ight at six hundred pounds, but he could
move the carcass of a cow or horse twice that heavy. Once on Cabin
Creek, not many miles from his accustomed haunts, a lion killed a
horse. As he approached the kill, the grizzly circled warily around
it, stood erect to sniff and listen, and growled warningly, informing
all would-be intruders that it was his. When he had eaten his fill, he
dragged the carcass nearly a hundred yards uphill over fallen timber,
into a thicket, where he covered it against the prying eyes of birds,
thinking, I presume, that they would signal other animals of its
location.

The date of his emergence from his den in the spring, like his holing
up in the fall, depended upon the weather. Commonly though, he
hibernated about one-third of the year. When he came out after his
long sleep he was very thin, the great layers of fat he had taken care
to put on before denning up were gone. One year I followed his tracks
the day he came out to learn what he first ate, and was surprised to
find that he scarcely ate at all. Instead of being ravenous, as I had
supposed he would be, he seemed to have no appetite, and barely tasted
a green shoot or two, and a little grass. His claws had grown out over
winter and the tough soles of his feet soon shed off so that, though
born to the wilds, he became a tenderfoot.

Upon two occasions I found the tracks of this "bad lands" grizzly far
from home; once he was at the edge of a snowbank near Arapahoe glacier,
where he had gone for a frozen grasshopper feast; and another time,
some years later, beyond Ypsilon Mountain, in an old sheep trail that
led toward the headwaters of the Poudre River. He was more than thirty
miles from home and still going.

Experience with men has made the few surviving grizzlies of the Rockies
crafty, and they are instinctively wary. Their habits have been much
the same wherever I have had opportunity of observing them. Their
extreme caution would perhaps lead one to believe them cowards, but
nothing is farther from the truth, for they are fighters of first rank,
and show unrivaled courage as well as lightning-like speed and
prodigious strength in combat. A fighting grizzly is a deadly
antagonist, never giving up, determined to win or die.

When a grizzly turns killer, as occasionally one of them does, you may
depend upon it, there are extenuating circumstances, and any
fair-minded jury would exonerate him of blame. When his home range