One day, about two years before my visit, a cow suddenly entered Petropavlovsk with a live bear on her back.  The bear escaped unhurt, leaving the cow pretty well scratched.  After that event she preferred to graze in or near the town, and never brought home another bear.

[Illustration:  Cow and bear.]

Kamchatka without dogs would be like Hamlet without Hamlet.  While crossing the Pacific my compagnons du voyage made many suggestions touching my first experience in Kamchatka.  “You won’t sleep any the first night in port.  The dogs will howl you out of your seven senses.”  This was the frequent remark of the engineer, corroborated by others.  On arriving, we were disappointed to find less than a hundred dogs at Petropavlovsk, as the rest of the canines belonging there were spending vacation in the country.  About fifteen hundred were owned in the town.

Very few Kamchadale dogs can bark, but they will howl oftener, longer, and louder than any ‘yaller dog’ that ever went to a cur pound or became sausage meat.  The few in Petropavlovsk made much of their ability, and were especially vocal at sunset, near their feeding time.  Occasionally during the night they try their throats and keep up a hailing and answering chorus, calculated to draw a great many oaths from profane strangers.

In 1865 Colonel Bulkley carried one of these animals to California.  The dog lifted up his voice on the waters very often, and received a great deal of rope’s ending in consequence.  At San Francisco Mr. Covert took him home, and attempted his domestication.  ‘Norcum,’ (for that was the brute’s name,) created an enmity between Covert and all who lived within hearing distance, and many were the threats of canicide.  Covert used to rise two or three times every night and argue, with a club, to induce Norcum to be silent.  While I was at San Francisco, Mr. Mumford, one of the Telegraph Company’s directors, conceived a fondness for the dog, and took him to the Occidental Hotel.

On the first day of his hotel life we tied Norcum on the balcony in front of Mumford’s room, about forty feet from the ground.  Scarcely had we gone to dinner when he jumped from the balcony and hung by his chain, with his hind feet resting upon a cornice.

A howling wilderness is nothing to the noise he made before his rescue, and he gathered and amused a large crowd with his performance.  He passed the night in the western basement of the hotel, and spoiled the sleep of a dozen or more persons who lodged near him.  When we left San Francisco, Norcum was residing in the baggage-room at the Occidental, under special care of the porters, who employed a great deal of muscle in teaching him that silence was a golden virtue.