han like any
other animals.

[*] Both this huge Alaskan bear and the entirely distinct
bear of the barren grounds differ widely from the true
grisly, at least in their extreme forms.

The grisly is now chiefly a beast of the high hills and heavy timber;
but this is merely because he has learned that he must rely on cover to
guard him from man, and has forsaken the open ground accordingly. In old
days, and in one or two very out-of-the-way places almost to the present
time, he wandered at will over the plains. It is only the wariness born
of fear which nowadays causes him to cling to the thick brush of the
large river-bottoms throughout the plains country. When there were no
rifle-bearing hunters in the land, to harass him and make him afraid,
he roved thither and thither at will, in burly self-confidence. Then
he cared little for cover, unless as a weather-break, or because it
happened to contain food he liked. If the humor seized him he would
roam for days over the rolling or broken prairie, searching for roots,
digging up gophers, or perhaps following the great buffalo herds
either to prey on some unwary straggler which he was able to catch at
a disadvantage in a washout, or else to feast on the carcasses of those
which died by accident. Old hunters, survivors of the long-vanished ages
when the vast herds thronged the high plains and were followed by the
wild red tribes, and by bands of whites who were scarcely less savage,
have told me that they often met bears under such circumstances; and
these bears were accustomed to sleep in a patch of rank sage bush, in
the niche of a washout, or under the lee of a boulder, seeking their
food abroad even in full daylight. The bears of the Upper Missouri
basin--which were so light in color that the early explorers often
alluded to them as gray or even as "white"--were particularly given
to this life in the open. To this day that close kinsman of the grisly
known as the bear of the barren grounds continues to lead this same kind
of life, in the far north. My friend Mr. Rockhill, of Maryland, who
was the first white man to explore eastern Tibet, describes the large,
grisly-like bear of those desolate uplands as having similar habits.

However, the grisly is a shrewd beast and shows the usual bear-like
capacity for adapting himself to changed conditions. He has in most
places become a cover-haunting animal, sly in his ways, wary to a degree
and clinging to the she