Bears are hunted in many ways. Some are killed by poison; but this plan
is only practised by the owners of cattle or sheep who have suffered
from their ravages. Moreover, they are harder to poison than wolves.
Most often they are killed in traps, which are sometimes dead-falls,
on the principle of the little figure-4 trap familiar to every American
country boy, sometimes log-pens in which the animal is taken alive,
but generally huge steel gins. In some states there is a bounty for the
destruction of grislies; and in many places their skins have a market
price, although much less valuable than those of the black bear. The
men who pursue them for the bounty, or for their fur, as well as the
ranchmen who regard them as foes to stock, ordinarily use steel traps.
The trap is very massive, needing no small strength to set, and it is
usually chained to a bar or log of wood, which does not stop the bear's
progress outright, but hampers and interferes with it, continually
catching in tree stumps and the like.
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