Grizzly Gastronomy

To him [the grizzly bear] almost everything is food, except granite. Every tree helps to feed him, every bush and herb, with fruits and flowers, leaves and bark; and all the animals he can catch--badgers, gophers, ground-squirrels, lizards, snakes, etc., and ants, bees, wasps, old and young, together with their eggs and larvae and nests. Craunched [sic] and hashed, down all go to his marvellous stomach, and vanish as if cast into a fire. What digestion! A sheep or a wounded deer or a pig he eats warm, about as quickly as a boy eats a buttered muffin; or should the meat be a month old, it still is welcomed with tremendous relish. After so gross a meal as this, perhaps the next will be strawberries [huckleberries] and clover, or raspberries [service berries] with mushrooms and nuts, or puckery...chokecherries.¹

--John Muir

1. John Muir, "Among the Animals of the Yosemite," Atlantic Monthly (Nov. 1898), Vol. LXXXII, p. 617.