For two hours I walked onwards across the ridges and valleys.  Then among some scattered spruces, where the snow lay to the depth of half a foot, I suddenly came on the fresh, broad trail of a grisly.  The brute was evidently roaming restlessly about in search of a winter den, but willing, in passing, to pick up any food that lay handy.  At once I took the trail, travelling above and to one side, and keeping a sharp look-out ahead.  The bear was going across wind, and this made my task easy.  I walked rapidly, though cautiously; and it was only in crossing the large patches of bare ground that I had to fear making a noise.  Elsewhere the snow muffled my footsteps, and made the trail so plain that I scarcely had to waste a glance upon it, bending my eyes always to the front.

At last, peering cautiously over a ridge crowned with broken rocks, I saw my quarry, a big, burly bear, with silvered fur.  He had halted on an open hillside, and was busily digging up the caches of some rock gophers or squirrels.  He seemed absorbed in his work, and the stalk was easy.  Slipping quietly back, I ran towards the end of the spur, and in ten minutes struck a ravine, of which one branch ran past within seventy yards of where the bear was working.  In this ravine was a rather close growth of stunted evergreens, affording good cover, although in one or two places I had to lie down and crawl through the snow.  When I reached the point for which I was aiming, the bear had just finished rooting, and was starting off.  A slight whistle brought him to a standstill, and I drew a bead behind his shoulder, and low down, resting the rifle across the crooked branch of a dwarf spruce.  At the crack he ran off at speed, making no sound, but the thick spatter of blood splashes, showing clear on the white snow, betrayed the mortal nature of the wound.  For some minutes I followed the trail; and then, topping a ridge, I saw the dark bulk lying motionless in a snow drift at the foot of a low rock-wall, from which he had tumbled.

The usual practice of the still-hunter who is after grisly is to toll it to baits.  The hunter either lies in ambush near the carcass, or approaches it stealthily when he thinks the bear is at its meal.

One day while camped near the Bitter Root Mountains in Montana I found that a bear had been feeding on the carcass of a moose which lay some five miles from the little open glade in which my tent was pitched, and I made up my mind to try to get a shot at it that afternoon.  I stayed in camp till about three o’clock, lying lazily back on the bed of sweet-smelling evergreen boughs, watching the pack ponies as they stood under the pines on the edge of the open, stamping now and then, and switching their tails.  The air was still, the sky a glorious blue; at that hour in the afternoon even the September sun was hot.  The smoke from the smouldering logs of the camp fire curled thinly upwards.  Little chipmunks scuttled out from their holes to the packs, which lay in a heap on the ground, and then scuttled madly back again.  A couple of drab-colored whisky-jacks, with bold mien and fearless bright eyes, hopped and fluttered round, picking up the scraps, and uttering an extraordinary variety of notes, mostly discordant; so tame were they that one of them lit on my outstretched arm as I half dozed, basking in the sunshine.