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Show Here's A Real Bear Story From Alaska By CHARLES MAD SEN Kodiak Guides Association Kodiak, Alaska (Continued) TWILIGHT SLEEP It is claimed that the mother does not wake up when she gives birth to the cubs and that they find their own way to Nature's nursing bottles. Whether this is true or not the writer does not propose to say. It is a remarkable remark-able fact, however, that Nature has regulated the size of these tiny cubs so that the mother can nurse them, while she is still, spending two to three months in her hibernating den without food of any kind and still emerge from the den with considerable fat on her body so, if necessaryj she can sustain life for herself and the cubs for some time. During the latter part of April and during the month of May the spring thawing of the snow usually drives the females and the cubs out of their dens, when water from the melting snow begins dripping on their comfortable comfort-able bed of grass. EAT ROOTS, GRASS Considerable time is then spent near their home where the mother finds an abundance of various kinds of roots and young grass to feed on while the cubs are continually playing and growing. grow-ing. As the weather gets warmer and the cubs larger, the mother starts out in search of new feeding grounds and eventually reaches the great salmon streams, below her mountain home, and where the youngsters soon learn the art of catching salmon. The delicious Alaska red salmon sal-mon and other species of salmon are the main diet of the Kodiak bear until the berries start growing grow-ing on the hillsides and lower reaches. Berries by the billions and of many varieties cover the hills and banks of the winding streams. Here we see a patch of salmon-berries. Higher up in the plateaus in the mountains you find the mossbc-rries on which the bears feed later in the season. CVBS GROW FAST Variation of fish and berry diet adds tremendously to the growth of the nursing cubs and when fall sets in it is hard to believe that those husky youngsters, which are now almost the size of a small full grown black bear, are the same little weaklings months earlier in the den. October and November finds the bears looking for the late run of Silver Salmon along the banks of the river and spawning streams and this, mixed with a little berries ber-ries and grass, forms, their diet un-till un-till they are ready to go into hibernation hi-bernation with their mother in December. Cubs will usually stay with their mother a year or two, but if she has not mated, cubs are sometimes seen with the mother when they are three and even four years old, and still nursing during the summer months. The Kodiak bear, however, is like any other bear on the food question, ques-tion, eating anything or everything every-thing that is edible when he is hungry. They have killed sheep and cattle, they eat kelp and alder buds and they will eat decayed de-cayed meat of any kind and are even cannibalistic if hungry enough. MATURE AT EIGHT As stated before, the mature when 8 years old but will continue to fill out as they grow older. The life span of these bears is estimated esti-mated at 35 to 40 years, but in some instances it is believed that i they reach the half century mark ( or even more. A full grown bear will weigh approximately 1500 to 1600 pounds and will have a skin that will square 10 feet or better. In some cases, like human beings, be-ings, they grow to extra large sizes and will weigh almost a ton and have a pelt twelve feet I square. FEMALES SMALLER The females seldom grow larger larg-er than 9 to 9 feet, but most skins will square 8 feet and their weight run from 900 to 1,200 pounds. The muscular development develop-ment of these animals is amazing, amaz-ing, and it is no wonder that they can climb up the mountain sides without much effort. Their sense of smell and hearing is exceptionally exception-ally fine, but their eyesight is very poor as they have very small eyes for an animal of such an enormous enor-mous size. In the spring of the year, the first to emerge from their winter hibernating quarters are the yearlings and two year olds that have been in hibernation by I themselves. These are followed by the females with large cubs and the older bears. Last to show j up are old male and females with cubs just bom in the den that j spring. LIMBER UP After a mild winter they usually usual-ly come out early and spend a period of unusual traveling, no doubt glad to have an opportunity of limbering up from their long winter siesta. No food of any kind is taken for two or three days, and then very gradually of certain roots which seem to act as a spring laxative and tonic for conditioning the delicate and almost al-most mummified stomach; a tonic juice which seems to bring it back to normalcy after several months of inactivity. As soon as the grass begins to grow on the hillsides the bears can be found nibbling away, in that the grass is young and tender on the southern slopes. Just below be-low the sViowline they may be seen browsing and digging roots in the early morning hours and also ' in the afternoons, after they have had their daily nap, and they may then be stalked with comparative ease if the wind is favorable. MATING SEASON The mating season now begins and the male bear will cover considerable con-siderable territory in a day's trayel and keep, on going until he finds his mate. When a male finds his mate, the pair will seldom sel-dom move more than 500 yards away for several days but continue con-tinue to feed in that particular locality until the mating season is over, unless disturbed by hunters. The bear is the roadmaker of Alaska, and not only are the swam, y plains intersected with paths made by him in all directions, di-rections, leading generally to the easiest fording places on streams and rivers, but the hills and ridges of mountains to the very top show the trails of this omnipresent omni-present traveler. TRAILS OF BEASTS On Kodiak Island, particularly, the hills above the salmon streams are like a giant checkerboard checker-board with the well trodden i trails of these huge beasts. In June the great schools of salmon begin to enter the streams and rivers on their way to the great spawning grounds at the head of the inland lakes. Here Mr. Kodiak feeds to his heart's content con-tent and accumulates enough surplus sur-plus fat to keep him in good shape during hibernation. That is not all he gathers from his raw fish diet because it also gives him a lot of tape worms which Nature again removes with remarkable efficiency before he is ready for his long winter's sleep. In September, October and the early psrt of November, all bears have numerous tape, worms throughout their intestines ' and in their stomach. The writer has personally observed balls of tape worm, like a large ball of heavy twine or small rope, in a bear's stomach, and tape worms all through the intestines to a point where high bush cranberries had forced the w-orms to let go of their hold and passed along. CRANBERRIES DO IT 6 All bears have tape worms in the fall and they are all passed out by the action of the cranberries. cran-berries. The most peculiar part of it is that the cranberries are not digested but passed out of the intestinal tract whole. The writer has made it a point to open the stomachs of all bears killed, after skinning, to see what it contains at different periods of the season and on two of these hunts happened to have doctors on the trip. The doctors were astonished to see the work the cranberries has done and wondered won-dered if that should not be an excellent medicine for tape worms in human beings. TRACT CLOSED Before going into hibernation, the bear eats a species of root which forms a sort of resinous plug which completely closes the intestinal track and therefore allows al-lows the animal to lie in a trance or state of hibernation for several months in a perfectly clean bed of grass. Stomach and bladder arc completely emptied before they enter the dens, and in fact before they eat roots which forms the plug, so the den is found as clean in the spring as it is when they enter it in the fall. It is claimed that heart action almost stops and that it therefore takes very little nourishment to keep this enormous animal alive during the time of hibernation, and the writer has seen, on several sev-eral occasions, bears killed in the sprign, immediately after they emerged from hibernation, with 2 to 3 inches of fat across their hind quarters. LEGEND UNTRUE The old and popular belief that a bear "sucks his paw" during hibernation is too silly and ridiculous ridic-ulous to need any discussion here and so is the old belief that the bear when fishing for salmon "throws the fish out of the stream with a quick swipe of his paw and keeps on like that until he gets a stack of fish like a pyramid and then lies down to eat them." Those old beliefs should have been exploded years ago as they are "pure nonsense." The bear is an expert fisherman, but he runs along the shallow streams and catches the salmon with his teeth or paws. He then takes the fish up on the bank, or eats it right in the stream, and starts eating it from the tall end. A bear will always leave the heads of the fish unless he is very hungry and fish are scarce. The above are facts and not old, popular popu-lar beliefs. The Kodiak bear is, truly, the King of all Big Game on the American continent and his skin is the most prized of all Alaskan trophies. Hunting this bear offers a new experience to the hunter whose wanderings in the wilderness wilder-ness have been confined to any part of the world, not excluding Africa or India. When this bear Is to the fore the use of such adjectives ad-jectives as "great" and "mighty" are really inadequate, for he is all of that and more. They are a w-orthy adversary for any sportsman sports-man and no, collect Ion of trophies can be considered complete without with-out a specimen or two of these j world famous beares. |