When bears are shot, as they usually must be, in open timber or on the bare mountain, the risk is very much less.  Hundreds may thus be killed with comparatively little danger; yet even under these circumstances they will often charge, and sometimes make their charge good.  The spice of danger, especially to a man armed with a good repeating rifle, is only enough to add zest to the chase, and the chief triumph is in outwitting the wary quarry and getting within range.  Ordinarily the only excitement is in the stalk, the bear doing nothing more than keep a keen look-out and manifest the utmost anxiety to get away.  As is but natural, accidents occasionally occur; yet they are usually due more to some failure in man or weapon than to the prowess of the bear.  A good hunter whom I once knew, at a time when he was living in Butte, received fatal injuries from a bear he attacked in open woodland.  The beast charged after the first shot, but slackened its pace on coming almost up to the man.  The latter’s gun jambed, and as he was endeavoring to work it he kept stepping slowly back, facing the bear which followed a few yards distant, snarling and threatening.  Unfortunately while thus walking backwards the man struck a dead log and fell over it, whereupon the beast instantly sprang on him and mortally wounded him before help arrived.

On rare occasions men who are not at the time hunting it fall victims to the grisly.  This is usually because they stumble on it unawares and the animal attacks them more in fear than in anger.  One such case, resulting fatally, occurred near my own ranch.  The man walked almost over a bear while crossing a little point of brush, in a bend of the river, and was brained with a single blow of the paw.  In another instance which came to my knowledge the man escaped with a shaking up, and without even a fight.  His name was Perkins, and he was out gathering huckleberries in the woods on a mountain side near Pend’Oreille Lake.  Suddenly he was sent flying head over heels, by a blow which completely knocked the breath out of his body; and so instantaneous was the whole affair that all he could ever recollect about it was getting a vague glimpse of the bear just as he was bowled over.  When he came to he found himself lying some distance down the hill-side, much shaken, and without his berry pail, which had rolled a hundred yards below him, but not otherwise the worse for his misadventure; while the footprints showed that the bear, after delivering the single hurried stoke at the unwitting disturber of its day-dreams, had run off up-hill as fast as it was able.

A she-bear with cubs is a proverbially dangerous beast; yet even under such conditions different grislies act in directly opposite ways.  Some she-grislies, when their cubs are young, but are able to follow them about, seem always worked up to the highest pitch of anxious and jealous rage, so that they are likely to attack unprovoked any intruder or even passer-by.  Others when threatened by the hunter leave their cubs to their fate without a visible qualm of any kind, and seem to think only of their own safety.