roam for days over the rolling or broken prairie, searching for roots,
digging up gophers, or perhaps following the great buffalo herds
either to prey on some unwary straggler which he was able to catch at
a disadvantage in a washout, or else to feast on the carcasses of those
which died by accident. Old hunters, survivors of the long-vanished ages
when the vast herds thronged the high plains and were followed by the
wild red tribes, and by bands of whites who were scarcely less savage,
have told me that they often met bears under such circumstances; and
these bears were accustomed to sleep in a patch of rank sage bush, in
the niche of a washout, or under the lee of a boulder, seeking their
food abroad even in full daylight. The bears of the Upper Missouri
basin--which were so light in color that the early explorers often
alluded to them as gray or even as "white"--were particularly given
to this life in the open. To this day that close kinsman of the grisly
known as the bear of the barren grounds continues to lead this same kind
of life, in the far north. My friend Mr. Rockhill, of Maryland, who
was the first white man to explore eastern Tibet, describes the large,
grisly-like bear of those desolate uplands as having similar habits.

However, the grisly is a shrewd beast and shows the usual bear-like
capacity for adapting himself to changed conditions. He has in most
places become a cover-haunting animal, sly in his ways, wary to a degree
and clinging to the shelter of the deepest forests in the mountains and
of the most tangled thickets in the plains. Hence he has held his own
far better than such game as the bison and elk. He is much less common
than formerly, but he is still to be found throughout most of his former
range; save of course in the immediate neighborhood of the large towns.

In most places the grisly hibernates, or as old hunters say "holes up,"
during the cold season, precisely as does the black bear; but as with