NEW YORK. - Warren Page, shooting editor of NEA's Field & Stream's column, has become the first big game hunter in nearly half a century to shoot one of the rare glacier bears found only in Alaska's Yakutat Bay region.
    Deep snow and bad weather combined to make Page's task uncommonly difficult.
    Page is believed to be the first sportsman to bag a glacier bear since 1906, the year Hardy Trefzger, one of the guides on the Yakutat expedition, arrived in southwest Alaska.
    "The animal was killed on a steep slope at the very tip of Yakutat Bay, and almost bowled me over when it rolled down," Page wrote friends.
    The glacier bear, also known as the blue or Emmons, is a color phase of the common black.
    It is found only in the St. Elias mountain area, near Yakutat Bay, 1300 miles north of Seattle and 300 miles west of Juneau.
    Specimens vary in color from a soiled whitish cast to a dark bluish black with numerous gray hairs.
    "This one," said Page, "has a pelt which is a light gray with darker ears and paws and even seemed to be tinged with green and silver."