CHAPTER XIV

      IN DAYS OF OLD

       Table of Contents

      The young travelers each night made their beds carefully, for they long since had learned that unless a man sleeps well he cannot enjoy the next day’s work. It has been noted that they had three buffalo robes for part of their bedding, one each for Uncle Dick and Rob, while John and Jesse shared one between them. In the morning Uncle Dick noted that the latter two boys had their robe spread down with the hair side up.

      “I suppose you did that to get more of a mattress?” he said. “But suppose you wanted to keep warm in really cold weather, in a snowstorm, say. Which side of the robe would you wear outside?”

      “Why, the smooth side, of course!” replied Jesse, who was rolling the robe. “That’d have the warm fur next to you, so you’d be warmer that way.”

      “No, there’s where you are wrong,” said his uncle. “The old-timers always slept with the hair outside, and the Indians wore their robes that way. ‘Buffalo know how to wear his hide!’ is the way an Indian put it. And, you see, a buffalo always did wear his hair outside! Next to the musk ox, he was the hardiest animal on this continent and could stand the most cold. No blizzards on these plains ever troubled him. He could get feed when other animals starved.”

      “He’d paw down through the snow to the grass,” said Jesse.

      “Again you are wrong. A horse paws snow. The buffalo threw the snow aside with his hairy jaws or his whole head — he rooted for the grass!”

      “Well, I didn’t know that.”

      “A good many things are now forgotten,” said his friend. “Writers and artists and even scientists quite often are wrong. For instance, in pictures you almost always see the herd led by the biggest buffalo bull. In actual fact it was always an old cow that led the herd. The bulls usually were at the rear, to defend against wolves. And when a buffalo ran, he ran into the wind, not downwind, like the deer. Few remember that now.

      “Take the antelope, too. The old hunters always knew that the antelope shed his horns, same as a deer, but scientists denied that for years, because they didn’t happen to see any shed horns. I have had an antelope buck’s horn pull off in my hand, in the month of May, and it left the soft core exposed, covered with coarse black filaments like black hairs. Naturally, in the fall, at the time Lewis and Clark got their ‘goat,’ as they called the antelope, the horns were on tight, so they supposed they didn’t shed.

      “They sent President Jefferson specimens of the new animals they found — the antelope, prairie dog, prairie badger, magpie, bighorn, and a grizzly-hide or so. They got their four bighorn heads at the Mandans, none very large, though ‘two feet long and four inches diameter’ seemed big to them. And I shouldn’t wonder if those horns could have been pulled off the pith after they got good and dry. The horns of the bighorn will dry out and lose at least ten per cent of their measurement, in a few years’ hanging on a wall. I have had a bighorn’s curly horn come off the pith in rough handling three or four years after it was killed; but of course the horns never were shed in life.”

      “Did they get them along the Missouri?” asked Jesse, now.

      “Not until they got above the mouth of the Yellowstone. There they killed a lot of them.”

      “They saw one big grizzly track before they got to the Mandans,” said Rob, who was listening.

      “Oh yes — that might have been. Alexander Henry the younger tells us of grizzlies in northern Minnesota in early days. In all the range country along the Missouri from lower South Dakota the grizzly used to range, and he was on the Plains all the way to the Rockies, and from Alaska to New Mexico and Utah, as I can personally testify. Just how far south he ran in here I don’t know — some think as far south as upper Iowa, but we can’t tell. He couldn’t do much with deer and antelope, and worked more on elk and buffalo, when it came to big meat. He’d dig out mice and eat crickets, though, as well.

      “Yes, he’d been all along this country, I’m sure.

      “But Lewis and Clark didn’t really kill any grizzlies until they got above the Yellowstone — and then they certainly got among them. Gass records sixteen grizzlies met with between the Yellowstone and the Great Falls of the Missouri. He usually calls them ‘brown bears,’ which shows the great color range of the grizzly. Lewis and the others call them ‘white bears.’ The typical grizzly had a light-yellowish coat, often dark underneath.

      “Of course, color has nothing to do with it. I’ve seen them almost black. The silvertip is a grizzly. The giant California bear was a grizzly. The great Kadiak bears which you boys saw were grizzlies of a different habitat. I’ve seen a grizzly with a hide almost red. But of course you know that the ‘cinnamon bear’ is practically always a black bear; and a black bear mother may have two cubs, one red and one quite black.

      “Scientists try to establish a dozen or two ‘species’ of bears — even making different ‘species’ of the black bears of the southern Mississippi bottoms — Arkansas, Louisiana, etc. — and I don’t know how many sorts of ‘blue bears’ and ‘straw bears,’ ‘glacier bears,’ etc., among the grizzlies. Of course, bears differ, just as men do. But the one thing which remains constant is the length of the claws, or front toe nails — what the Journal calls their ‘talons.’ In a black bear these are always short. In a grizzly they are always long — they get them up to four and one-half inches, and I believe some of your Kadiaks have even longer claws. Colors grade, but claws don’t. I even think the polar bear is a grizzly of the North — white because he lives on snow and ice, and with a snaky head because he has to swim. But his claws he needed and kept.

      “The long-clawed bears were all predatory; the short-clawed ones never were. Not long ago I read a magazine story about a black bear which killed a moose with seven-foot horns. There never was a black bear ever killed any moose, and there never was any moose with horns that wide. Such things are nonsense — like a great part of the magazine animal fiction.”

      Rob was interested. “Too bad they’ve trapped off about all the grizzlies,” he said now. “I’ve tried a lot of kinds of sport, and of them all, I like grizzly hunting, quail shooting, and fly fishing for trout.”

      “Not a bad selection! Well, the first is hard to get now. The grizzly is closer to extinction than the elk or the buffalo, for the buffalo breed in domestic life, and the grizzly — well, he hasn’t domesticated yet. He’s the one savage — he and the gray wolf — that would never civilize. And he’s gone.”

      “But, Uncle Dick, those bears must have been a different species from grizzlies nowadays. Look how they fought? Even Lewis came near being killed by them more than once.”

      “Yes, they’d fight, in those days, for they were bigger and bolder, and they had not yet learned fear of the rifle. You must remember that while, in this country up to the Mandans, the early traders had been ahead of Lewis and Clark, above the Yellowstone no white man ever had gone. Those bears thought a white man was something good to eat, and they offered to eat him.

      “Their rifles were muzzle loaders — I’ve often and often tried to find just the size ball they used, but I can’t find such exact mention of their weapons — but they were light and inefficient single-shot rifles, as we now look at it, even in the hands of exact riflemen, as all those men were. So the grizzlies jumped them. They shot one sixteen times. Lewis had to jump in the river to escape from one. Oh, they had merry times in those days, when grizzlies were regular fellows!”

      John nearly always had precise facts at hand. He now found his copy of the little journal of Patrick Gass. “Here’s how big one was,” he said. “Gass calls it a ‘very large brown bear,’ and it measured three feet five inches around the head, three feet eleven inches around the neck, five feet ten and one-half inches