It was the next day that I made my first close acquaintance with bears. There are many bears in Glacier Park. Firearms are forbidden, of course, and the rangers kill them only in case of trouble. Naturally, so protected, they are increasing rapidly. They find good forage where horses would starve. Mr. Ralston, the park supervisor, saw a she bear with three cubs last spring. There are no tame bears, as in the Yellowstone.

There are plenty of animals. Some fifty moose graze along the Flathead. Beavers have colonies in many of the valleys and industriously build dams that deepen the fords. I remember one place along the Cutbank Trail where the first horses found themselves above the belly in water and confronting a perpendicular bank up which one or two scrambled as best they could. The rest turned and, riding in the stream for a half-mile dÉtour, made the trail again. That was the work of beavers.

There are coyotes a-plenty. Because they kill the deer and elk, the rangers poison them in the winter with strychnine. A few mountain lions remain. As one can make a whole night hideous, a few are sufficient.

There is something particularly interesting about a bear. Perhaps it is because he can climb a tree. In other words, ordinary subterfuges do not go with him. Reports vary—he is a fighter; he is a craven; the fact being, of course, that he is, like all wild animals and most humans, a bit of each.

The trip was over, and I had seen but one bear. At Lewis's that last Sunday I voiced my disappointment. Soon after I received word quietly that Frank Higgins, guide and companion on many hunting trips to Stewart Edward White and other hunters, had offered to show me some bears.

He had horses saddled under a tree when I went back, and two men, one of them a Chicago newspaper artist, were with him. We mounted and rode up the trail back of the hotel.

I was dubious. For days I had tried to see bears and failed, and now to have them offered with certainty by Mr. Higgins made me skeptical. I had an idea that under his tall impassiveness he was having a little fun at my expense. He was not. We went out into the forest, to where the hotel dumps its garbage. That was rather a blow, at first. And there were no bears. Only a great silence and a considerable stench.

We got off our horses, tied them, and sat down on a log. Almost immediately there was a distant crackling of branches.

"One coming now," said Frank Higgins. "Just sit quiet."

That first bear, however, was nervous. He circled around us. I set my camera for one hundred feet, and waited. But the creature, a big black, was shy. He refused to come out. Mr. Higgins went after him. He snarled. I looked after Mr. Higgins with a new respect, and the Chicago newspaper man said he was perfectly satisfied with the bear where he was, and that enough was enough.

The bear suddenly took to a tree, climbing like a cat. He looked about the size of a grand piano. Urged by Mr. Higgins, we approached the tree. Finally we stood directly beneath. He growled—the bear, of course, not Frank Higgins. But my courage was rising. Wild bear he was, but he was a craven. I moved up the focus of my camera and took his picture. We left him there and went back to the log. All at once there were bears in every direction, six in all. I moved my camera to thirty feet and snapped another. They circled about, heads turned toward us. Now and then they stood up to see us better. We were between them and supper.

The newspaper man offered to sketch me with a "bear" background. And he did. Now and then he would say:—

"Isn't there one behind me?"

"About twenty feet away," I would say.

"Good Lord!" But he went on drawing. I have that picture now. It is very good, but my eyes have the look of a scared rabbit.

Our friend still clung in the tree. The other man had ridden back to the hotel for camera films. Time went on and he did not return. We made would-be facetious remarks about his courage—from our own pinnacle. Almost an hour! The sketch was nearly finished, and twilight was falling. Still he had not come. Then he appeared. He had taken the wrong trail, and had been riding those bear-infested regions alone. He was smiling, but pale. To visit bears in a party is one thing; to ride alone, with fleeting black and brown figures skulking behind fallen timber, is another. Not for a long time, I think, will that gentleman forget the hour or so when he was lost in the forest, with bears

"Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks,

In Vallombrosa."