trifle with you, take a mere snack, as it were — make a trifling collation or luncheon, so to speak, off you.
But if still in doubt as to the species encountered, the Hindoo student’s description of the bheel may assist the stranger in arriving at a correct conclusion, for the Big bear is black, “only much more hairy,” and when it has killed you it leaves your body in a ditch. By this you may know the Big bear.
But, unless provoked to attack you, these creatures will not do so; so naturalists assure us. A bear’s notions of provocation, however, are so peculiar that perhaps the safest rule for strangers to observe is not to let the animal see you. The bear never attacks any person whom it cannot see. This is a golden rule for persons who are in the habit of meeting bears to observe.
Otherwise there seem to be no limits to a bear’s provocations. If it comes up behind you, and finds you not looking that way, it knocks off the back part of your head with one blow of its curved claws; and if it meets you face to face it knocks off the front part of your head. But there is nothing agreeable in this variety. Again, if it discovers you sitting below it on the same hillside as itself, it rolls itself up, and comes trundling down the slope upon top of you like an ill-tempered portmanteau; or if it is down below you, and becomes provoked, it comes scrambling up the hill with a speed that in a creature of such a shape is described, by those who have been charged, as quite incredible. Sometimes, on the other hand, bears receive very solid provocation without showing any resentment, for, as Captain Kinloch, a noted Indian Shikarry, has told us, the amount of lead which an old black bear will carry
