A few persons have done considerable talking and writing about the damage to stock inflicted by bears, but I think there is little justification for such charges.  Certainly, there is not one-tenth enough real damage done by bears to justify their extermination.  At the present time, we hear that the farmers (!) of Kadiak Island, Alaska, are being seriously harassed and damaged by the big Kadiak bear,—­an animal so rare and shy that it is very difficult for a sportsman to kill one!  I think the charges against the bears,—­if the Kadiak Islanders ever really have made any,—­need to be proven, by the production of real evidence.

In the United States, outside of our game preserves, I know of not one locality in which grizzly bears are sufficiently numerous to justify a sportsman in going out to hunt them.  The California grizzly, once represented by “Monarch” in Golden Gate Park, is almost, if not wholly, extinct.  In Montana, outside of Glacier Park it is useless to apply for wild grizzlies.  In the Bitter Root Mountains and Clearwater Mountains of Idaho, there are grizzlies, but they hide so effectually under the snow-bent willows on the “slides” that it is almost impossible to get a shot.  Northwestern Wyoming still contains a few grizzlies, but there are so many square miles of mountains around each animal it is now almost useless to go hunting for them.  British Columbia, western Alberta and the coast mountains at least as far as Skaguay, and Yukon Territory generally, all contain grizzlies, and the sportsman who goes out for sheep, caribou and moose is reasonably certain to see half a dozen bears and kill at least one or two.  In those countries, the grizzly species will hold forth long after all killable grizzlies have vanished from the United States.

I think that it is now time for California, Montana, Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Wyoming to give grizzly bears protection of some sort.  Possibly the situation in those states calls for a five-year close season.  Even British Columbia should now place a bag limit on this species.  This has seemed clear to me ever since two of my friends killed (in the spring of 1912) six grizzlies in one week!  But Provincial Game Warden A. Bryan Williams says that at present it would be impossible to impose a bag limit of one per year on the grizzlies of British Columbia; and Mr. Williams is a sincere game-protector.

THE BROWN BEARS OF ALASKA.—­These magnificent monsters present a perplexing problem, which I am inclined to believe can be satisfactorily solved by the Biological Survey only in short periods, say of three or four years each.  Naturally, the skin hunters of Alaska ardently desire the skins of those bears, for the money they represent.  That side of the bear problem does not in the least appeal to the ninety odd millions of people who live this side of Alaska.  The skins of the Alaskan brown bears have little value save as curiosities, nailed upon the wall, where they can not be stepped upon and injured.  The hunting of those bears, however, is a business for men; and it is partly for that reason they should be preserved.  A bear-hunt on the Alaska Peninsula, Admiralty or Montagu Islands, is an event of a lifetime, and with a bag limit of one brown bear, the species would be quite safe from extermination.