Ben and the author...

My story of Ben starts on the 22d of June, 1890. Ben’s own story had begun some four or five months earlier, in the den where his mother, who was a Black Bear, had spent the winter; but although I came to know Ben rather intimately later on, he never spoke of his early childhood to me and I never asked him about it. So we’ll take that part for granted. Early in May of that year three of us, Martin Spencer, Jack O’Brien, and myself, had set out from Spokane, Washington, to hunt grizzlies and pros

Scientific naturalists, like other learned gentlemen in large spectacles, have a way (or it sometimes seems as though they had) of using very big words about very small matters. For instance, what they might describe as “an aquatic larva of Rana catesbiana or other Batrachian,” we would call a tadpole. And so on through the list. But we are obliged to assume that they have excellent reasons for their choice of language, and there is no getting around the fact that if we wish to profit by their w

The American Black Bear, or, as our friends with the big spectacles have named him, Ursus americanus (Pallas), has by very long odds the widest distribution of any North American bear. The polar bear stays well inside the Arctic Circle. The big brown Alaskan bears are only found in certain localities on or near the north-west coast of the continent. The grizzlies inhabit, or inhabited, the mountain regions of the extreme west from Mexico to Alaska. But the Black Bear is found in the central and

In this chapter I purpose to bring together in some sort of order the characteristic habits of the Black Bear as I have personally observed them during many years of life in the open. Of course it is never possible to watch a single wild animal from the time it is born until it grows up, lives its natural life out, and dies; nor even to follow one through the activities of an ordinary year of its life. And even if one could do this, one would have to be very careful not to generalize too broadly

The Black Bear is described as omnivorous. Literally, that means that he eats everything; and this comes pretty near to being literally true, for he has democratic tastes, a magnificent appetite, and nothing much to do between meals. Technically, however, the term means that the Black Bear is both carnivorous and herbivorous; that he eats flesh like a wolf, grass like an ox, fish like an otter, carrion like a coyote, bugs like a hen, and berries like a bird. In short he eats pretty much everythi

In this chapter I would like to give some notion of the Black Bear at home. I do not mean “at home” in the society sense of being dressed up “from four to seven” to receive callers; but in the good old backwoods sense of being in your shirt-sleeves with your feet on the table. There is a good deal more difference between the two attitudes than appears in a book on etiquette. If you meet a man at an afternoon reception you see one side of him—the outside. If you are a member of the local vigilanc