But although endowed with so strong a propensity for animal food, as well as with the power to gratify the appetite thus grafted in his very nature, he is not, like the more perfect of the carnivorous tribe, left entirely dependent upon that which, in the climate in which he has been placed, must of necessity be a precarious, and frequently even an impossible, source of subsistence. Of a more fierce and sanguinary temper than the other bears, he does not hesitate to attack whatever living creature may fall in his way, and man himself seems to inspire him with little dread: but in the absence of his favourite food, he makes a less savoury, but equally congenial, meal of vegetable substances, of fruits, or more commonly of roots, the latter of which he digs up with the greatest facility with his enormous claws; and in some parts of the country these more simple productions form almost his sole subsistence. On the quality of his food depends much of the ferocity of his temper; for it appears that the bears of the western side of the Rocky Mountains, who live almost entirely upon vegetables, are of a much less fierce and savage disposition than their fellows of the eastern side, where animal food is more abundant and more easily procured.
Next to his great size and excessive ferocity, one of the most striking peculiarities of this animal is his extreme tenacity of life. For the instances of this we are indebted almost wholly to the narrative of the Travels of Captains Lewis and Clarke, whose statements are no doubt founded in truth, although it may be suspected that they require to be received with some grains at least of allowance. According to these gentlemen one bear which had received five shots in his lungs, and five other wounds in various parts of his body, swam a considerable distance to a sand bank in the river, and survived more than twenty minutes; another that had been shot through the centre of the lungs, pursued at full speed the man by whom the wound was inflicted for half a mile, then returned more than twice that distance, dug himself a bed two feet deep and five feet long, and was perfectly alive two hours after he received the wound; and a third, although actually shot through the heart, ran at his usual pace nearly a quarter of a mile before he fell. There is no chance, they add, of killing him by a single shot, unless the ball goes directly through the brain; a single hunter runs consequently no little risk in venturing to attack an animal upon whom the most dangerous wounds, if not instantaneously fatal, produce no obvious immediate effects.