Books: Bears Are Like People

HUNTING AMERICAN BEARS (247 pp.]—Frank C. Hibben—Lippincott ($5).

“As his eyes came around, there was blackness before him . . . Hasselborg instinctively shifted his eyes upward toward the top of this blank wall. His mouth sagged open in his beard and his eyes went glassy at what he saw. There was a splotch of red on top of the thing . . . The bloodshot eyes . . . glared down at him from a height twice his own . . . Yes, it was the gigantic bear—the one he had killed but a moment ago. He had forgotten his own precepts about approaching bears until they were dead. And his rifle stood against a bush two steps behind, ineffective and unreachable . . .”

Out of a dozen such melodramatic, real-life hunting episodes, University of New Mexico Anthropology Professor Frank (Hunting American Lions) Hibben has put together a bear book as fresh and arresting as the hour-old print of a grizzly’s paw. Some of the experiences are Professor-Hunter Hibben’s own: he has tracked the varmints through the Southwest and in Alaska. Others he gleaned secondhand from such fast-trailing U.S. hunters as Ben Lilly (TIME, May 15) and Alaska’s Allen Hasselborg, who left the States in 1900 and settled for good on desolate Admiralty Island to hunt and trap.

Touchdown Leap. The mammoth brown bear that rose up from the dead was the last one Hunter Hasselborg ever hunted professionally. To escape, he made “a sailing leap, the kind a frantic quarterback makes when the goal line and winning touchdown are almost his,” and landed face-down in a shallow gulley. While the bear clawed his back to ribbons and chewed away the muscles in his shoulder, Hasselborg hugged the earth, finally blacked out. Later he awoke to find the bear gone. It took hours to get himself into his homemade boat, and it was two days before he got his boat under way. Since then, Hunter Hasselborg has been leaving the big bears pretty much alone.

“Bears,” says Author Hibben, “are like people. They are all different and generally unpredictable.” One chocolate-colored Arizona three-year-old showed such persistent friendliness that compassionate Hunter Hibben, who found himself alone in a canyon with his intended victim, hesitated to kill it. “We stood an eternity there, the bear and I … The main atmosphere seemed to be one of embarrassment.” Hearing the dog pack yelping at its trail, the bear calmly wrestled its way up a tree. “Should I shoot the bear? . . . Certainly this was no sporting thing. I would let Giles finish [him] off.” Then suddenly the bear changed its mind and started coming down again.

“Shoot Him, Frank!” To keep his bear treed till his friend Giles arrived, Hibben “raised the rifle barrel and with all my strength, lunged in a vicious thrust upward at the bear’s tail . . . The bear gave a slight ‘Oof!’ at this indignity, but that was all.” Even a mighty second shove did not slow up the beast. With his friend’s excited cry, “Shoot him, Frank!” in his ears, Hibben “extended the gun with one hand and arm, holding it like a pistol . . . At the instant of execution, I averted my eyes so I would not see the brown fur on the bear’s head blanch flat and burn from the powder flame.” After the bear had lumbered off, unhit, up the canyon to safety, Author Hibben’s friend paid him a grinning tribute: “You are undoubtedly the only hunter who ever missed a full-grown bear at the distance of six inches.”

There is less sentimentality and more bloodshed in most of the other hunts that Author Hibben describes. Blond bears, silver-tipped bears, sunburned bears and just plain mean bears all enter his literary sights and provide meat for some of the best wild-animal stories since Ernest Thompson Seton. But Author Hibben is always less interested in skins and weights than in the personalities of living bears. The climax of most of the stories comes not in the kill but in the first sight of the hunted animal standing with ears pricked and nose revolving, a wise, unpredictable and dangerous opponent for even a well-armed man.