Bears are peaceful folk. They are a mild and lowly citizenry of the woods—I'm talking of the black sort—and shuffle modestly away the moment they hear you coming. We get many of our impressions of the ferocity of animals and the deadly poisons of reptiles from an unworthy sort of hearsay evidence. Much of it comes from Mexicans and Indians rather than from real experience. Now I wouldn't traduce either the Mexicans or the Indians, for their lot is one of hard, sodden ignorance; but it must be conceded that they're by no means careful historians, and run readily to tales of the marvellous and the tragic. I am going back to a bear story I have in mind before I get through; but I want to interject here, while I think of it, that though the centipede, the rattlesnake, the tarantula and the Gila monster, have bitter repute as able to deal death with their poisonous feet or fangs, I was never, in my years on the plains and in the mountains, able to secure proof of even the shallowest sort that a death, whether of man or animal, had ever resulted from the sting of any one of these. On the other hand, I have been with men who were bitten by rattlesnakes, or stung by tarantulas; or who while asleep had suffered as the inadvertent promenade of a centipede, with its hundred hooked, poison-exuding feet; but none of them died. They were sick in an out-of-sort, headache fashion for a day or two; the bitten place inflamed and was sore for a week or a month; that was all. I suppose I've known of fully one hundred horses, cows and sheep which were bitten by rattlesnakes; none died. They were invariably fanged in the nose, too, as they grazed towards my lord of the rattlers. On more than one occasion I kept the animal so bitten in sight to note results. Its head would swell and puff; it would lounge about with a sick listlessness for several days; then the poison would wear away in force, and back to its grass it would go with the wire-edge appetite of a sailor home from sea.

But about bears. I was remarking that my black, shaggy cousins of the woods were a peaceful folk. So much is this true, and so little do their neighbours apprehend violence at their clumsy hands, that they who live in regions which abound in bears evince not the least alarm about the safety of their children. The babies, some as young as five or six years, roam the same mountains with the bears; and, while the latter will swoop upon a pig and run dangers with wide-open eyes in doing it, never did I hear of one who disturbed a ringlet on a child's head. They had daily opportunities enough, for many are the households to live in the wide, pine-sown Rockies.

Our bears, too, are creatures of vast physical power. Often, as I rode the mountain for cattle, have I come across a dead and fallen pine tree, which would have defeated the best efforts of a horse to move, completely torn from its bed in the earth and leaves, and either overturned or thrown one side by the mighty arms of a bear. He was in search of a dinner cf grubs—those white, helpless worms which make their dull homes under rotten logs—and Sir Bear made no more ado of lifting and laying aside a pine tree in his grub-hunt than would you or I of a billet of firewood.

While in the mountains I marvelled over the fact that the bears and the mountain lions never assailed the young calves. The hills were rife with cattle, and every spring found the canyons and oak-bushed slopes a perfect nursery of calves. And yet neither the panthers nor the bears disturbed them. It was due, I think, more to the bellicose character of the old cow and her relatives, than any uprightness of character on the part of the bears, and the panthers. Let a calf raise but one yell of distress in those mountains—and I assure you he can make their walls and valleys ring with his youthful music when so disposed—and, out of canyons and off mesas, over logs and crashing through the oak bushes, will come plunging all the cattle within hearing. Not thirty seconds will elapse before as many cattle will be by the side of the threatened calf, lusting for battle. They make such a phalanx of sharp, threatening horns, coupled with their rolling, wrath-red eyes and ferocious breathings, that, I warrant you, they have so shocked the nerves of past bears and panthers, it has become instinct with these latter to give the whole horned, truculent brood a wide berth.

The Indians are very fond of the bear for his wisdom, and he divides their respect with the beaver as a personage of sagacity. The curiosity of my shaggy friend would shame any boy or girl of ten. You may be sure, were a bear to visit you for a week at your home, he would open every door, ransack every bureau, take every garment off every hook in every closet—and I had almost said “try it on”—before he had been with you an hour. Not a box nor a barrel, not a nook nor cranny, from cellar to ridge pole, would escape his investigation. His black nose would sniff at every crack, his black hand explore every crevice. Nor, beyond what he bestowed in his remorseless stomach, would he destroy anything. I have the black coat of a bear at my house, who might be wearing it himself to-day, were it not for his curiosity.

There was a salt spring near my camp on the upper Red River; perhaps two miles away, which is “near” in the mountains. This salt spring was popular with the deer. They repaired thither to lick the salt earth about the waters. I had, among the lumber at my camp, a big, two-spring trap of steel; I suppose it must have weighed sixty pounds. It occurred to me that a lazy way to kill a deer would be to set this wide-jawed engine near the spring and let one walk into it. I'm not proud of this plan as a method in deer-killing, and wouldn't do it now. On this occasion, however I was not particular. I “set” the trap at my camp—for I had to use a hand-spike to crush down the springs, and it all gave me a deal of work and trouble—and then, with its jaws wide open, but held so that it wouldn't nip me in case it did snap, I crept carefully aboard my pony and rode over to the spring. The next morning early I had to go again to remove the trap, as during the day the cattle would take the places of the deer at this delectable salt spring, and I didn't care to break the legs of a thirty-dollar steer with my trapping. I went over while it was yet dark, and found no deer in the trap. I took it and hid it, face downward—the jaws still spread and “set”—by the of a big yellow pine log, which stretched its decayed length along the slope of the canyon. There I left it, intending to return and rearrange it for deer at dusk.

It snowed that day, and as I grew lazy towards night, I left my trap where I'd hidden it by the yellow pine log. The deer would have one night of safety. What was safety for the deer proved otherwise for the bear.

The following day I rode over just as the canyons were getting dark and the cattle climbing out of them to pass the night on the hills. Behold! my trap was gone!

There was a great flourish of tracks in the snow; long plantigrade impressions like the bare footprints of some giant! I knew that a bear had somehow acquired my trap, or the trap, him; at that time I couldn't tell which. To make it short, however, it came to this: The bear, scouting in a loaferish way down the hill, and pausing no doubt to make an estimate of the probable grubs he would find beneath this particular yellow pine next summer, had chanced upon the trap. Here was a great find. Thoughts of grubs and common edible things at once deserted him. The mysterious novelty he had found took possession of his addle-pate like a new toy. A wolf or a fox would have smelled the odour of my handling, even off the cold steel of the trap, and been over the hills and far away in a twinkling. Your wolf is the canniest of timber folk; a grey Scotchman of the mountains. But my bear was reared on a different bottle. He sat down at once and actually took the new plaything in his lap. Then it would seem as if he deliberately thrust his paw into it and sprung its savage jaws on his forearm.

In his first wrathful surprise, my bear tore up the snow and bushes for twenty feet about; but at last he set off with the trap on his foot.

It was late. For half an hour I followed the broad track where his bearship had dragged the trap in the snow at a gallop. It was dark when at last I turned off for camp. Bright and betimes, I took the trail next day. It carried me over some ten miles of rough, close country. About midday I stood on the bluff edge of the Canyon Caliente, picking a pathway with my eyes along its steep, perilous side for my pony to get down. The bear had crossed here; but he was in the roughest of moods, and seemingly made no more of hurling himself over twenty-foot precipices—himself and my trap—or sublimely sliding down dangerous descents of hundreds of feet where foothold was impossible, than you would of eating buttered buns. So I had to pick out paths for myself; I couldn't trust to so reckless and uncivil an engineer as my bear.

As I sat in the saddle running a quick eye over the slope for a trail, I, of an instant, heard a most surprising noise. It was indeed a noble racket, and might have passed for a blacksmith shop. But I knew the hills too well. It was of a verity my bear; and from the riot he was making, it was plain I would have to get there soon if I wanted to save the trap.

This formidable uproar came from across the Caliente, perhaps half a mile. I slid from the saddle and went forward afoot. It didn't take long to cover the distance. I fell and tumbled down the first third, much as the bear had done a bit earlier.

Once on the other side, I came upon my rough gentleman cautiously, and found him sitting by the side of a round, boulder-like rock, something the size and contour of a load of hay. And he was smiting the enduring granite with my trap in a way which told more of his feelings than would have been possible with mere words. He would raise his arm clumsily, 60-pound trap and all, and then bring it against the rock with all the fervour of rage and giant strength.

He was so wrapt in the enterprise, he never heard me until a shot from my Winchester met him just under the ear. One shot did it; and I had trap and bear. He had ruined the trap; one spring was broken and the whole disparaged beyond my power to repair. Wherefore I stripped him of his black overcoat to pay for the damage he had done; and that and the grease I took from him covered all costs and damages.