by a
bullet, but does not see the real assailant, it often falls tooth and
nail upon its comrade, apparently attributing its injury to the latter.

Bears are hunted in many ways. Some are killed by poison; but this plan
is only practised by the owners of cattle or sheep who have suffered
from their ravages. Moreover, they are harder to poison than wolves.
Most often they are killed in traps, which are sometimes dead-falls,
on the principle of the little figure-4 trap familiar to every American
country boy, sometimes log-pens in which the animal is taken alive,
but generally huge steel gins. In some states there is a bounty for the
destruction of grislies; and in many places their skins have a market
price, although much less valuable than those of the black bear. The
men who pursue them for the bounty, or for their fur, as well as the
ranchmen who regard them as foes to stock, ordinarily use steel traps.
The trap is very massive, needing no small strength to set, and it is
usually chained to a bar or log of wood, which does not stop the bear's
progress outright, but hampers and interferes with it, continually
catching in tree stumps and the like. The animal when trapped makes off
at once, biting at the trap and the bar; but it leaves a broad wake and
sooner or later is found tangled up by the chain and bar. A bear is by
no means so difficult to trap as a wolf or fox although more so than a
cougar or a lynx. In wild regions a skilful trapper can often catch a
great many with comparative ease. A cunning old grisly however, soon
learns the danger, and is then almost impossible to trap, as it either
avoids the neighborhood altogether or finds out some way by which to get
at the bait without springing the trap, or else deliberately springs it
first. I have been told of bears which spring traps by rolling across
them, the iron jaws slipping harmlessly off the big round body. An old
horse is the most common bait.

It is, of course, all right to trap bears when they are followed merely
as vermin or for the sake of the fur. Occasionally, however, hunters
who are out merely for sport adopt this method; but this should never be
done. To shoot a trapped bear for sport is a thoroughly unsportsmanlike
proceeding. A funny plea sometimes advanced in its favor is that it is
"dangerous." No doubt in exceptional instances this is true; exactly as
it is true that in exceptional instances it is "dangerous" for a butcher
to knock over a ste