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The Life Story of a Black Bear

Chapter 18: FOOTNOTES
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About This Book

The narrator, a black bear, recounts early cubhood and family life on mountain slopes, describing landscape, hibernation, learning to climb and feed, playful interactions with siblings and mother, tumbling downhill, seasonal rhythms of snowmelt and streams, encounters with other wildlife, and increasing threats as men arrive with axes and rifles during gold-digging and logging; the narrative blends natural-history detail with personal episodes of growth, survival, parenthood, and the disruption of wild habitats by human activity.

FOOTNOTES

[1] It is not possible to give any idea of how a bear says wow-ugh. The wow begins at the bottom of the octave, runs halfway up and then down again, and the ugh comes from the very inside of his insides. It is as if he started on the ground floor of a house, wowed clear upstairs to the top and down again, and then went into the cellar to say ugh!

[2] The striped ground squirrels of North America.

[3]The new mining town or camp of the Far West has no long rows of houses or paved streets. The houses are built of logs or of boards, rarely more than one story high, and are set down irregularly. There may be one more or less well-defined ‘street’—the main trail running through the camp—but even along that there will be wide gaps between the houses; while, for the rest, the buildings are at all sorts of angles, so that a man or a bear may wander through them as he pleases, regardless of whether he is following a ‘street’ or not.

[4] The North American elk is the wapiti.