Yet it
still holds its own, though in greatly diminished numbers, in the more
thinly settled portions of the country. One of the standing riddles of
American zoology is the fact that the black bear, which is easier killed
and less prolific than the wolf, should hold its own in the land better
than the latter, this being directly the reverse of what occurs in
Europe, where the brown bear is generally exterminated before the wolf.
In a few wild spots in the East, in northern Maine for instance, here
and there in the neighborhood of the upper Great Lakes, in the
east Tennessee and Kentucky mountains and the swamps of Florida and
Mississippi, there still lingers an occasional representative of the old
wilderness hunters. These men live in log-cabins in the wilderness.
They do their hunting on foot, occasionally with the help of a single
trailing dog. In Maine they are as apt to kill moose and caribou as bear
and deer; but elsewhere the two last, with an occasional cougar or wolf,
are the beasts of chase which they follow.
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