When he had feasted for a few minutes he suddenly rose, snarled, and sniffed along my trail for a few yards. He uttered a few growling threats. That a grizzly cannot climb a tree is a fact in natural history which gave me immense satisfaction. But the bear returned to the carcass and finished his feast. Finally, having raked grass and trash over the remains, he doubled back on his trail and faded into the twilight.
Grizzlies often show courage and strategy by hiding and lying in ambush for a pursuing hunter. On one occasion I had been following a grizzly for a number of days, trying to get his photograph at short range. He knew I was in pursuit. Finally, he doubled back on his trail a short distance and crouched behind a log. His tracks as I followed them passed along the other side of this log, and continued plainly ahead of me across the top of a snow-covered moraine. But as I approached the log, the wind stirred the bear's fur and gave me warning.
A grizzly appears to understand that his tracks reveal his movements. I was once following one that had been wounded by a hunter to see where he went and what he did. He circled from his trail and came back to it over logs and rocks, which left no markings, and hid in a clump of fir trees. On seeing this possible place of ambush by the trail, I turned aside and climbed a pine to reconnoitre. When the bear realized that I had discovered him, he made off in anger.
Round the foot of Long's Peak I followed a bear through a shallow snow, hoping to overtake and photograph him. Most of the snow had melted off the logs and bowlders. After trailing him four or five miles I came to a bowlder where he had climbed up and looked around. Possibly he wished to see how close I was to him; possibly he was deciding just where he would carry out a plan for outwitting me. At any rate, he jumped from the bowlder, walked round it, traveled a short distance slowly, then set off on a run, going east. After I had followed his trail for more than a mile, his tracks ceased in a rocky, snowless area where his footprints did not show.
I thought I should find his tracks in the snow on the farther edge of the rocky space; but they were not there. Then, in the snow, I went entirely round the edge of the rocky space without seeing a track. Thinking that possibly the grizzly was hiding in this small rocky area, I at once cautiously circled every place behind which he might be concealed, but without finding him.