CHAPTER VI.
WHEN GRIZZLIES RAN IN DROVES.
William Thurman, who owned a lumber mill on the Chowchilla mountain, not far from the Mariposa grove of Big Trees, told this plain, unadorned tale of an old-fashioned Grizzly bear hunt.
He was moved thereto by inspection of a Winchester express rifle, carrying a half-inch ball, backed by 110 grains of powder, that was shown to him by a hunter.
"If we had been armed with such rifles in early days," said Mr. Thurman, "the Grizzly wouldn't have achieved his reputation for vitality and staying powers in a fight. There is no doubt that he is a very tough animal and a game fighter, but in the days when he made a terrible name for himself he had to face no such weapons as that.
"I assisted in killing, in 1850, the first Grizzlies that were brought into the town of Sonora. I had heard a great deal about the Grizzly, and coming across the plains I talked to my comrade, Green, about what I should do if I should get a chance at a bear. I was a pretty good shot, and thought it would be no trick at all to kill a bear with the Mississippi rifle that I brought home from the Mexican war.
"One day I went out with a man named Willis, who was a good hunter, and in the hills back of Sonora we found plenty of bear sign. In fact we could get through the thick brush and chaparral only on the trails made by bears, and we had to go carefully for fear of running upon a Grizzly at close quarters. Although it was evident that we were in a bear country, we hadn't seen anything to shoot at when we emerged from the brush into an open space about fifty yards in diameter.
"Willis said that he was sure bears were close around us, if we could only see them, and I proposed to climb a tree on the other side of the clearing and get a good view of the surrounding thickets. If I should see bears I was to make a noise and try to scare them out of their hiding places.
"I started across the opening, but before I reached the tree I saw a huge Grizzly coming toward me through the brush. He looked much larger and uglier than I had expected, and it struck me that the proper thing for me was to get into that tree before shooting. I got to the tree all right enough, but found that I couldn't climb it and take my rifle up with me. Willis saw my difficulty and shouted to me that I couldn't make it, and so I abandoned the attempt and ran back toward him.
"The bear was following me, and Willis started back into the brush. I called to him not to do that, but to stand in the open and wait for me. He halted, and when I got alongside we both turned and raised our rifles. When the bear saw that we were standing our ground, he stopped, looked at us a moment and then turned and shuffled back into the brush. He was so big and looked so formidable that we concluded to let him go unmolested, rather relieved, in fact, that we were let out of the scrape so easily.
"We made our way back to camp with some caution and decided that we would get up a crowd and go bear hunting the next day. When we told our adventure, Green was very hilarious at my expense and kept reminding me of the brave things I had said coming across the plains. He was so everlastingly tickled with his joke that he sat up all that night to guy me about my running away from a bear. I told him I would show him all the bears he wanted to see the next day, and give him a chance to try his own nerves.
"The next day five of us went out to look for bears, and we struck them thick before we got to the place where we had found so much sign. Willis and I took the upper side of a patch of brush, and Green and the other two skirted the lower edge. An old Grizzly and two cubs, startled by some noise made by the other fellows, jumped out of the brush on our side, and we fired at them. My bullet struck one near the shoulder, and Willis hit the dam in the belly. They all turned and ran down through the brush toward the rest of the crowd, and got out of our range. "The noise made by them in running through the brush stirred up another squad, and when the shooting began down below five bears came tearing out on our side to get out of the way. Willis raised his rifle and pulled the trigger, but luckily the cap failed to explode. The five turned as soon as they saw us and ran in another direction. I was going to shoot one in the rump, but Willis stopped me, saying that we had our hands full without inviting any more bears to join the scrimmage. Before those five bears, got out of sight three more broke cover and joined them, and for a moment there were eleven Grizzly bears, young and old, in sight from where I stood. Eight of them ran away and the original three kept us all busy for the best part of the afternoon.
"For some time the other three men had all the fun, while Willis and I stood guard on our side of the thicket and watched the performance. The old bear would stand up and look over a patch of brush to locate her enemy, and somebody would give her a shot. She would drop to all fours and gallop around to where she saw the man last, and he would run around the other side and reload. The cubs were half grown—big enough to be dangerous—and the boys had to watch for them while dodging about.
"I got even on Green that afternoon. He had forgotten to bring any caps, and after his first shot he could do nothing but dodge around the brush and keep out of the way. One of the bears was after him, and he had to step lively. While he was waiting to see which way the bear was coming next, he made motions with his hand, pointing to the nipple of his rifle, to indicate that he wanted caps. I saw what he meant, but instead of going to him to supply him with caps I stood still and laughed at him and applauded his running when the bear chased him. That made him furious and he yelled that if he had a cap he'd take a shot at me.
"After two or three hours of dodging about, every man taking a shot whenever he got a chance, one of the cubs keeled over and the dam and the other cub retreated into the thickest part of the brush patch.
"We consulted and decided that if we killed the other cub next the dam might quit and get away, whereas if we killed the dam the cub probably wouldn't leave her and we'd bag the whole outfit. One of the party crawled cautiously into the thicket and presently he fired. Then he called to me to come in, and when I crawled up to him he said: 'I've killed the cub by mistake, but the old one is lying badly wounded on the other side of a little open spot, and you can get a splendid shot at the butt of her ear while I back out and reload."
"He backed out, and I crawled up and took his place. There was the old bear about ten yards away, lying down and bleeding from a great many wounds. She seemed to be nearly exhausted and out of breath. I was in the act of raising my rifle to take aim at her head, when she caught sight of me and suddenly sprang up and rushed at me. She was almost upon me in two jumps, and I thought I was in for a bad time of it. I had no time to aim, but pushed out my rifle instinctively and fired in her face. The bullet struck her in the mouth, and the pain caused her to stop, wheel around and make a rush through the chaparral in the opposite direction. Such a shot as that from a Winchester express would have blown off the whole roof of her head, but my bullet, as I found later, tore through her tongue, splitting the root, and stopped when it struck bone.
"When she broke out of the brush on the other side three of the boys fired into her and she fell dead. We looked her over and found more than thirty bullets in her. We had been shooting at her and dodging her in the brush from 11 o'clock in the forenoon; until after 3 o'clock, and she had caved in from sheer exhaustion and loss of blood, not from the effects of any single bullet.
"We packed the three carcases into Sonora that night and a butcher named Dodge offered to cut them up and sell the meat without charge to us if we would let him have the bears at his shop. That was the first bear meat ever taken into Sonora, and everybody in the camp wanted a piece. In the morning there was a line of men at Dodge's shop like the crowd waiting at a theatre for Patti tickets. Men far down the line shouted to Dodge not to sell the meat in big pieces, but to save slices for them. The meat sold for $1 a pound. Everybody got a slice, and we got $500 for our three bears.
"One of our crowd was so elated over the profits of bear-hunting that he started out alone the next day to get more Grizzly meat. He didn't come back, and the boys who went out to look for him found his body, covered up with leaves and dirt, in the edge of a clump of brush. His skull had been smashed by a blow from a Grizzly's paw."
CHAPTER VII.
THE ADVENTURES OF PIKE.
Pike was one of the oldest of Yosemite guides and altogether the quaintest of the many queer old fellows who drifted into the valley in early days and there were stranded for life. He had another name, no doubt, but nobody knew or cared what it might be, and he seemed to have forgotten it himself. "Pike" fitted him, served all the purposes for which names were invented, was easy to pronounce, and therefore was all the name he needed. Pike was tall, round-shouldered, lop-sided, slouchy, good-natured, illiterate, garrulous, frankly vain of the little scraps of botanical nomenclature he had picked up and as lazy and unacquainted with soap as an Indian.
Pike dearly loved bears and bear stories. When there were no tourists about to whom he could tell bear stories, he would go into the woods and have adventures with bears and stock up with stories for the next season. Pike never had to kill a bear to get a story out of him. He brought in no bear skins, pointed out no bullet holes, exhibited no scars and told no blood-curdling tales of furious combat and hair-breadth escapes. Pike and the bears appeared to have an understanding that there was room enough in the woods for both and that his hunting was all in the way of innocent amusement and recreation, to be spiced now and then with a practical joke.
"Black bears and brown bears are peaceable folks," Pike used to say in his Californianized-Missourian vernacular. "There's nothing mean about 'em and they don't go around with chips on their shoulders. I generally get along with them slick as grease and they never try to jump me when I haven't got a gun. Why, sir, I can just talk a brown bear out of the trail, even when he thinks he owns it. I did one night in the valley. I was going from Barnard's up to the Stoneman when I ran right up against a big brown bear in the dark. He was coming down the road and was in pretty considerable of a hurry, too—going down to the butcher's corral for supper I reckon—and we stopped about three feet apart. 'What you adoin' of here,' says I. 'Seems to me you're prowling around mighty permiscuous, buntin' inter people on the State stage road. You git inter the bresh,' says I, 'where you belong or I'll kick a few dents into you. Now don't stand here argifying the pint,' says I, just as important as if I was the Gardeen of the Valley, which I wasn't. 'Scoot, skedaddle, vamoos the ranch, git off the earth,' I says, 'if you ain't aimin' to git your head punched.'
"Well, sir, he stood there a minute with his head cocked sidewise, kinder grunted once as if he was saying 'good-night,' and turned off the road into the brush and went about his business, and I poked along up to the Stoneman. 'Course I can't swear that he knew just what I said, but he ketched the general drift of the argyment all right, what you might call the prepoort of my remarks, and he knowed he hadn't no case worth fighting about.
"I remember once when Jim Duncan and me was ketched out in a snowstorm up near the head of Alder Creek, and lost each other in the dark. I knew Jim would take care of himself and it was no use tramping around, so I hunted a hole to sleep in. I found a place under a rock just big enough for me, where the snow didn't blow in, and I curled up on some dry leaves and snoozed off in no time. By and by something touched my face and I woke up, and there was a bear poking his head in and wondering if there was room for two. There wasn't no room and I don't like to sleep with bears nohow. Bears are all right in their place and I don't hold to no prejudices, but I'm notional about some things and I never could stand bears in my bed; they smell worse than Indians. So I says to that bear, which was looking mighty wishful into my snug quarters, 'Git along out of this; I was here first,' and I reached up and fetched him a back-handed slap on the nose. You'd orter heard him sneeze as he moseyed off. Last thing I remembered when I turned over and went to sleep was him a sneezing as he wandered around looking for another hole.
"If that had been a she-bear, of course I'd have crawled out and gave her my place like a gentleman. You never know what a she—bear, or any other kind of she, is going to do next, and the best way to get along with 'em is to let 'em have their own way and be polite. I'm always polite to ladies—or most always any way. Of course when they get too cantankerous a man has to forget his manners and call 'em down.
"I was impolite to a she-bear once, but she got back at me. I was over on the far side of Signal Peak hunting gray squirrels with a shot-gun. I heard a funny sort of squealing a little way off, and set out to find out what was going on in the woods. Poking quietly through the brush, I came to the top of a ledge that dropped off straight and smooth to a flat covered with bear clover, just an opening in the forest. A she-bear was busy cracking open sugar pine cones and showing two cubs how to get the nuts out of them. The little fellows were having a gay old time, wrestling, boxing, stealing nuts from mamma and rolling about in the clover like a couple of kids, and I laid down in some bushes on top of the ledge and watched them. Sometimes they would grab a cone from the old one or bite her ear, and she would scold them and cuff them until they yelped that they'd be good. They couldn't be good half a minute, and they had the old lady's patience most worn out before I took a hand in the frolic.
"The old bear's coat was pretty thin and rusty, and she'd been sitting down or coasting down a bear slide so much that all the hair was worn off her hams slick and smooth. She looked mighty ridiculous when her back was turned, and it came into my fool head that a charge of small shot in the smooth place would be mighty surprising to her and help out the fun a whole lot. She couldn't get at me on the ledge, so I was perfectly safe to play jokes on her, and I wanted to see her jump. So I shoved the gun out through a bush and turned it loose. She was sixty yards away and the shot stung her good without doing any great harm.
"'Woof!' said the old bear as she jumped four feet high, and when she lit she was as mad as a wet hen. She looked up at the ledge, but couldn't see me, and she looked all around for somebody or something to blame for her trouble. Not a thing was in sight to account for it. She sat down sort of sideways, reached around with one paw to scratch where it hurt and thought the matter over. I had to stuff grass in my mouth to keep from howling with laughter at the way she cocked her head and seemed to be sizing up the situation while she scratched the stinging place.
"The cubs had stopped playing at the sound of the gun and run up close to her, and they were watching her for further orders. The old girl finally got her eye on them, and she looked at them solemnly for half a minute, and it was plain as print she was beginning to have suspicions. Then she was sure she had the thing figured out, and she fetched first one and then the other a cuff that sent them rolling ten feet away. When they got up bawling she was right there and gave them the darndest spanking two innocent cubs ever got. Every time she hit one he would go heels over head and yell blue murder, and by the time he got up she gave him another belt, scolding like an old woman all the time. It seemed to me I could almost hear her say, 'Play tricks on your mammy, will ye? I'll teach ye. Get along home without your supper, ye little scamps, and take that.' And so she went through the woods; spanking her babies, and they a'yelling for keeps and not knowing what they were being licked for, and I rolled around on top of the ledge, kicking my heels in the air and just bellowing with laughter.
"I thought that was the end of the funniest time I ever had with a bear, but it wasn't. Along about the first of March there was a warm spell in the mountains, and I went down the South Fork to Devil's Gulch, which heads up toward Signal Peak, to look over a timber claim and see if it was worth taking up. It was one of those warm days that take the snap out of a man, and I got tired and went to sleep under a tree. When I waked a bear had me half covered up with leaves and was piling on more. I wasn't cold, and didn't need any covering, but she seemed to think I did, and I reckoned the best thing to do was to keep still and let her finish the job. She seemed so serious about it that I didn't dare take it as a joke and try any tricks on her, but I couldn't figure out what her game was. She covered me with oak leaves, pine-needles and dirt from head to foot, and then all was still. I couldn't see, and I didn't dare to lift my head and shake off the leaves.
"After a while I made up my mind to take some chances to find out if the bear was on watch, and I wiggled my foot. Nothing happened, so I wiggled it a little harder. Then I felt around slowly until I got hold of my gun, and when I had that where I could handle it, I jumped up and shook the leaves and dirt from my face. The bear was gone. I had a sort of notion of what she was driving at, and so I fixed up the pile of leaves just as she had left them, went up the hill a little way and shinned a tree.
"About half an hour later the bear came back, leading two half-grown cubs so thin you could count their slats, and I recognized the interesting family I had met and had fun with in the fall. She was saying things to them in bear-talk, sort of whining and grunting, and they wobbled along behind her up to that pile of leaves. The cubs laid down with their tongues hanging out as if they were pretty tired, and the old girl tackled the pile confidently. It was plain enough that she had cached me for dinner, gone home into the gulch after the cubs and brought them back to have a square meal after being holed up for two or three months.
"The old bear made only two or three dabs at the pile when she began to suspect something was wrong, and then she sailed into it like a steam shovel. She made leaves and dirt fly so fast out between her hind legs that the cubs had to get out of the way or be buried, and the more she dug, the more excited she got. She worked over that pile and all the ground for ten feet around it until she was down to the frost, and when she finally got it through her head that the cupboard was bare, she was the most foolish-looking critter a man ever saw. She stood there blinking at the cubs, who were sniffing at the rubbish she had scattered about, and couldn't explain to them what had become of that square meal, and I reckon the cubs had it put up that mamma was getting light-headed and having dreams. They quit prospecting and sat down and looked at her and whined, and that set her off again raking over all the leaves in the neighborhood as if she hoped to find me hiding under them. Pretty soon she struck some kind of a root that was good to eat, and she braced up and called the cubs and showed it to 'em as if that was what she had been hunting for all the time. She made more fuss over that root than there was any call for and pretended it was the greatest thing a bear ever struck in the woods, and the cubs were so glad to get anything that they allowed roots were good enough and forgot all about what she had promised them.
"If her pelt had been good and the cubs had been big enough, I reckon I'd have got even with her for caching me, but she wasn't worth skinning and the cubs were no good for grub. It was getting late and I was tired of my tree, so I ploughed up the dirt under her nose with a load of shot and let out a yell, and she herded those cubs off into the brush and lit out for Devil's Gulch, and I went home. That was the nearest I ever came to being eaten up by bears."
CHAPTER VIII.
IN THE BIG SNOW.
The winter of 1889-90 is memorable in California as the winter of "the big snow." In the latter part of January the Central Pacific line over the Sierra Nevada was blockaded, and three or four passenger trains were imprisoned in the drifts for more than two weeks. Passing through the blockade and over the range afoot, I walked at times above the tops of the telegraph poles, and think it no exaggeration to estimate the depth of snow at the higher altitudes at 25 feet. Drifts in the canyons must have been more than double the depth of the snow on a level. The storm was general and the snowfall throughout the mountain region was extraordinary, not only for quantity but for rapidity. It can snow more inches to the hour in the high Sierra than feet to the week anywhere else, and the big storm of 1890 broke all previous records.
Miners' cabins in the gulches and hunters' shacks on the mountains were buried in a night and the occupants had to tunnel their way out. Deer fled from the slopes down into secluded glens which had been their safe refuge from Sierra storms before, but the white death followed them and softly folded its feathery wings about them. In the spring the dead deer were found in hundreds where they had "yarded" safely through many winters before the big snow. Warm weather before the storm had brought the bears out of their holes and set them to foraging for grub. The snow fell lightly and no crust formed for some time, and bruin could not wallow through it. The best he could do was to get under the lee of a log or ledge, take another nap and nurse his inconvenient appetite. Being a philosopher, bruin did the best he could and trusted the god of the wild things to do the rest.
Upon the long western slope of a big sprawling mountain in Sierra county a Grizzly dam and two gaunt cubs of the vintage of '89 were caught in the big snow miles away from the deep gulch in which they had passed the winter. No doubt that dam was weatherwise enough to sense the coming storm in time to have returned to the den, but neither beast nor man could have guessed what a thick blanket of white the gray clouds were about to lay upon the land. When the flakes began to fall thickly Mother Grizzly quit digging roots and turning over rocks, and sought shelter. The long slope was smooth and bare, but down near the foot was a fallen pine with upturned roots, and into the hollow where the roots had been, under the lee of the matted mass of fibre and dirt, Mother Grizzly led her babies and there made her bed for the night. It was a longer night than the old bear expected. It lasted until the next day's westering sun made a pale, bluish glimmer through the upper part of the drift that covered the fallen tree and filled up the hollow. The warmth of their bodies had kept an open space around the bears, and the upturned roots of the pine had prevented the snow from piling high directly over them, while causing it to drift and form an enclosing barrier in front of the shallow pit made by the uprooting of the tree. Mother Grizzly arose and struggled toward the dim glimmer of light, but she could not break her way out. The snow was light and dry and would not pack, and her buffetings only brought a feathery smother down upon her and the cubs. All she accomplished was to let down the frail roofing of the den and get a glimpse of the sky. She tried to climb up the drift, but sank out of sight and had to back out of the smother. Digging was futile, for the snow offered scarcely more resistance than foam.
So Mother Grizzly gave up her attempt to escape and busied herself with making the hollow as comfortable as possible for a long stay. She scraped down to the dirt and packed the snow about the sides of the lair, stowed the cubs against the back of the den and curled herself in front of them and waited for better times to come.
It is a proverb of the Spaniards that "who sleeps, dines," and bears attest its truth, for it is their experience through the long, cold weeks of winter, when the snow is deep and no food is to be got at. Doubtless the old she bear was content to go to sleep again and forget her hunger, but it may be supposed that the cubs had not learned the philosophy of necessity, and kept her awake with fretful demands which she could not satisfy. Had the family remained holed up in the winter den and not been tempted out by mild weather to break the long fast, probably the desire for food would have remained dormant, but the taste of food awakened appetite, and exercise sharpened it and created insistent necessity for its satisfaction. The normal period of hibernation having passed, dreams were no longer acceptable substitutes for dinner. So the hungry, worrying cubs would not let their dam sleep, and she soon became as ravenous as they and impatient of imprisonment.
Every day Mother Grizzly tried the barrier to find a way out, but for more than two weeks the snow was without a crust that would sustain the weight of a dog, and she could only flounder into the drift a few feet and struggle out again. Then a light drizzle of rain came, and the next night there was a sharper tingle in the air, a promise of cold weather, and crust began to form. In a day or two more it would be firm enough to travel upon, and the old Grizzly would lead her starving cubs down into the foothills and hunt for a stray calf or a sheep with which to feed them.
The big snow obliterated mountain roads and trails, and the mail was carried to many of the smaller mountain settlements by men on snowshoes, who took the shortest feasible routes and found smooth traveling a dozen or fifteen feet above the rough, rock-strewn ground. A Sierra carrier on skis—the long, wooden Norwegian snowshoes—with a letter pouch strapped to his shoulders, was tempted by the light crust to leave the ridge and shorten his journey by making a cut-off down the long, smooth slope. A minute's swift rush down that slope would save hours of weary plodding above the heads of the gulches.
The carrier studied the stretch of gleaming white carefully to select his course, and determined on a line passing a little below the roots of the fallen pine, which were indicated by a slight fold in the blanket of snow. Setting his steel-shod staff under his left arm pit to serve as brake and rudder and throwing his weight upon it, the carrier ranged his skis parallel, the right in advance a few inches, fixed his attention upon the range mark he had chosen, gave a slight push with the staff and got under way. The crust bore his weight easily, and in two seconds he was gliding swiftly. In five seconds more he was speeding like an arrow from the bow, and the ringing of the steel staff point against the crust arose in a high clear note above the grating sound of the sliding skis.
Mother Grizzly heard the strange sound, which was unlike anything of which she knew the meaning, and cuffing the whining cubs into instant silence, she started cautiously up the barrier to see what was going on or what danger menaced. Her frequent attempts to get out of the hole had made an inclined trench, which came to the surface a few yards from the protruding tree roots, and when she reached the upper end and put her head above the crust she saw a man rushing down the mountain straight toward her with the speed of a falling stone.
The green glint came into the grizzly's eyes, her teeth clashed together in quick, sharp strokes, like the chattering of a chilled bather, and she lunged forward and upward to meet the charge. If the man saw her at all, it was too late to swerve from his course or swing his staff forward for a weapon. His right ski passed under the bear's foreleg and he flew headlong over her, hurtled through the air and crashed through the snow crust a dozen yards beyond her. One of the skis was broken and torn from his foot, and even if his leg had not been broken he would have been helpless where he fell.
[Illustration: She Lunged Forward to Meet the Charge.]
Mother Grizzly and the starving cubs broke their fast, and two or three days later they went away over the frozen snow to the foothills. The men who went out in search of the missing carrier, and followed his trail to the fallen pine, brought back the mail pouch and something in a grain sack. They told me what they found, but it was not a pleasing tale and it is best that it be not retold.
CHAPTER IX.
BOSTON'S BIG BEAR FIGHT.
A small party of hunters sat by a campfire in a tamarack grove in the high Sierra. Their guide was William Larkin, Esq., alias "Old Bill," a man who had lived in the mountains for forty years and learned many things worth telling about. A new Winchester rifle that was being cleaned was the immediate provocation of some reminiscent remarks on the subject of pump-guns.
"We old mossbacks are slow to see anything good in new contraptions," said Mr. Larkin, after begging a Turkish cigarette from the Dude and lighting it with the Dude's patent pocket lamp, "but I'm just beginning to get it socked home into my feeble old intellect that things ain't naturally no account just because I never seen 'em afore. I stuck to it for a good many years that an old muzzle-loading rifle was the best shooting tool that ever was or ever could be made, but an old she-bear with one of my bullets through her lungs taught me different by clawing all the clothes and half the meat off my back. I'm learning' slowly, and I ain't too old to learn some more. If I live long enough I'll know consid'able yit.
"I remember the first pump-gun that came into these mountains. It was a Henry sixteen-shooter, and it blew in along with a kid from Boston who wanted to kill a bear. The young chap's uncle tried to convince him that killing a California Grizzly was not as much fun as some folks pretended, but the Boston boy couldn't be convinced, and so the uncle hired me to go along and take care of him. Boston had a gun in a case, and I told him to keep it there until we got to my bear pasture. The rest of his outfit was 500 cartridges and a box of paper collars.
"When we got into camp over on the South Fork, Boston wanted to begin the slaughter right away and opened up that gun case. I'd heard of the repeating rifle, but had it put up for a Yankee lie, and when the boy pulled out the gun I thought he had made a mistake and brought along some scientific contrivance from his college. He told me it was a Henry rifle and showed me how it worked, but I had no use for it. While he stuffed his pump-gun I smoked and thought. 'Unless you go slow, Mr. Larkin,' says I to myself, 'you'll get into plenty of trouble. Here you are, mixed up with something that you don't sabe pretty well. A rough canyon, two hound dogs and an able-bodied bear is a combination that you can work, but when you throw in a college boy and a gun that winds up like a clock and shoots till the cows come home, the situation looks kind of misty.' I didn't think much of the pump-gun, but for all I knew it might go off at both ends and paw up everything by the roots, and I was tolerable sure that Boston would wobble it around so's to take in a pretty consid'able scope of outdoors. But I allowed I was old fashioned enough to circumvent a Boston boy and his new gun, and concluded to go ahead.
"Next morning we put the dogs into Devil's Gulch, and by making a cut over a spur we got about two miles below them and sat down to wait for bear. The trees were so tall and so close together that you couldn't see the tops and the sun never saw the ground. The canyon was narrow and the sides were so steep that they tucked under at the bottom. While we sat there I figured a bit on what was going to happen. There was a light breeze, and presently I noticed something on the other side of the canyon, about fifty yards away. The wind swayed some bushes that grew around a charred stump, and from time to time the black end of the stump showed up and then disappeared very much like a bear's head peeping out of the brush.
"Pretty soon the dogs made a row up the gulch, and as the howls and yells and promiscuous uproar came nearer I knew they had started a bear and made him get a wiggle on. Boston danced around in great excitement, and when I pointed to the black stump he was ready to see bears most anywhere. 'You take care of that,' says I, 'and I'll go and see what ails the dogs.' He opened fire on the stump, and I dodged from tree to tree up the gulch until I was out of range.
"I never was in a battle, but if they made any more noise at Bull Run than Boston was making, I'm glad I wasn't there. I thought I was running away from the biggest fight on record. It was what our military authors call 'a continual roll of musketry.' But while running away from one battle I piled into another and had all the fight I needed on my hands. The dogs and two bears were mixed up in some sort of disagreement about things in general, and I was in it, as the Dude would say, with both feet and a crutch. We got some tangled, but things came my way pretty soon, and when the bears were laid out I stopped to listen. The fight was still going on down the canyon. The boy is still holding his own, I thought; it would be a pity to spoil such a battle. So I went on and dressed my bears, while the steady roll of musketry thundered in the gulch. Then I had a wash in the creek, had a smoke and sat down at the foot of a tree and fell asleep. The last I heard was a monotonous uproar indicating that the forces down the gulch were stubbornly holding their ground.
"I never did know how long I slept, but when I awoke all was quiet. Perhaps it was the silence following the cessation of hostilities that awakened me. I set out to find Boston, and groped my way down the gulch through a cloud of smoke. Presently I came to the scene of the fray. Where my hero had made his first and last stand was a stack of empty shells and the pump-gun so hot that it had set the dry leaves afire, but the bear hunter was gone. I yelled, but got no answer. I looked for tracks up and down the canyon, but there were no tracks. The kid had vanished.
"Then I climbed up the side of the canyon, high enough to see the tops of trees that stood in the bottom of the gulch. Near the scene of hostilities was a giant sugar pine, the top of which had been broken off. Boston had shinned up that tree when his ammunition gave out, and when I discovered him he was balancing himself upon the broken shaft and reaching out over his head into space for more limbs."
CHAPTER X.
YOSEMITE.
"Yosemite" is an Indian word, signifying "place of the Grizzly bear," and appropriately the Yosemite National Park is made a sanctuary for the California Grizzly by the regulations forbidding hunting or the carrying of firearms within its borders. Danger of extinction of the species, which was an imminent menace when the park was established, was averted by that act, and doubtless the bears have increased in numbers under protection of the United States. They were quite plentiful in that part of the Sierra Nevada in the early 90's, when, as State Forester, I co-operated with the first superintendent of the National Park, Capt. Wood, Fourth U. S. Cavalry, in driving out the sheep-men with their devastating flocks of "hoofed locusts," and protecting the Sierra forests from fire.
During the first two or three years of the Park's legal existence the hunting of deer was prohibited, but bear-hunting was permitted, and Captain Wood, Lieut. Davis and I devoted considerable time to the sport in the autumn of 1891. The Captain and I learned to appreciate the distinction between bear-hunting and bear-killing very keenly during that season. For example, I cut the trails of no less than thirteen bears in two days in the mountains north of Yosemite Valley and followed some of them, but although I succeeded in getting close enough to hustle two of the wanderers out of a leisurely walk into a lope, I never saw hair through my rifle sight. Having no dogs, of course, it was all still-hunting and trailing, with the long-odds chance of jumping a bear in the brush by sheer accident.
Late in the tourist season, bears came down out of the high mountains into the Yosemite Valley and made tracks in the Bridal Veil Meadows and along the stage roads, which were pointed out to visitors for their entertainment. The valley butcher reported bear sign at the place where he slaughtered beef for the hotel, and I tried roosting for bear in hope that it might prove better than still-hunting. There was a platform in a tree at the slaughtering place and I sat there through one chilly night without hearing or seeing any bear sign. The next night an eager tourist persuaded me to give him a share of the perch, and we roosted silently and patiently until after midnight. Hearing a bear coming through the brush, I touched my companion gently to attract his attention. He had fallen into a doze, and, awakening with a start at my touch he dropped his shotgun from the platform. The stock was broken, one of the hammers struck upon a log and a load of buckshot went whistling through the leaves of our tree. Then we went home. It was an accident; the man meant well, and he was very sorry, and I held my tongue.
The next afternoon I was one of a small party on a drive over the roads at the lower end of the valley, and of course had no gun, A bear broke out of the brush, crossed the road fifty yards ahead of the team, and went down to the meadow. It was not expedient to say all that occurred to me before comparative strangers; so I jumped from the buckboard, picked up a cudgel and lit out after that bear on a lope. He had a good start and when he discovered that he was being followed he clawed dirt to increase his lead and beat me out to the bank of the Merced. For a moment he hesitated about going into the swift water, but he decided that he would rather swim than listen to offensive personalities, and over the bank he plunged.
It was a relief to sit there, watching him swim the rapids, and feel free to say all the things I hadn't said to the man who dropped the gun, with a few general observations on the perversity of bears and bear-hunters' luck thrown in for good measure.
Bears were all over the place that year. They blundered into the roads at night and scared teams, broke into the cabin in Mariposa Grove and ate up all the grub and a sack of sugar pine seed worth a dollar a pound, and Captain Wood and I never got a shot in three weeks' of diligent hunting. The only man who had any luck was Lieutenant Davis; that is, not counting Private McNamara, who had bigger luck than a man who wounds a big Grizzly and runs really has coming to him. McNamara's luck will be seen later.
Davis killed two bears on the Perigord Meadows and one on Rush Creek, and wounded a large Grizzly in Devil's Gulch. It was a lucky shot that he made in the dark on Rush Creek. A troop horse had died about a quarter of a mile below the cavalry camp, on the edge of the National Park, and the men had seen bear tracks around the carcass. Davis and an Illinois preacher, who was roughing it for his health with the troopers, took their blankets one night and camped about thirty yards from the dead horse to await the coming of the bear. The moon was not due to rise until about midnight, and Davis pulled off his boots, rolled up in his blanket and went to sleep. The preacher was not sleepy, and was not entirely confident that it was bear nature to wait for moonlight before starting out on the prowl. So he made a small fire and sat beside it, toasting his toes and thinking of things.
Just before midnight Davis awoke, looked at his watch, and said: "Well, parson, it is about time for the moon to show up, and the bear is likely to come pretty soon. You'd better put out your fire."
The preacher shoved some dirt over the embers with his foot, and Davis had just returned his watch to his pocket, when the sound of the crunching of gravel was heard from the bank just above the carcass. Davis looked up and could just make out a huge dark form on the edge of the bank. He raised his carbine and fired point blank at the dark mass, and the report was answered by an angry growl. The bear leaped down the bank toward the hunters, and Davis sprang to his feet, dropping the carbine, and jumped into the creek, revolver in hand, to get into clear fighting ground. In doing so, he had to jump toward the bear, but he preferred close quarters in the creek bed, where the water was knee deep, to a scrimmage in the brush.
The preacher ran for his carbine, which was leaning against a tree twenty feet distant, but he had no opportunity to use it, for the bear made but one more plunge and fell into the water with the death gurgle in his throat. When Davis was certain that the bear was done for, he and the preacher ventured to examine the beast. They found that Davis had made one of the luckiest shots on record, having sent a carbine bullet through the heart of the big cinnamon bear, although he had taken no aim, and, when he fired, could not distinguish the bear's head from his tail.
They pulled the dead bear out of the water, and by the light of the moon, which had risen over the mountain, the preacher curiously examined the teeth and formidable claws of the first wild bear he had ever seen. He felt of the animal's enormous, muscular legs, and was profoundly impressed with the great strength of the brute.
"Well," said Davis, after he had inspected the body sufficiently, "we might as well turn in and sleep the rest of the night. The trail back to camp is too rough to follow in the night." And so saying he rolled up in his blankets.
"Sleep!" said the preacher; "sleep with those dum things wandering about! Not much." And the preacher rebuilt his fire, climbed upon a log, and roosted there, with cocked carbine, until daybreak, while the Lieutenant slept and snored.
The "other story" is about Private McNamara, a Grizzly, and some gray squirrels. McNamara got leave to go hunting, and went over to Devil's Gulch, the roughest canyon in the country and the best hiding place for big game. McNamara had good luck, and killed about a dozen gray squirrels, which he slung to his belt. He had turned homeward, and was picking his way through the fallen timber, when a Grizzly arose from behind a log about fifty yards away. McNamara raised his carbine and fired. The bear howled and started for him, and McNamara felt in his belt for another cartridge, but none was there. He had fired his last shot.
McNamara realized that he had to trust to his legs to get him out of that scrape, and he turned and ran faster than he ever sprinted in his life. But the bear was the better runner, and gained rapidly. The dangling squirrels impeded McNamara's action, and as he ran he tried to get rid of them. He pulled two loose and dropped them, and the Grizzly stopped to investigate. Bruin found them good, and he ate them in two gulps and resumed the chase.
McNamara dropped some more squirrels and gained a good lead, and then he unhooked his belt and dropped all that were left, and when the Grizzly finished the lot McNamara was out of sight across the river and getting his second wind for a long run home.
CHAPTER XI.
THE RIGHT OF WAY.
"It was pretty late in the season," said my friend, the prospector, "when I took a notion that I'd like to see what sort of a country lies north of the Umpqua River, in Oregon, and I struck into the mountains from Drain Station with my prospecting outfit and as much grub as I could pack upon my horse. After leaving Elk Creek I followed a hunting trail for a day, but after that it was rough scrambling up and down mountain sides and through gulches, and the horse and I had a pretty tough time. The Umpqua Mountains are terribly steep and wild and it's no fool of a job to cross them.
"There is any amount of game in those mountains, and where I went it never is hunted, and, therefore, not hard to find. If I had cared to shoot much, I could have killed a great many bears, but I wasn't in there for fun so much as for business, and I didn't shoot but one. Bear meat is no good at any time unless a man is starving, according to my notions, and in the summer it is worse than no good. Before berries are ripe a bear goes around clawing the bark from logs and dead trees and feeds on the borers and ants. He has a banquet when he strikes a well-populated ant heap, and then he smells and tastes like ants if you try to eat him. His meat is rank, and if you eat it for a day or two you will break out all over with a sort of rash that is mightily uncomfortable. There is no fur on a bear in summer and his skin is not worth taking, so you see there was no reason why I should fool away time and cartridges on Bruin. Besides, I rather like Bruin for his comical ways, and when he doesn't bother me, I'd rather watch him than shoot at him.
"I had to kill one big brown fellow, because he wouldn't get out of my way and my horse was afraid to pass him. He was on a narrow ridge that I was following in order to keep out of the heavy timber, and the bear sat upon his haunches right in my way. Probably he never saw a man before, for he didn't seem to be in the least disturbed when I hove in sight leading the horse. I supposed he would drop on all fours and scuttle away, but not a bit of it. He had struck something new and was going to see the whole show. There he sat, with his forepaws hanging down and his head cocked on one side, looking at the procession with the liveliest curiosity in his face. There was nothing wicked in his appearance, and if it hadn't been for the horse I think I would have passed within three yards of him without any trouble. As it was, I dragged the horse up to within twenty feet, but then he hung back, snorted and protested so vigorously that I was afraid he would back over the edge and fall down the steep mountain side.
"Letting the horse back away a few yards, I tied his halter to a scrub tree and then advanced toward the bear with my rifle in my left hand. He didn't budge, and when I yelled at him he only started a little and cocked his head over on the other side. That made me laugh, and then I amused myself by talking to him. 'Why don't you move?' said I. 'I know you got here first and have a squatter claim on the quarter-section, but you ought not to sit down on public travel in that way.' He looked at me as though I was the oddest specimen he ever came across, and scratched his ear with his left paw.
"'You musn't mind my friend here,' I said, pointing to the horse; 'he's a little shy in society, but he means well. If you'll move to one side, we'll pass on.' It was a fool sort of an idea, standing there and talking to a bear, but I was interested in studying the expression of his face and seeing how puzzled he seemed to be at the sound of my voice. He'd rub his ear or his nose once in a while, and then look up, as though he were saying: 'Just repeat that; I don't quite make out what you are driving at,' and then he'd assume a look of the most intense interest. I don't know how long he would have remained there, but I got tired of the fun and threw a stick at him. It would have hit him on the nose, but he warded it off very cleverly, and then his manner changed. He growled a little and began swaying his head from side to side, and when I saw the green glint come into his eyes—the danger signal that all the carnivorae flash and all hunters heed—I knew the time was up for airy persiflage and that I was in for a 'scambling and unquiet time' unless I promptly took up the quarrel. It was an easy shot, through the throat to the base of the skull, and the bullet smashed the spinal cord.
"That was the only bear, other than a Grizzly, that I ever saw dispute the right of way of a man through the woods."