fat he can hardly
walk along in September when he don't feed on much else but berries an'
ants an' grubs? Would you get fat on wild currants?

"An' why does he grow so fast during the four or five months he's denned up
an' dead to the world without a mouthful to eat or drink?

"Why is it that for a month, an' sometimes two months, the mother gives her
cubs milk while she's still what you might call asleep? Her nap ain't much
more'n two-thirds over when the cubs are born.

"And why ain't them cubs bigger'n they are? That natcherlist laughed until
I thought he'd split when I told him a grizzly bear cub wasn't much
bigger'n a house-cat kitten when born!"

"He was one of the few fools who aren't willing to learn--and yet you
cannot blame him altogether," said Langdon. "Four or five years ago I
wouldn't have believed it, Bruce. I couldn't actually believe it until we
dug out those cubs up the Athabasca--one weighed eleven ounces and the
other nine. You remember?"

"An' they were a week old, Jimmy. An' the mother weighed eight hundred
pounds."

For a few moments they both puffed silently on their pipes.

"Almost--inconceivable," said Langdon then. "And yet it's true. And it
isn't a freak of nature, Bruce--it's simply a result of Nature's
far-sightedness. If the cubs were as large comparatively as a house-cat's
kittens the mother-bear could not sustain them during those weeks when she
eats and drinks nothing herself. There seems to be just one flaw in this
scheme: an ordinary black bear is only about half as large as a grizzly,
yet a black bear cub when born is much larger than a grizzly cub. Now why
the devil that should be--"

Bruce interrupted his friend with a good-natured laugh.

"That's easy--easy, Jimmy!" he exclaimed. "Do you remember last year when
we picked strawberries in the valley an' threw snowballs two hours later up
on the mountain? Higher you climb the colder it gets, don't it? Right
now--first day of July--you'd half freeze up on some of those peaks! A
grizzly dens high, Jimmy, and a black bear dens low. When the snow is four
feet deep up where the grizzly dens, the black bear can still feed in the
deep valleys an' thick timber. He goes to bed mebby a week or two weeks
later than the grizzly, an' he gets up in the spring a week or two weeks
earlier; he's fatter when he dens up an' he ain't so poor when he comes
out--an' so the mother's got more strength to give to her cubs. It looks
that way to me.