not long ago, about the time a party of americans were setting out for india to hunt the tiger, a young banker from new york came to california to hunt what he rightly considered the nobler beast.
he chartered a small steamer in san francisco bay and taking with him a party of friends, as well as a great-grandson of daniel boone, a famous hunter, for a guide, he sailed up the coast to the redwood wilderness of humboldt. here he camped on the bank of a small stream in a madrona thicket and began to hunt for his bear. he found his bear, an old female with young cubs. as boone was naturally in advance when the beast was suddenly stumbled upon, he had to do the fighting, and this gave the banker from the states a chance to scramble up a small madrona. of course he dropped his gun. they always do drop their guns, by some singularly sad combination of accidents, when they start up a tree with two rows of big teeth in the rear, and it is hardly fair to expect the young bear-hunter from new york to prove an exception. poor boone was severely maltreated by the savage old mother grizzly in defense of her young. there was a crashing of brush and a crushing of bones, and then all was still.
suddenly the bear seemed to remember that there was a second party who had been in earnest search for a bear, and looking back down the trail and up in the boughs of a small tree, she saw a pair of boots. she left poor boone senseless on the ground and went for those boots. coming forward, she reared up under the tree and began to claw for the capitalist. he told me that she seemed to him, as she stood there, to be about fifty feet high. then she laid hold of the tree.
fortunately this madrona tree is of a hard and unyielding nature, and with all her strength she could neither break nor bend it. but she kept thrusting up her long nose and longer claws, laying hold first of his boots, which she pulled off, one after the other, with her teeth, then with her claws she took hold of one garment and then another till the man of money had hardly a shred, and his legs were streaming with blood. fearing that he should faint from loss of blood, he lashed himself to the small trunk of the tree by his belt and then began to scream with all his might for his friends.
when the bear became weary of clawing up at the dangling legs she went back and began to turn poor boone over to see if he showed any signs of life. then she came back and again clawed a while at the screaming man up the madrona tree. it was great fun for the bear!
to cut a thrilling story short, the party in camp on the other side of the creek finally came in hail, when the old bear gathered up her babies and made safe exit up a gulch. boone, now in arizona, was so badly crushed and bitten that his life was long despaired of, but he finally got well. the bear, he informed me, showed no disposition to eat him while turning him over and tapping him with her foot and thrusting her nose into his bleeding face to see if he still breathed.
story after story of this character could be told to prove that the grizzly at home is not entirely brutal and savage; but rather a good-natured lover of his family and fond of his sly joke.
