MER DAVENPORT.

The Bears Inspected the Pigs in Clover.----CHAS. NELAN.

Pinto Looked Down on the Platform.----WILL CHAPIN.

Watching the Man in the Tree.----WILL CHAPIN.

The Grizzly Chewed His Arm.----A. K.

He Had Seen the Bears.----WALT McDOUGALL.

PREFACE

These bear stories were accumulated and
written during a quarter of a century of
intermittent wanderings and hunting on the
Pacific Slope, and are here printed in a book
because they may serve to entertain and amuse.
Most of them are true, and the others--well,
every hunter and fisherman has a certain
weakness, which is harmless, readily detected
and sympathetically tolerated by others of the
guild. The reader will not be deceived by
the whimsical romances of the bear-slayers,
and he may rest assured that these tales
illustrate many traits of the bear and at least one
trait of the men who hunt him.

One of the most amiable and well-behaved
denizens of the forest, Bruin has ever been
an outlaw and a fugitive with a price on his
pelt and no rights which any man is bound to
respect.

Like most outlawed men, he has been
supplied with a reputation much worse than he
deserves as an excuse for his persecution and
a justification to his murderers. His
character has been traduced in tales of the fireside
and his disposition has been maligned ever
since the female of his species came out of
the woods to rebuke irreverence to
smooth-pated age. Every man's hand has been against
him, but seldom has his paw been raised
against man except in self-defense.

A vegetarian by choice and usually by
necessity, Bruin is accused of anthropophagy, and
every child is taught that the depths of the
woodland are infested by ravening bears with
a morbid taste for tender youth. Poor,
harried, timid Ursus, nosing among the fallen
leaves for acorns and beechnuts, and ready to
flee like a startled hare at the sound of a
foot-fall, is represented in story and picture as
raging through the forest with slavering jaws
seeking whom he may devour. Yet the man
does not live who can say truthfully that he
ever was eaten by a bear.

Possibly there have been bears of abnormal
or vitiated tastes who have indulged in human
flesh, just as there are men who eat decayed
cheese and "high" game, but the gustatory sins
of such perverts may not be visited justly on
the species. There are few animals so
depraved in taste as to dine off man except under
stress of famine, an