Old hunters, survivors of the long-vanished ages when the vast herds thronged the high plains and were followed by the wild red tribes, and by bands of whites who were scarcely less savage, have told me that they often met bears under such circumstances; and these bears were accustomed to sleep in a patch of rank sage bush, in the niche of a washout, or under the lee of a boulder, seeking their food abroad even in full daylight.

The bears of the Upper Missouri basin--which were so light in color that the early explorers often alluded to them as gray or even as "white"-- were particularly given to this life in the open.

To this day that close kinsman of the grisly known as the bear of the barren grounds continues to lead this same kind of life, in the far north.

My friend Mr.Rockhill, of Maryland, who was the first white man to explore eastern Tibet, describes the large, grisly-like bear of those desolate uplands as having similar habits.
However, the grisly is a shrewd beast and shows the usual bear-like capacity for adapting himself to changed conditions.

He has in most places become a cover-haunting animal, sly in his ways, wary to a degree and clinging to the shelter of the deepest forests in the mountains and of the most tangled thickets in the plains.