Trailing without a Gun

I had gone into Wild Basin, hoping to see and to trail a grizzly. It was early November and the sun shone brightly on four inches of newly fallen snow; trailing conditions were excellent. If possible I wanted to get close to a bear and watch his ways for a day or two.

Just as I climbed above the last trees on the eastern slope of the Continental Divide, I saw a grizzly ambling along the other side of a narrow canon, boldly outlined against the sky-line. I was so near that with my field-gla.s.ses I recognized him as "Old Timberline," a bear with two right front toes missing. He was a silver-tip,--a nearly white old bear. For three days I followed Old Timberline through his home territory and camped on his trail at night. I had with me hatchet, kodak, field-gla.s.ses, and a package of food, but no gun.

The grizzly had disappeared by the time I crossed the canon, but a clear line of tracks led westward. I followed them over the Divide and down into the woods on the other side. In a scattered tree-growth the tracks turned abruptly to the right, then led back eastward, close to the first line of tracks, as though Old Timberline had turned to meet any one who might be following him.

The most impressive thing I had early learned in trailing and studying the grizzly was that a wounded bear if trailed and hara.s.sed will sometimes conceal himself and lie in an ambush in wait for his pursuer.

I never took a chance of walking into such danger. Whenever the trail pa.s.sed a log, bowlder, or bushes that might conceal a bear, I turned aside and scouted the ambush for a side view before advancing further.

Old Timberline's tracks showed that he had now and then risen on hind feet, listened, and turned to look back. He acted as though he knew I was following him, but this he had not yet discovered. All grizzlies are scouts of the first order; they are ever on guard. When at rest their senses do continuous sentinel duty, and when traveling they act exactly as though they believed some man was in pursuit.

Following along the trail and wondering what turn the grizzly would make next, I found where he had climbed upon a ledge in the edge of an opening, and had evidently stood for some seconds, looking and listening. From the ledge he had faced about and continued his course westward, heading for a spur on the summit of the Divide.

We were in what is now the southern end of the Rocky Mountain National Park. The big bear and myself were on one of the high sky-lines of the earth. We traversed a territory ten thousand to twelve thousand feet above sea-level, much of it above the limits of tree growth. There were long stretches of moorland, an occasional peak towering above us, and ridges long and short thrusting east and west, and canons of varying width and depth were to be seen below us from the summit heights.

Crossing this spur of the Divide, the grizzly entered the woods. Here he spent so much time rolling logs about and tearing them open for grubs and ants that I nearly caught up with him. I watched him through the scattered trees from a rocky ledge until he moved on. This after a few minutes he did. As he came to an opening in the woods, I wondered whether he would go round it to the right or to the left. To my astonishment, without the least hesitation he sauntered across the opening, his head held low and swinging easily from side to side. But the instant he was screened by trees beyond, rising up, with fore paws resting against a tree, he peered cautiously out to see if he was being followed. When the next opening in the woods was reached, he went discreetly round it. You never know what a grizzly's next move will be nor how to antic.i.p.ate his actions.

Old Timberline started down into a canon as though to descend a gully diagonally to the bottom. I hastily made a short cut and was ready to take his picture when he should come out at the lower end. But he never came. After waiting some time, I back-tracked and found he had gone only a few hundred feet down the gully, then returned to the top of the canon and followed along the rim for a mile. He had then descended directly to the bottom of the canon and gone straight up to the top on the other side.

Autumn is the time when bears most search the heights for food. Old Timberline's trail headed again for the heights. When I next caught sight of him, he was digging above the tree-line, but as it was now nearly night, I went back a short distance into the woods and built a fire by the base of a cliff. Here all through the clear night I had a glorious view of the high peaks up among the cold stars.

Before daylight I left camp and climbed to the top of a treeless ridge, thinking that the bear might come along that way. In the course of time he appeared, about a quarter of a mile east of me. After standing and looking about for a few minutes, he started along the ridge, evidently planning to recross the Continental Divide near where he had crossed the day before. As I could not get close to him from this point, I concluded to follow his trail of the preceding night and if possible find out what he had been doing.

A short distance below him I found his trail and back-tracked to a place which showed that he had spent the night near the entrance of a recently dug den. I learned some weeks later that this den was where he hibernated that winter. A short distance farther on I came to where he had been digging when I saw him the evening before. Evidently he had been successful. A few drops of blood on the snow showed that he had captured some small animal, probably a cony. From this point I trailed Old Timberline forward and eastward, and near noon I caught a glimpse of him on the summit of the Divide.

While roaming above timber-line he did not take the precaution to travel with his face in the wind. He could see toward every point of the compa.s.s. He was ambling easily along, but I knew that his senses were wide awake--that his sentinel nose never slept and that his ears never ceased to hear. Climbing to the very summit of a snow-covered ridge, he lay down with his back to the wind. Evidently he depended upon the wind to carry the warning scent of any danger behind him, while he was on the lookout for anything in front of him. Nothing could approach nearer than half a mile without his knowing it. He looked this way and that. After only a short rest he arose and started on again.

I hoped that some time I should be able to photograph Old Timberline at twenty-five or thirty feet. But at all times, too, I was more eager to watch him, to see what he was eating, where he went, and what he did. I was constantly trying to get as close as possible. Of course I had ever to keep in mind that he must not see, hear, nor scent me. I had to be particularly careful to prevent his scenting me. Often in hastening to reach a point of vantage I had to stop, note the topography, and change my direction, because a wind-current up an unsuspected canon before me might carry news of my presence to the bear.

Near mountain-tops the wind is deflected this way and that by ridges and canons. In a small area the prevailing west wind may be a north wind, and a short distance farther on it may blow from the southwest. Often, when the bear was somewhere in a canon, I climbed entirely out of it, to avoid the likelihood of being scented, and scurried ahead on a plateau.

Usually I followed in the bear's trail, but sometimes I made short cuts.

So long as Old Timberline remained on the moorland summit of this treeless ridge, I could not get close to him. But when he arose and started down the ridge, I hurried down the slope, hoping to get ahead and hide in a place of concealment near which he might pa.s.s. I kept out of sight in the woods and hastened forward for two miles, then climbed up and hid in a rock-slide on the rim of the ridge.

By and by I saw Old Timberline coming. When within five hundred feet of me he stopped and dug energetically. Buckets of earth flew behind, and occasionally a huge stone was torn out and hurled with one paw to the right or left. Once he stopped digging, rose on hind feet, and looked all around as though he felt that some one was slipping up on him. He dug for a few minutes longer and then again stood up and sniffed the air. Not satisfied, he walked quickly to a ledge from which he could see down the slope to the woods. Discovering nothing suspicious, he returned to his digging, stepping in his former footprints. He uncovered something in its nest, and through my gla.s.ses I saw him strike right and left and then rush out in pursuit of it. After nosing about in the hole where he had been digging, he started off again. He went directly to the ledge, walking in his former well-tracked trail, then descended the steep eastern slope of the Divide toward the woods. I hurried to the ledge from which he had surveyed the surroundings and watched him.

Arriving at a steep incline on the snowy slope, Old Timberline sat down on his haunches and coasted. A grizzly bear coasting on the Continental Divide! How merrily he went, leaning forward with his paws on his knees!

At one place he plunged over a snowy ledge and dropped four or five feet. He threw up both fore paws with sheer joy. Soon he found himself exceeding the speed-limit. Looking back over one shoulder, and reaching out his paw behind him, he put on brakes; but as this did not check him sufficiently, he whirled about and slid flat on his stomach, digging in with both fingers and toes until he slowed down.

Then, sitting up on his haunches again, he set himself in motion by pushing along with rapid backward strokes of both fore paws. He coasted on toward the bottom. In going down a steep pitch of one hundred feet or more he either quite lost control of himself or let go from sheer enthusiasm. He rolled, tumbled, and slid recklessly along. Reaching the bottom, he rose on hind feet, looked about him for a few seconds, and then climbed halfway up the course for another coast. At the end of this merry sliding he landed on an open flat in the edge of the woods.

As it was nearly dark and I should not be able to see or follow the bear much longer, I concluded to roll a rock from the ledge down near him.

Twice I had noticed that he had paid no attention to rocks that broke loose above and rolled near him. But he heard this rock start and rose up to look at it. It stopped a few yards from him. He sniffed the air with nose pointing toward it and then went up and smelled it. Rearing up instantly, he looked intently toward the mountain-top where I was hidden. After two or three seconds of thought he turned and ran.

Evidently the stone had carried my scent to him. It was useless to follow him in the night.

The next morning I left camp and followed Old Timberline's trail through the woods. He had run for nearly ten miles almost straight south until coming to a small stream. Then for some distance he concealed, involved, and confused his trail with a cleverness that I have never seen equaled.

Most animals realize that they leave a scent which enables other animals to follow them, but the grizzly is the only animal that I know who appears to be fully aware that he is leaving telltale tracks. He will make unthought-of turns and doublings to walk where his tracks will not show, and also tramples about to leave a confusion of tracks where they do show.

Arriving at the stream, the bear crossed on a fallen log and from the end of this leaped into a bushy growth beyond. I made a detour, thinking to find his tracks on the other side of the bushes, and I threw stones into the bushes, not caring to go into them. Both tracks and grizzly seemed to have vanished. I went down stream just outside the bushes bordering it, expecting every instant to find the grizzly's tracks, but not finding them. Then I returned to the log on which he had crossed the stream, and from which he had leaped into the bushes.

Examining the tracks carefully, I now discovered what I had before overlooked. After leaping into the bushes the bear had faced about and leaped back to the log, stepping carefully into his former tracks. From the log he had entered the water and waded up stream for a quarter of a mile. Of course not a track showed. At a good place for concealing his trail he had leaped out of the water into a clump of willows on the north bank. From the willows he made another long leap into the snow and then started back northward, alongside his ten-mile trail and one hundred feet from it, as though intending to return to the place where I had rolled the stone down the slope near him.

I did not discover all this at once, however. In my search for his trail I went up stream on the north side and pa.s.sed, without noticing, the crushed willows into which he had leaped. Crossing to where the bank was higher, I started back down stream on the other side, and in doing so chanced to look across and see the crushed clump of willows. But it took me hours to untangle this involved trail.

When I had followed the tracks northward for more than a mile, the trail vanished in a snowless place. Apparently the grizzly had planned in advance to use this bare place, because the moves he made in it were those most likely to bewilder the pursuer. He did three things which are always more or less confusing and even bewildering to the pursuer, be he man or dog. He changed his direction, he left no tracks, and he crossed his former trail, thereby mixing the scents of the two. He confused the nose, left no record for the eye, and broke the general direction.

Unable to determine the course the bear had taken across this trackless place, I walked round it, keeping all the time in the snow. When more than halfway round I came upon his tracks leaving the bare place. Here he had changed his direction of travel abruptly from north to east, crossed his former trail, gone on a few yards farther, and then abruptly changed from east to north.

I hurried along his tracks. After a few miles I saw where perhaps the night before he had eaten part of the carca.s.s of a bighorn. To judge from tooth marks, the sheep had been killed by wolves. The trail continued in general northward, parallel to the summit and a little below it. As I followed, the tracks approached timber-line, the trees being scattered and the country quite open.

Suddenly the trail broke off to the right for five or six hundred feet into the woods, as though Old Timberline had remembered an acquaintance whom he must see again. He had hustled along straight for a much-clawed Engelmann spruce, a tree with bear-claw and tooth marks of many dates, though none were recent. Old Timberline, apparently, had smelled the base of the tree and then risen up and sniffed the bark as high as his nose could reach. He had neither bitten nor clawed. Then he had gone to two near-by trees, each of which had had chunks bitten or torn out, and here smelled about.

Retracing his tracks to where the trail had turned off abruptly, the bear resumed his general direction northward. When he stopped on a ridge and began digging, I hurried across a narrow neck of woods and crept up as close as I dared. A wagon-load of dirt and stones had been piled up. While I watched the digging, a woodchuck rushed out, only to be overtaken and seized by the bear, who, having finished his meal, shuffled on out of sight.

I followed the trail through woods, groves, and openings. After an hour or more without seeing the grizzly, I climbed a cliff, hoping to get a glimpse of him on some ridge ahead. I could see his line of tracks crossing a low ridge beyond and felt that he might still be an hour or so in the lead. But, in descending from the cliff, I chanced to look back along my trail. Just at that moment the bear came out of the woods behind me. He was trailing me!

I do not know how he discovered that I was following him. He may have seen or scented me. Anyway, instead of coming directly back and thus exposing himself, he had very nearly carried out his well-planned surprise when I discovered him. I found out afterwards that he had left his trail far ahead, turning and walking back in his own footprints for a distance, and trampling this stretch a number of times, and that he had then leaped into scrubby timber and made off on the side where his tracks did not show in pa.s.sing along the trampled trail. He had confused his trail where he started to circle back, so as not to be noticed, and slipped in around behind me.

But after discovering the grizzly on my trail I went slowly along as though I was unaware of his near presence, turning in screened places to look back. He followed within three hundred feet of me. When I stopped he stopped. He occasionally watched me from behind bushes, a tree, or a bowlder. It gave me a strange feeling to have this big beast following and watching me so closely and cautiously. But I was not alarmed.

I concluded to turn tables on him. On crossing a ridge where I was out of sight, I turned to the right and ran for nearly a mile. Then, circling back into our old trail behind the bear, I traveled serenely along, imagining that he was far ahead. I was suddenly startled to see a movement of the grizzly's shadow from behind a bowlder near the trail, only three hundred feet ahead. He was in ambush, waiting for me! At the place where I left the trail to circle behind him, he had stopped and evidently surmised my movements. Turning in his tracks, he had come a short distance back on the trail and lain down behind the bowlder to wait for me.

I went on a few steps after discovering the grizzly, and he moved to keep out of sight. I edged toward a tall spruce, which I planned to climb if he charged, feeling safe in the knowledge that grizzlies cannot climb trees. Pausing by the spruce, I could see his silver-gray fur as he peered at me from behind the bowlder, and as I moved farther away I heard him snapping his jaws and snarling as though in anger at being outwitted.

Just what he would have done had I walked into his ambush can only be guessed. Hunters trailing a wounded grizzly have been ambushed and killed. But this grizzly had not even been shot at nor hara.s.sed.

Generally, when a grizzly discovers that he is followed, or even if he only thinks himself followed, he at once hurries off to some other part of his territory, as this one did after I rolled the stone. But Old Timberline on finding himself followed slipped round to follow me. Often a grizzly, if he feels he is not yet seen,--that his move is unsuspected,--will slip round to follow those who are trailing him. But in no other case that I know of has a bear lingered after he realized that he was seen. After Old Timberline discovered that I had circled behind him, he knew that I knew where he was and what he was doing.

But instead of running away he came back along the trail to await my coming. What were his intentions? Did he intend to a.s.sault me, or was he overcome with curiosity because of my unusual actions and trying to discover what they were all about? I do not know. I concluded it best not to follow him farther, nor did I wish to travel that night with this crafty, soft-footed fellow in the woods. Going a short distance down among the trees, I built a rousing fire. Between it and a cliff I spent the night, satisfied that I had had adventure enough for one outing.

Trailing is adventurous. Many of the best lessons of woodcraft that I have learned, several of the greatest and most beneficial outings that I have had, were those during which I followed, sometimes day and night, that master of strategy, the grizzly bear. A few times in trailing the grizzly I have outwitted him, but more frequently he has outwitted me.

Every grizzly has speed, skill, and endurance. He has mental capacity and often shows astounding plan, caution, courage, and audacity.

Trailing without a gun is red-blooded life, scouting of the most exacting and manly order. The trailer loses himself in his part in the primeval play of the wilderness. It is doubtful if any other experience is as educational as the trailing of the grizzly bear.

When the Grizzly Plays

One of the best play-exhibitions that I have ever enjoyed was that of a grizzly juggling with an eight-foot log in a mountain stream. In examining the glaciation of the Continental Divide, five or six miles west of Long's Peak, I came out of the woods into a little meadow by the East Inlet of Grand Lake, where I saw the grizzly and the log, rolling and tumbling in the water. The log bobbed and plunged about as the bear struggled with it in the swift current.

The big, s.h.a.ggy grizzly, wild and gray, fitted into the wild mountain scene. A peak bristling with ledges and dotted with snow towered in the blue sky behind. Down the steep incline of the peak the clear, cold stream came with subdued roar, as it rushed the inclines and the rapids of its solid rock-cut channel. The opposite wall of the canon was of glacier-polished granite, while behind me the wall rose steeply, covered with a crowded growth of towering spruce. It was a grand wilderness playground.

As I watched from the edge of the woods, the grizzly once hugged the log between fore paws, stood it on end in the water, and then tried to climb it. His weight caused it to tip him over. The log escaped from the bear and started to float away, but he was after it with a rush.