Night of the Grizzlies Read Online Free

dead of winter and, at birth, are blind, helpless and small. But after a few months of constant suckling of the mother, the young bears come out of hibernation weighing as much as 25 pounds, glossy of coat and ready for instant mischief. Up to a point, the mother grizzly will play happily with her cubs, sometimes for hours at a time. She will cuff them about gently, sitting on her rump and beckoning them to come on in and mix it up, and she will suffer their scratchings and clawings almost to the point of drawn blood before calling off the fun. Hikers have seen mother bears and their cubs lying in seep pools and swamps against the summer heat or splashing one another with water in a brook. Others have seen bear families enjoying snowslides and snow fights just before hibernating together for another year. The mother grizzly seems possessed of an almost infinite amount of patience and love for her cubs, and she will fight to the death for them. It is only when the young bears are willfully disobedient, especially in the training courses given by the mother on such important subjects as berry hunting, squirrel digging, and man avoiding, that she will insist on absolute obedience, reaching out to smack a feckless cub with the same paw that can brain a Percheron.
    Except for their offspring, the grizzlies of North America appear to live for their stomachs. Wrote Canadian Andy Russell, in his fascinating book Grizdy Country (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1967):
The grizzly joins man, the hog, and the common rat in being the four outstanding omnivores on Earth. Like them, he will eat almost anything when hungry and a great variety of things most of the time. It would be much easier to list the things the grizzly does not eat than those he does... Most of the time the grizzly follows his nose through life; wandering from one smell to another, always seeking, nearly always hungry, but as carefree and happy as an animal can get. He makes use of his natural endowments to the fullest, fitting his way to conditions as they are found. Probably a grizzly bear’s idea of pure heaven is a mountain slope glistening with the blue-black shine of huckleberries hanging thickly on the bushes, the brilliant glow of buffalo berries, or the luscious smell of acres of wild raspberries, strawberries, and saskatoons. For the grizzly, life is a glorious saga of nip and crunch and lick and swallow, and it matters little what is being nipped and crunched and licked and swallowed. The same grizzly that will devour 40 pounds of maggoty venison that has been lying in the sun for a week will stop by the nearest anthill for a nightcap on his way home, probably for the tangy taste of the formic acid that abounds in the ants’ bodies. Grizzlies will watch pine squirrels bury hundreds of nuts from white pine cones, then spend days digging up the industrious workers’ winter storage. There is no other way for the bears to get the tasty nuts; they grow at the very tops of the trees, far past the reach even of the lighter black bears, and if it were not for the squirrels, the grizzlies would never know this delicacy.
    The long, sharp claws on a grizzly’s forefeet are perfectly suited to the job of digging, and except for the berries that he strips from bushes and crams into his mouth at a breakneck pace, the big animal gets most of his food by using his paws as pick and shovel. When glacier lilies begin to appear, grizzlies cannot be far behind. As the flowers burst into bloom higher and higher on the mountainsides, the animals follow the harvest like braceros . In their compulsion to get the succulent glacier lily bulbs, sometimes they manage to convert solid swatches of real estate into disaster areas. When they come to a patch of grass, they will graze on it like cattle, and when they come to the burrow of a Columbia ground squirrel or a gopher, they will flail away at the earth with such unabashed enterprise that they will sometimes dig themselves almost