked horribly under my feet. The big beast of the two fell
to my first barrel, sinking where she stood, while her mate got my
second barrel in the back as he scrambled up the bank, making good his
escape for the moment into the dense scrub.
[Illustration: STANDING STILL AS STONE IMAGES]
I don’t suppose that the whole incident, from the find until we began
to fish up my bear, took a minute, and yet into that minute was crowded
a third of the reward for forty days of hard work, short commons and
general misery. Is the game worth the candle? I think it is, but I
don’t want to persuade any man to be of my way of thinking, nor do I
want to convey the impression that all bear hunting is necessarily as
grim and miserable as it is in Alaska. But in places where bear hunting
is easy, bears are getting scarce (at least, grizzlies are), for their
hides bring a good price and there is a bounty upon their scalps as
well. The result is that more bears are trapped in one year than
would be shot in five under ordinary circumstances. For instance, two
brothers whom I know killed thirty-five bears in 1890 within a radius
of eighty miles of their cabin. Of course, this sort of thing cannot
last.
It seems a pity, as, whether you hunt him among the mists and storms
of an Alaskan autumn, or watch for him by a hill at the edge of some
dark canyon, until even the bird _chiquetta_ stops her noisy little
song, and the outlines of all objects become indistinct and moving,
_Ursus horribilis_ is better worth hunting than any other beast, except
perhaps the bighorn, in all America.
P.S.--Since writing this, Sir George Lampson has kindly furnished
me with the length of eleven American grizzly skins in his warehouse
at one time--87, 89, 90, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 101 and 103 ins.
respectively. On the day these particulars were furnished I myself put
the tape over a grizzly skin in Sir George Lampson’s possession which
measured 9 ft. from the eyes to the tail.
III. BLACK BEAR (_Ursus americanus_)
I have said so much incidentally about the black bear while writing of
his congener the grizzly, that I have very little left to say of him
in the proper place. A recent American authority describes this bear’s
habitat as being confined nowadays ‘to some portions of the various
ranges of mountains south of the St. Lawrence river, the Great Lakes,
and (east of the Mississippi river) to parts of those portions of the
Mississippi river and its tributaries which are yet unsettled,’ and
to ‘the dense thickets of the Colorado, Trinity, and Brayos rivers.’
Colonel G. D. Alexander should have bethought him of those countries
west of the Rockies (Alaska, British Columbia, Washington Territory,
Vancouver Island, and Oregon) which are at present the principal
stronghold of _Ursus americanus_; and as I am informed the chief source
from which the fur-traders draw their supplies of black bear skins.
Unfortunately for the black bear, the price of his hide has gone up
lately in the fur market. Ten years ago $15 was a long price to pay
for a bear’s skin; this year a trader out here paid as much as $35 for
one. Whatever the ultimate result of this rise in value may be, the
immediate consequence of it has been to show the world what a vast
number of bears can be killed in America if they are wanted.
Here are some statistics of recent crops of bear in America which speak
for themselves.
The Hudson Bay Company, of course, draws _all_ its supply of hides
from this continent, and I am assured that the same maybe said (with
scarcely any allowance for Russian, Norwegian, Indian, or other skins)
of the great firm of C. M. Lampson & Co. These two firms collected in
1891 and offered for sale in 1892 no fewer than 29,081 bear hides, to
which enormous total the Hudson Bay Company contributed 11,027 hides.
Some idea of the proportion of black to other skins at these sales may
be obtained by looking at the Hudson Bay Company’s lists for 1891, in
which we find 11,414 black, 1,875 brown, 253 grey, and 130 white bear
skins offered for sale.
[Illustration: ‘When Spring in the woods’]
There can be little doubt, then, that there were plenty of black bear
in America in 1890 and 1891; and, in spite of the immense harvest of
hides which is annually gathered in, I venture to prophesy that until
Alaskan river bottoms and the dense timber districts of Vancouver
Island, Oregon, and Washington Territory are cleared and ready for the
plough, there will be plenty of bear left for those who care to look
for them. Here on Vancouver Island and on the north-west coast of
British Columbia black bears are especially plentiful, one of our great
fur-dealers (Mr. Boscowitz) having taken in over 1,000 hides last year,
whilst I see by a newspaper (‘Colonist,’ Dec. 6, 1892) that at Sumas
in the New Westminster District (one of our best farming districts)
seven bears have lately fallen to one rifle and three to another; and
I am well convinced that a salmon-canning friend of mine told me the
truth when he asserted that about dawn, one day during the great annual
salmon run, he saw seventeen black bears at one _coup d’œil_, feeding
along the bank of one of the northern rivers of British Columbia.
But it must not be inferred from these facts that every tenderfoot
who comes along will run up against bears the first time he goes in
search of them. On the contrary, an old friend of mine (every inch
an English sportsman) has been out in this country for twenty-five
years, travelling from time to time all over the province, and has
never yet seen a bear alive in the woods. The reason is simply that my
friend uses a shot-gun, and doesn’t look for bears; and if you want
to see these beasts you must look for them at the right time and in
the right place, and even then be thankful if you see more than their
fresh tracks, for Nature has given them noses as keen as the nose
of a caribou, and ears which are always on the alert, as well as an
impregnable sanctuary in the dense timber and tangled woodfall of their
native forests. To those who live upon the Pacific coast the black bear
is an animal to be thankful for, affording as he does an excuse for
carrying a rifle when spring is in the woods; when the cedar swamps
smell heavy with the musk of the skunk cabbage, and are lit in their
green darkness by stray beams of May sunshine; when _Cormus Nuttalli_
is white with blooms as big as the palm of a man’s hand, and underfoot
all is bright with the red and orange of columbine and ‘Indian pink,’
or white with the delicate petals of the dog violet. To me the black
glossy hide beneath my feet always brings back memories of spring-time,
either here on the island, or on the mainland by the Frazer, where the
beautiful olalis are smothered in white blossom, and where the great
yellow swallow-tails and plum-coloured Camberwell Beauties sail and sun
themselves upon the stone slides round the lake.
But though the black bear affords an excellent excuse for bolting out
of town in spring-time, it cannot be said that he is a very sporting
beast. He hasn’t got an ounce of ‘fight’ in him, and stalking is of
course impossible in such districts as those which he frequents. Even
‘still hunting’ is very nearly useless in such timber as exists on this
coast; so that unless you use hounds to hunt him with, your best chance
of meeting _Ursus americanus_ is to take a canoe and paddle quietly up
untravelled streams, where fish are plentiful, or where in autumn the
berry bushes grow thickly. In spring you may get a shot by watching
woodland swamps where the skunk cabbage grows, or hill-sides when the
Indian potato is ripe, but you are nearly as likely to have your chance
if you are out early upon the best trail in the country, which runs
near such feeding places, for the black bear appreciates a good road as
much as a man does, and always uses one when he can.
In Eastern America the black bear is principally hunted with hounds,
and even here a good dog which will tree a bear is useful; but my own
experience of such sport has been, that in nine cases out of ten the
hounds’ music ceased just as I had done the hardest mile on record
up hill and over fallen timber, and the hounds themselves turned up
ten minutes later, meek and dejected, their muzzles full of porcupine
quills, which they evidently expected me to pull out for them.
Most of the skins sent in to Victoria from Alaska are taken by trapping
(by noose, gin, or deadfall), or by hunting with dogs, between the
time the bears leave their dens and the time the snow leaves the river
bottoms. It is a short season and an uncertain one, but I am assured
by those who have tried it, that for a man who is a good goer upon
snow-shoes, it is excellent fun whilst it lasts. The dogs used for
bears are of every breed and combination of breeds, but perhaps the
best are collies. It does not require a big dog or a powerful dog
for the work, for no dog is big enough to close with, whilst any dog
is big enough to frighten, a black bear. I remember upon one occasion
seeing three dogs, two small Pomeranians and a cross-bred setter, run a
two-year-old black bear to bay on the ford of a river. The dogs had to
swim, but by standing up the bear could rest upon firm ground, and keep
his arms and jaws free for fighting above water.
The bear had already received a shot in the stomach before the dogs
tackled him, but when they ran him to bay he seemed strong and well.
Neither dogs nor bear took any notice of me, though I was standing up
to my knees in the water of the ford within a few paces of them; and
in five minutes the fight was over without interference on my part. At
first the bear cuffed the dogs as they swam up to him, as a man might
cuff who knew nothing of hitting out from the shoulder, and once he
took the big dog in his jaws and went right under with him. However,
the setter came up smiling, and shortly afterwards poor old Bruin was
floating down stream, his head under water, and the dogs tugging with
impunity at his flanks. I suppose that this bear weighed less than 200
lbs.
Captain Baldwin in his excellent book on the game of Bengal describes
two kinds of bears: _U. labiatus_ and _U. tibetanus_; and almost
everything that he says of the Indian black bear would apply equally
well to _U. americanus_ (even to his weakness for yellow raspberries),
except that _U. labiatus_ appears to fight upon occasion, whereas _U.
americanus_ is hardly ever known to fight even in self-defence, and has
never, as far as I know, been accused of making an unprovoked assault
upon a human being.
Baldwin seems to have been somewhat surprised when he discovered
that the Indian black bear fed upon carrion. No one in America would
be surprised at anything which _U. americanus_ considered good for
him. I have seen a cub take rotten melon, a piece of meat, a cake of
chocolate, a plug of T. & B. tobacco, and the end of a half-smoked
cigar for breakfast. Being a true American, the cub naturally showed a
preference for the plug of T. & B., but none of the other things came
amiss to him. In a wild state a black bear will eat any garbage, putrid
fish, dead animals, or anything else which comes in his way. In fact,
the poor black bear is in all his tastes and habits a thorough hog: a
pig without a pig’s pugnacity.
As a rule he is a lowland beast, living in swamps and river-bottoms,
but I have seen him once or twice even in a mountain sheep country,
probably crossing over the divide from one river-bed to another. It
is well for him that he generally eschews the open, for once out of
the timber everything which has eyes must see him. A man may mistake
a burnt log for a bear, but no man could mistake a bear for a burnt
log. The intense blackness and gloss of a bear’s coat is not thoroughly
appreciated until you see it contrasted with other objects which you
are accustomed to call black.
Where the sportsman runs any chance of seeing tracks of both black and
grizzly in one and the same piece of country, it is as well to be able
to distinguish the one from the other.
It is not easy to do this, but, as a general rule, if the ground on
which the track is made is soft, you should be able to see the long
_cuts_ made by the grizzly’s claws, as contrasted with the little
holes made by the points of the black bears. I am talking now of the
forepaws, and it will be remembered that the claws of the black are
much arched, and therefore only touch at the tip, whereas the grizzly’s
claw is flat and should touch almost along its whole length.
Again, there is no doubt that the heel of the grizzly is much broader
and squarer than that of the black bear, which makes a very narrow
impression, even upon soft clay.
Like the grizzly, the black bear varies greatly in size and weight. On
Vancouver Island I am inclined to think that the average black bear
would not weigh 300 lbs.; but no doubt there are many exceptional
bears, even upon the island, which greatly exceed that weight; and
I have myself seen an old male upon the mainland which, if I am any
judge of weight, was not an ounce less than 500 lbs., and probably
weighed more; while there are from time to time black bear skins in
the warehouses of Mr. Boscowitz, the principal fur-dealer in Victoria,
which would measure nearly 9 ft. from end to end (if allowance were
made for the mask beyond the eyes), and 6 ft. from side to side below
the arms.
In 1891 I measured in this store a black bear’s skin which did not
seem unduly stretched, the length of which was, to the best of my
recollection, 8 ft. 6 ins. from eyes to tail, or 8 ft. 10 ins. as
measured.
Amongst the skins for sale by Messrs. C. M. Lampson & Co., at their
small summer sale, June 12, 1893, at which I was told that the black
bear skins were small, I measured one skin 93 ins. from eyes to tail,
and one of the employés of the house assured me that a black bear skin
measuring 8 ft. 6 ins. was not uncommon.
Before leaving the subject of bears altogether, I should like to refer
to an extraordinary skin which I saw among Mr. Boscowitz’s consignments
from the upper country last year. In size this skin is considerably
larger than the average bear hide; the colour of it is white, with a
few straw-coloured patches (little more than a few hairs in each) on
the head and about the rump. The paws and claws of the animal were
attached to the skin, and from the jaws and skin of the head I should
imagine that the beast had a long shallow head like a black bear’s,
though the skin is more like the skin of a Polar in summer season,
_except that_ whereas other bear hides are of hair, this is distinctly
woolly, more like the fleece of a sheep than the hide of a bear.
I am informed that this skin was sent to Mr. Rowland Ward’s. The bear
was killed on one of the inlets of the north-west coast, and is the
only one of the kind ever seen in our British Columbia fur market.
IV. BISON OR BUFFALO (_Bison americanus_)
In writing of big game in North America, it is impossible to write
for more than the immediate present. That which was ten years ago has
already ceased to be, and it is probable that the conditions, both of
game and country, will change almost as much in the coming decade as
they have done in that which has just passed.
Ten years ago, as I travelled along the Northern Pacific Railway line,
the skin-hunters were at work in the neighbourhood of Glendive and
Little Missouri, and I had an opportunity of killing my buffalo like
my predecessors. Unfortunately for me, I agreed with Colonel Dodge’s
plainsmen in ‘scarcely considering the buffalo game.’ Now the herds
are gone, and neither I nor any other man will see the prairies again
‘all one vast robe.’ All that remains of the vast herds which used
to roam ‘over the whole of the Eastern United States to the Atlantic
Ocean, and southward into Florida,’ are two or three half-domesticated
herds (one which was Colonel Bedson’s and one in the Kootenay country
among the Flat-head Indians), and a small band of wild beasts,
protected by the United States, in the Yellowstone Park. ‘Forest and
Stream,’ January 29, 1892, puts this last herd at about 400 head,
with an increase of 100 head per annum. West of Winnipeg the buffalo
paths are still visible, worn deep in the grey prairies by millions
of passing feet; but the herds have gone, and the men and beasts who
lived upon them. All that is left are a few piles of bleaching bones
and a few weather-worn skulls, and even these have almost all been
gathered and turned into dollars by the manure manufacturer and the
trophy-monger. In this practical money-grubbing age it does not do to
lament the good old days, unless you want to be laughed at; but it is
hard, nevertheless, to look on the ocean of grassland when the spring
flowers are coming, and not regret the great waves of animal life which
used to sweep over it. Such evidence as I can offer as to the mode in
which the buffalo was hunted must of necessity be hearsay evidence,
collected, however, at first hand, principally from an Indian confined,
at the time I saw him, at the Stony Mountain Penitentiary, and from a
white skin-hunter, whose last hunts were conducted in 1880, 1881 and
1882, in Montana and North Dacota.
A white skin-hunter’s ‘outfit’ of the most modest kind consisted
in those days of one hunter carrying a Sharp’s rifle (with bullets
weighing 500 grains), two skinners, and an extra man for camp work and
odd jobs.
During the rutting season (from July 20 to September 16) the buffaloes
all ran together, but during the rest of the year the old bulls
kept together, apart from the cows and young bulls. Except during
the rutting season, the bands were comparatively small--from 20 to
200--led, if consisting of cows and young beasts, by an old cow. In
hot weather the bands would lie quiet during the heat of the day, but
in windy weather they would keep travelling all day against the wind,
feeding as they went. As soon as the herds had been found the hunter
would begin operations, shooting at long ranges, and keeping out of
sight as much as possible. The first beast shot was the leader of the
band, and as often as the band seemed to have selected another leader
he, too, had to be dropped in his tracks. Without a leader, and with
no enemy in sight, the remainder of the herd would generally become
confused, and allow the hunter to shoot down a large number ‘at a
stand,’ as he called it. Having killed as many as he could, the hunter
left the carcases where they lay, his assistants coming to skin them
the next day. Fifteen head a day was, so my informant stated, a fair
average for one man to kill and two to skin, although in the fall of
1880 and spring of 1881 he and his party averaged twenty-four heads per
diem.
The best shot was low down behind the shoulder, about ten inches from
the brisket. A ball placed there would penetrate the lungs, and, after
a few plunges, the beast would drop and die.
The price of all the blood shed by the skin-hunters may be summed up
briefly as 2 dollars 75 cents each for ‘leather hides’--i.e. hides
of old bulls all the year round and young beasts during the summer
season--and 3.50 cents for ‘robe hides.’
My informant told me that if it would pay him he thought that he could
still find buffalo on the northern tributaries of the Saskatchewan,
east of the Rockies, as some friends of his, trapping ‘away back’ in
1886, had seen plenty of them, though the difficulty of bringing the
robes out had prevented their shooting any.
The last buffalo killed by a white man to my own certain knowledge was
shot by Mr. Warburton Pike far away to the North, near the Great Slave
Lake, when out after musk ox.[16]
Some idea of the number of the buffaloes in early days may be gathered
from the well-attested fact that the pioneer settlers often drove
through the herds for days and days with buffalo in sight all round
them all day long, as well as from the statistics collected by Colonel
Dodge, in his ‘Plains of the Great West.’ That author states that,
from information furnished to him by the Atcheson, Topeka and Santa Fé
Railway Company, he concludes that not less than a million and a half
were killed in the States from 1872 to 1874.
Colonel Dodge mentions a mountain buffalo as a variety of the common
buffalo, and Mr. J. E. Harting, in some remarks published originally
in the ‘Field,’ alludes to a beast of the same class, which he calls
‘Zacateca.’
The Zacatecas, of which specimens were exhibited at the American
Exhibition of 1887, inhabit the mountainous regions of Northern Mexico;
they are smaller than the buffalo, are hornless, and have tails more
like the tails of yaks than like those of the common buffalo, who by
the way is, properly speaking, a bison (_Bos americanus_). I have taken
the liberty of calling him a buffalo because in his native haunts he
has been so called, and as such he will go down to posterity in the
legends of those great plains which know him no longer.
The Wood Buffalo and the Mountain Buffalo appear to be almost, if not
quite, identical with the common type of _B. americanus_, from which
they differ only in habitat, in the quality of their coat, and in that
they are of somewhat smaller size than their kinsmen of the plains.
[Illustration: Colonel Bedson’s herd of buffaloes]
A better idea of the appearance of the subject of these remarks may
be obtained by a glance at the illustrations than could possibly be
given by any amount of descriptive writing, the illustrations having
been drawn by Mr. Whymper from photographs of the pure-bred beasts
in Colonel Bedson’s herd, taken by Lady Alice Stanley, and by a
photographer at Winnipeg, Manitoba.
An idea of the size of a buffalo bull may be conveyed by the fact that,
in 1889, one of the bulls in Colonel Bedson’s herd was estimated at
2,000 lbs., and a much smaller beast, a half-bred bull, was killed,
which dressed without the head 1,100 lbs. This was a four-year-old, by
a buffalo bull out of a Durham cow.
P.S.--Since writing the above, I have spent a season with an old-time
buffalo hunter, who confirmed all the statements made to me by others;
and added that, as an instance of the numbers killed by individuals,
he himself accounted for 3,500 head in four years, whilst a friend of
his, A. C. Myers, killed 4,200 buffaloes in the Pan Handle Country, in
Texas, in one year, ‘about the time Hayes was President.’
My old friend S. W. explained to me why men used such a gigantic weapon
as the ‘old reliable’ Sharp, which used to weigh 16 lbs. and upwards,
although the bullet was but a small one.
[Illustration: ‘A pile of buffalo bones’]
In buffalo shooting, he said, you had often to fire a deuce of a lot
of shots one after another; the weather was hotter than ‘the hottest
part of the hot place,’ and as you were shooting at long ranges, if
the barrel got hot, a sort of mist would get between your eye and the
sights, which helped the buffalo somewhat. Besides, where shooting was
your trade, you didn’t want to get your shoulder ‘kicked’ at every
shot; and as for the weight of your rifle, that didn’t matter to you,
for your pony packed it.
V. THE BIGHORN (_Ovis montana_)
[Illustration: A group of bighorn]
To a man who loves the hill-tops, where the winds blow keen and pure
over the red gold of sun-dried grass and the deep blue of snow-fed
tarns, there is no game in America to compare with the bighorn of the
Rocky Mountains. Other beasts may hide away in the dense timber of
Oregon, Washington Territory, and Vancouver Island; other beasts may
sneak out only at dusk and dawn, but the gallant bighorn still lives
out in the open, trusting for safety to the grey-faced ewes who watch
over him, or to his own marvellously keen sight and scent. In spite of
this, the man who kills a 16-in. ram generally deserves his good luck,
for there is no beast better able to take care of himself than an old
bighorn, nor any more difficult to stalk. Where he lives the wind seems
never still, and never constant in any given direction; at night it
strains at the hunter’s tent-rope and makes his fire roar and blaze
like a mad thing, and in the morning it curls round the hill-tops and
heralds the stalker’s coming from every quarter. It is the fashion in
books of sport to describe the haunts of _Ovis montana_ as being ‘the
highest, raggedest, and most forbidding mountain ranges.’ Nothing could
be further from the truth than this, if the statement is intended to be
general. Sheep are undoubtedly sometimes found in difficult and even
dangerous places, but to describe sheep shooting as anything like ibex
or chamois hunting is pure folly. The first sheep it was ever my good
fortune to see was in the Bad Lands, on an eminence not 200 ft. above
the level of the Northern Pacific Railway line, and the last I shot in
1892 was not 1,000 ft. above the level of the Frazer. As a rule, sheep
in early autumn keep to the bald knolls above the timber-line (where
patches of snow still linger), seeking refuge when disturbed in the
abrupt rock faces with which the hills abound. When the snow comes they
retire to the edge of the timber, sheltering among the juniper bushes
and stunted balsams from the early winter storms. Later on, when the
deep snows have covered all their upland pastures, the sheep come down
to the benches immediately above the river, retiring at midday to the
canyons which lead to the first ridges. On the Frazer river in late
November and early December all the sheep of the district are down
by the river; indeed, one ram which I shot in 1892 was first sighted
feeding in the middle of a small band of cattle on the flat. But winter
is not the time for sheep hunting, nor the flats above the river the
proper places to hunt them in. To enjoy sheep shooting to perfection a
man should leave the Pacific coast in September, pass through the belt
of water meadows and pine forests, where the pink fireweed contrasts
vividly with the grey stems of the pines and the soft green of the
ferns, and through the country of sage brush and rolling yellow bluffs.
From this point his road will lie steadily upwards, over the rolling
prairie, through belts of green timber where the deer swarm in winter,
and then by thread-like trails over side-hills and stone-slides along
the course of some tributary of the Frazer, until at last a great
yellow cone, patched here and there with snow, rises clear above the
timber-line in front of him. This is sheep-land, the land of the
roaring wind (Skulloptin), but it will take him a good long day to
reach it, and both he and his horses will be dead tired by the time
they stop to camp. At first a sheer rock wall rises from the river; on
the top of the rock is a bench of golden grass, and then again there
is a sharp ascent and another bench of grass. Finally the ladder of
benches is lost in the forest, which goes climbing away uphill in
resolute fashion until towards nightfall the hunter reaches the land of
stone-slides and burnt timber, and passing through that comes out upon
the edge of the sheep downs, where the stream becomes no more than a
succession of small pools amongst the moss, and the only trees still
left are dwarfed, stunted, and twisted into all manner of forms by the
violence of the mountain winds. If the sun has left the landscape when
the hunter first sees it, the effect is weird and cheerless. The great
brown wastes above, the soft silent mosses underfoot, the trees huddled
together in little groups as if for mutual support, the hanging fringes
of blackened beard moss, all help to accentuate the bleakness of the
land over which the mountain wind sobs or shrieks. But in the morning
all changes as if at a magician’s word. The skies are cloudless, the
sunlight dances on snowfield and streamlet, and even the grey stems of
the trees are beautiful when contrasted with the ruddy orange of the
Indian pinks at their feet--better than all, the hunter’s lungs are
filled with air which acts on him like champagne, and on the skyline,
as likely as not, he sees the great white sterns of half a dozen sheep
feeding quietly on their way back to their sleeping ground. By ten
o’clock at latest those sheep will lie down, and then where they lie
down they will stay, motionless as the grey rocks they lie amongst,
until nearly four o’clock, their eyes apparently open the whole time
and fixed steadily upon the _nearest skyline_. Generally, sheep will
choose a little sheltered meadow at the foot of a small glacier, lying
down in the very middle of it, each old ram with his head turned in
a different direction, and each with his eyes fixed on a different
skyline. When sheep have chosen such a position as this, the only thing
to be done is to lie and watch them until they move away to some more
accessible country. Many a time have I lain like this waiting until
first one old ram and then another rose, stretched himself, and then
lay down again for another forty winks. It is very exasperating, but
when at last the whole band gets upon its legs and feeds slowly over a
ridge from behind which it is possible to stalk them, verily you have
your reward.