China and Tibet circa 1283 Status: Endangered Asiatic Black Bears and Brown Bears
Marco Polo (Henry Yule and Henri Cordier 3d Edition), The Travels of Marco Polo, 1903, 1920, Chapter XLIV: Concerning the Province and City of Sindafu, Chapter XLV: Concerning the Province of Tebet.
When you leave this city you travel for five days across a country of plains and valleys, finding plenty of villages and hamlets, and the people of which live by husbandry. There are numbers of wild beasts, lions [tigers*], and bears, and such like.
….
In this region you find quantities of canes, full three palms in girth and fifteen paces in length …. And let me tell you that merchants and other travellers through that country are wont at nightfall to gather these canes and make fires of them; for as they burn they make such loud reports that the lions [tigers] and bears and other wild beasts are greatly frightened, and make off as fast as possible; in fact nothing will induce them to come nigh a fire of that sort. So you see the travellers make those fires to protect themselves and their cattle from the wild beasts which have so greatly multiplied since the devastation of the country. And ’tis this great multiplication of the wild beasts that prevents the country from being reoccupied. In fact but for the help of these canes, which make such a noise in burning that the beasts are terrified and kept at a distance, no one would be able even to travel through the land.
I will tell you how it is that the canes make such a noise…. After they have been awhile burning they burst asunder, and this makes such a loud report that you might hear it ten miles off.
[*Marco Polo “lions” are probably tigers. Steven G. Haw, Some Problematic Animals in Marco Polo’s Description of the World, University of Oxford, 2019, chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/334560632.pdf accessed 11/30/2022.]
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Sweden circa 1908
Count Eric Von Rosen, Bear Hunting in Sweden, Wide World Magazine, Vol. 22, No. 128, November 1908, citing Country Life.
In Karelen the bear is yet regarded as a noxious horror. The great black-haired “Slagbjörn,” or killing bear, is still rampant there, and a couple of winters back I was able to wreak justifiable vengeance on some beasts that had killed over a score of cows and nine horses.
