is range each year
during the heat of the summer, as completely as he did each winter during
his sleep.

[Illustration]

II

Many years ago a wise government set aside the head waters of the
Yellowstone to be a sanctuary of wildlife forever. In the limits of this
great Wonderland the ideal of the Royal Singer was to be realized, and none
were to harm or make afraid. No violence was to be offered to any bird or
beast, no ax was to be carried into its primitive forests, and the streams
were to flow on forever unpolluted by mill or mine. All things were to
bear witness that such as this was the West before the white man came.

[Illustration]

The wild animals quickly found out all this. They soon learned the
boundaries of this unfenced Park, and, as every one knows, they show a
different nature within its sacred limits. They no longer shun the face of
man, they neither fear nor attack him, and they are even more tolerant of
one another in this land of refuge.

Peace and plenty are the sum of earthly good; so, finding them here, the
wild creatures crowd into the Park from the surrounding country in numbers
not elsewhere to be seen.

[Illustration]

The Bears are especially numerous about the Fountain Hotel. In the woods, a
quarter of a mile away, is a smooth open place where the steward of the
hotel has all the broken and waste food put out daily for the Bears, and
the man whose work it is has become the Steward of the Bears' Banquet. Each
day it is spread, and each year there are more Bears to partake of it. It
is a common thing now to see a dozen Bears feasting there at one time. They
are of all kinds--Black, Brown, Cinnamon, Grizzly, Silvertip, Roachbacks,
big and small, families and rangers, from all parts of the vast surrounding
country. All seem to realize that in the Park no violence is allowed, and
the most ferocious of them have here put on a new behavior. Although
scores of Bears roam about this choice resort, and sometimes quarrel among
themselves, not one of them has ever yet harmed a man.

[Illustration]

Year after year they have come and gone. The passing travellers see them.
The men of the hotel know many of them well. They know that they show up
each summer during the short season when the hotel is in use, and that they
disappear again, no man knowing whence they come or whither they go.

[Illustration]

One day the owner of the Palette Ranch came through the P