The Grizzlies of the Bad Lands did not do this: they used to stand on
their dignity and growl like a thunder-storm, and so gave the hunters
a chance to play their deadly lightning; and lightning is worse than
thunder any day. Men can get used to growls that rumble along the ground
and up one's legs to the little house where one's courage lives; but
Bears cannot get used to 45-90 soft-nosed bullets, and that is why the
Grizzlies of the Bad Lands were all killed off.

So the hunters have learned that they never know what a Roachback will
do; but they do know that he is going to be quick about it.

Altogether these Bitter-root Grizzlies have solved very well the problem
of life, in spite of white men, and are therefore increasing in their
own wild mountains.

Of course a range will hold only so many Bears, and the increase is
crowded out; so that when that slim young Bald-faced Roachback found he
could not hold the range he wanted, he went out perforce to seek his
fortune in the world.

He was not a big Bear, or he would not have been crowded out; but he had
been trained in a good school, so that he was cunning enough to get on
very well elsewhere. How he wandered down to the Salmon River Mountains
and did not like them; how he traveled till he got among the barb-wire
fences of the Snake Plains and of course could not stay there; how a
mere chance turned him from going eastward to the Park, where he might
have rested; how he made for the Snake River Mountains and found more
hunters than berries; how he crossed into the Tetons and looked down
with disgust on the teeming man colony of Jackson's Hole, does not
belong to this history of Wahb. But when Baldy Roachback crossed the