The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals: A Book of Personal Observations

Judging by the facts that Charles L. Smith and the Norboe brothers related to Mr. Phillips and me around our camp-fires in the Canadian Rockies, the wolverine is one of the most cunning wild animals of all North America. This is a large order; for the gray wolf and grizzly bear are strong candidates for honors in that contest. The greatest cunning of the wolverine is manifested in robbing traps, stealing the trapper's food and trap-baits, and at the same time avoiding the traps set for him. He is wonderfully expert in springing steel traps for the bait or prey there is in them, without getting caught himself. He will follow up a trap line for miles, springing all traps and devouring all baits as he goes. Sometimes in sheer wantonness he will throw a trap into a river, and again he will bury a trap in deep snow. Dead martens in traps are savagely torn from them. Those that can not be eaten on the spot are carried off and skilfully cached under two or three feet of snow. Trapper Smith once set a trap for a wolverine, and planted close behind it a young moose skull with some flesh upon it. The wolverine came in the night, started at a point well away from the trap, dug a tunnel through six feet of snow, fetched up well behind the trap,--and triumphantly dragged away the head through his tunnel. From the testimony of W. H. Wright, of Spokane, in his interesting book on "The Grizzly Bear," and for other reasons, I am convinced that the Rocky Mountain silver-tip grizzly is our brightest North American animal, and very keen of nose, eye, ear and brain. Mr. Wright says that "the grizzly bear far excels in cunning any other animal found throughout the Rocky Mountains, and, for that matter, he far excels them all combined." While the last clause is a large order, I will not dispute the opinion of a man of keen intelligence who has lived much among the most important and interesting wild animals of the Rockies.