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Title: Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches

Author: Theodore Roosevelt

Release Date: July, 2002  [Etext #3337]
[Yes, we are about one year ahead of schedule]
[The actual date this file first posted = 04/05/01]

Edition: 10

Language: English

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                           PREPARER'S NOTE

  This text was prepared from a 1902 edition, published by G. P.
  Putnam's Sons, New York and London. It was originally published in
  1893. It is part II of "The Wilderness Hunter."

Etext prepared by Dagny, dagnyj@hotmail.com
and John Bickers, jbickers@ihug.co.nz





HUNTING THE GRISLY AND OTHER SKETCHES

by THEODORE ROOSEVELT




               An Account of the Big Game of the United
                   States and its Chase with Horse
                           Hound, and Rifle




                              CHAPTER I.

                    THE BISON OR AMERICAN BUFFALO.

When we became a nation in 1776, the buffaloes, the first animals to
vanish when the wilderness is settled, roved to the crests of the
mountains which mark the western boundaries of Pennsylvania, Virginia,
and the Carolinas. They were plentiful in what are now the States of
Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. But by the beginning of the present
century they had been driven beyond the Mississippi; and for the next
eighty years they formed one of the most distinctive and
characteristic features of existence on the great plains. Their
numbers were countless--incredible. In vast herds of hundreds of
thousands of individuals, they roamed from the Saskatchewan to the Rio
Grande and westward to the Rocky Mountains. They furnished all the
means of livelihood to the tribes of Horse Indians, and to the curious
population of French Metis, or Half-breeds, on the Red River, as well
as to those dauntless and archtypical wanderers, the white hunters and
trappers. Their numbers slowly diminished, but the decrease was very
gradual until after the Civil War. They were not destroyed by the
settlers, but by the railways and the skin hunters.

After the ending of the Civil War, the work of constructing trans-
continental railway lines was pushed forward with the utmost vigor.
These supplied cheap and indispensable, but hitherto wholly lacking,
means of transportation to the hunters; and at the same time the
demand for buffalo robes and hides became very great, while the
enormous numbers of the beasts, and the comparative ease with which
they were slaughtered, attracted throngs of adventurers. The result
was such a slaughter of big game as the world had never before seen;
never before were so many large animals of one species destroyed in so
short a time. Several million buffaloes were slain. In fifteen years
from the time the destruction fairly began the great herds were
exterminated. In all probability there are not now, all told, five
hundred head of wild buffaloes on the American continent; and no herd
of a hundred individuals has been in existence since 1884.

The first great break followed the building of the Union Pacific
Railway. All the buffaloes of the middle region were then destroyed,
and the others were split into two vast sets of herds, the northern
and the southern. The latter were destroyed first, about 1878; the
former not until 1883. My own chief experience with buffaloes was
obtained in the latter year, among small bands and scattered
individuals, near my ranch on the Little Missouri; I have related it
elsewhere. But two of my kinsmen were more fortunate, and took part in
the chase of these lordly beasts when the herds still darkened the
prairie as far as the eye could see.

During the first two months of 1877, my brother Elliott, then a lad
not seventeen years old, made a buffalo-hunt toward the edge of the
Staked Plains in Northern Texas. He was thus in at the death of the
southern herds; for all, save a few scattering bands, were destroyed
within two years of this time. He was with my cousin, John Roosevelt,
and they went out on the range with six other adventurers. It was a
party of just such young men as frequently drift to the frontier. All
were short of cash, and all were hardy, vigorous fellows, eager for
excitement and adventure. My brother was much the youngest of the
party, and the least experienced; but he was well-grown, strong and
healthy, and very fond of boxing, wrestling, running, riding, and
shooting; moreover, he had served an apprenticeship in hunting deer
and turkeys. Their mess-kit, ammunition, bedding, and provisions were
carried in two prairie-wagons, each drawn by four horse. In addition
to the teams they had six saddle-animals--all of them shaggy, unkempt
mustangs. Three or four dogs, setters and half-bred greyhounds,
trotted along behind the wagons. Each man took his turn for two days
as teamster and cook; and there were always two with the wagons, or
camp, as the case might be, while the other six were off hunting,
usually in couples. The expedition was undertaken partly for sport and
partly with the hope of profit; for, after purchasing the horses and
wagons, none of the party had any money left, and they were forced to
rely upon selling skins and hides, and, when near the forts, meat.

They started on January 2nd, and shaped their course for the head-
waters of the Salt Fork of the Brazos, the centre of abundance for the
great buffalo herds. During the first few days they were in the
outskirts of the settled country, and shot only small game--quail and
prairie fowl; then they began to kill turkey, deer, and antelope.
These they swapped for flour and feed at the ranches or squalid,
straggling frontier towns. On several occasions the hunters were lost,
spending the night out in the open, or sleeping at a ranch, if one was
found. Both towns and ranches were filled with rough customers; all of
my brother's companions were muscular, hot-headed fellows; and as a
consequence they were involved in several savage free fights, in
which, fortunately, nobody was seriously hurt. My brother kept a very
brief diary, the entries being fairly startling from their
conciseness. A number of times, the mention of their arrival, either
at a halting-place, a little village, or a rival buffalo-camp is
followed by the laconic remark, "big fight," or "big row"; but once
they evidently concluded discretion to be the better part of valor,
the entry for January 20th being, "On the road--passed through Belknap
--too lively, so kept on to the Brazos--very late." The buffalo-camps
in particular were very jealous of one another, each party regarding
itself as having exclusive right to the range it was the first to
find; and on several occasions this feeling came near involving my
brother and his companions in serious trouble.

While slowly driving the heavy wagons to the hunting grounds they
suffered the usual hardships of plains travel. The weather, as in most
Texas winters, alternated between the extremes of heat and cold. There
had been little rain; in consequence water was scarce. Twice they were
forced to cross wild, barren wastes, where the pools had dried up, and
they suffered terribly from thirst. On the first occasion the horses
were in good condition, and they travelled steadily, with only
occasional short halts, for over thirty-six hours, by which time they
were across the waterless country. The journal reads: "January 27th--
Big hunt--no water, and we left Quinn's blockhouse this morning 3 A.M.
--on the go all night--hot. January 28--No water--hot--at seven we
struck water, and by eight Stinking Creek--grand 'hurrah.' " On the
second occasion, the horses were weak and travelled slowly, so the
party went forty-eight hours without drinking. "February 19th--Pulled
on twenty-one miles--trail bad--freezing night, no water, and wolves
after our fresh meat. 20--Made nineteen miles over prairie; again only
mud, no water, freezing hard--frightful thirst. 21st--Thirty miles to
Clear Fork, fresh water." These entries were hurriedly jotted down at
the time, by a boy who deemed it unmanly to make any especial note of
hardship or suffering; but every plainsman will understand the real
agony implied in working hard for two nights, one day, and portions of
two others, without water, even in cool weather. During the last few
miles the staggering horses were only just able to drag the lightly
loaded wagon,--for they had but one with them at the time,--while the
men plodded along in sullen silence, their mouths so parched that they
could hardly utter a word. My own hunting and ranching were done in
the north where there is more water; so I have never had a similar
experience. Once I took a team in thirty-six hours across a country
where there was no water; but by good luck it rained heavily in the
night, so that the horses had plenty of wet grass, and I caught the
rain in my slicker, and so had enough water for myself. Personally, I
have but once been as long as twenty-six hours without water.

The party pitched their permanent camp in a canyon of the Brazos known
as Canyon Blanco. The last few days of their journey they travelled
beside the river through a veritable hunter's paradise. The drought
had forced all the animals to come to the larger water-courses, and
the country was literally swarming with game. Every day, and all day
long, the wagons travelled through the herds of antelopes that grazed
on every side, while, whenever they approached the canyon brink, bands
of deer started from the timber that fringed the river's course;
often, even the deer wandered out on the prairie with the antelope.
Nor was the game shy; for the hunters, both red and white, followed
only the buffaloes, until the huge, shaggy herds were destroyed, and
the smaller beasts were in consequence but little molested.

Once my brother shot five antelopes from a single stand, when the
party were short of fresh venison; he was out of sight and to leeward,
and the antelopes seemed confused rather than alarmed at the rifle-
reports and the fall of their companions. As was to be expected where
game was so plenty, wolves and coyotes also abounded. At night they
surrounded the camp, wailing and howling in a kind of shrieking chorus
throughout the hours of darkness; one night they came up so close that
the frightened horses had to be hobbled and guarded. On another
occasion a large wolf actually crept into camp, where he was seized by
the dogs, and the yelling, writhing knot of combatants rolled over one
of the sleepers; finally, the long-toothed prowler managed to shake
himself loose, and vanished in the gloom. One evening they were almost
as much startled by a visit of a different kind. They were just
finishing supper when an Indian stalked suddenly and silently out of
the surrounding darkness, squatted down in the circle of firelight,
remarked gravely, "Me Tonk," and began helping himself from the stew.
He belonged to the friendly tribe of Tonkaways, so his hosts speedily
recovered their equanimity; as for him, he had never lost his, and he
sat eating by the fire until there was literally nothing left to eat.
The panic caused by his appearance was natural; for at that time the
Comanches were a scourge to the Buffalo-hunters, ambushing them and
raiding their camps; and several bloody fights had taken place.

Their camp had been pitched near a deep pool or water-hole. On both
sides the bluffs rose like walls, and where they had crumbled and lost
their sheerness, the vast buffalo herds, passing and repassing for
countless generations, had worn furrowed trails so deep that the backs
of the beasts were but little above the surrounding soil. In the
bottom, and in places along the crests of the cliffs that hemmed in
the canyon-like valley, there were groves of tangled trees, tenanted
by great flocks of wild turkeys. Once my brother made two really
remarkable shots at a pair of these great birds. It was at dusk, and
they were flying directly overhead from one cliff to the other. He had
in his hand a thirty-eight calibre Ballard rifle, and, as the gobblers
winged their way heavily by, he brought both down with two successive
bullets. This was of course mainly a piece of mere luck; but it meant
good shooting, too. The Ballard was a very accurate, handy little
weapon; it belonged to me, and was the first rifle I ever owned or
used. With it I had once killed a deer, the only specimen of large
game I had then shot; and I presented the rifle to my brother when he
went to Texas. In our happy ignorance we deemed it quite good enough
for Buffalo or anything else; but out on the plains my brother soon
found himself forced to procure a heavier and more deadly weapon.

When camp was pitched the horses were turned loose to graze and
refresh themselves after their trying journey, during which they had
lost flesh woefully. They were watched and tended by the two men who
were always left in camp, and, save on rare occasions, were only used
to haul in the buffalo hides. The camp-guards for the time being acted
as cooks; and, though coffee and flour both ran short and finally gave
out, fresh meat of every kind was abundant. The camp was never without
buffalo-beef, deer and antelope venison, wild turkeys, prairie-
chickens, quails, ducks, and rabbits. The birds were simply "potted,"
as occasion required; when the quarry was deer or antelope, the
hunters took the dogs with them to run down the wounded animals. But
almost the entire attention of the hunters was given to the buffalo.
After an evening spent in lounging round the campfire and a sound
night's sleep, wrapped in robes and blankets, they would get up before
daybreak, snatch a hurried breakfast, and start off in couples through
the chilly dawn. The great beasts were very plentiful; in the first
day's hunt twenty were slain; but the herds were restless and ever on
the move. Sometimes they would be seen right by the camp, and again it
would need an all-day's tramp to find them. There was no difficulty in
spying them--the chief trouble with forest game; for on the prairie a
buffalo makes no effort to hide and its black, shaggy bulk looms up as
far as the eye can see. Sometimes they were found in small parties of
three or four individuals, sometimes in bands of about two hundred,
and again in great herds of many thousands; and solitary old bulls,
expelled from the herds, were common. If on broken land, among the
hills and ravines, there was not much difficulty in approaching from
the leeward; for, though the sense of smell in the buffalo is very
acute, they do not see well at a distance through their overhanging
frontlets of coarse and matted hair. If, as was generally the case,
they were out in the open, rolling prairie, the stalking was far more
difficult. Every hollow, every earth hummock and sagebush had to be
used as cover. The hunter wriggled through the grass flat on his face,
pushing himself along for perhaps a quarter of a mile by his toes and
fingers, heedless of the spiny cactus. When near enough to the huge,
unconscious quarry the hunter began firing, still keeping himself
carefully concealed. If the smoke was blown away by the wind, and if
the buffaloes caught no glimpse of the assailant, they would often
stand motionless and stupid until many of their number had been slain,
the hunter being careful not to fire too high, aiming just behind the
shoulder, about a third of the way up the body, that his bullet might
go through the lungs. Sometimes, even after they saw the man, they
would act as if confused and panic-struck, huddling together and
staring at the smoke puffs; but generally they were off at a lumbering
gallop as soon as they had an idea of the point of danger. When once
started, they ran for many miles before halting, and their pursuit on
foot was extremely laborious.

One morning my cousin and brother had been left in camp as guards.
They were sitting idly warming themselves in the first sunbeams, when
their attention was sharply drawn to four buffaloes that were coming
to the pool to drink. The beasts came down a game trail, a deep rut in
the bluff, fronting where they were sitting, and they did not dare to
stir for fear of being discovered. The buffaloes walked into the pool,
and after drinking their fill, stood for some time with the water
running out of their mouths, idly lashing their sides with their short
tails, enjoying the bright warmth of the early sunshine; then, with
much splashing and the gurgling of soft mud, they left the pool and
clambered up the bluff with unwieldy agility. As soon as they turned,
my brother and cousin ran for their rifles, but before they got back
the buffaloes had crossed the bluff crest. Climbing after them, the
two hunters found, when they reached the summit, that their game,
instead of halting, had struck straight off across the prairie at a
slow lope, doubtless intending to rejoin the herd they had left. After
a moment's consultation the men went in pursuit, excitement overcoming
their knowledge that they ought not, by rights, to leave camp. They
struck a steady trot, following the animals by sight until they passed
over a knoll, and then trailing them. Where the grass was long, as it
was for the first four or five miles, this was a work of no
difficulty, and they did not break their gait, only glancing now and
then at the trial. As the sun rose and the day became warm, their
breathing grew quicker; and the sweat rolled off their faces as they
ran across the rough prairie sward, up and down the long inclines, now
and then shifting their heavy rifles from one shoulder to the other.
But they were in good training, and they did not have to halt. At last
they reached stretches of bare ground, sun-baked and grassless, where
the trail grew dim; and here they had to go very slowly, carefully
examining the faint dents and marks made in the soil by the heavy
hoofs, and unravelling the trail from the mass of old footmarks. It
was tedious work, but it enabled them to completely recover their
breath by the time that they again struck the grassland; and but a few
hundred yards from the edge, in a slight hollow, they saw the four
buffaloes just entering a herd of fifty or sixty that were scattered
out grazing. The herd paid no attention to the new-comers, and these
immediately began to feed greedily. After a whispered consultation,
the two hunters crept back, and made a long circle that brought them
well to leeward of the herd, in line with a slight rise in the ground.
They then crawled up to this rise and, peering through the tufts of
tall, rank grass, saw the unconscious beasts a hundred and twenty-five
or fifty yards away. They fired together, each mortally wounding his
animal, and then, rushing in as the herd halted in confusion, and
following them as they ran, impeded by numbers, hurry, and panic, they
eventually got three more.

On another occasion the same two hunters nearly met with a frightful
death, being overtaken by a vast herd of stampeded buffaloes. All the
animals that go in herds are subject to these instantaneous attacks of
uncontrollable terror, under the influence of which they become
perfectly mad, and rush headlong in dense masses on any form of death.
Horses, and more especially cattle, often suffer from stampedes; it is
a danger against which the cowboys are compelled to be perpetually on
guard. A band of stampeded horses, sweeping in mad terror up a valley,
will dash against a rock or tree with such violence as to leave
several dead animals at its base, while the survivors race on without
halting; they will overturn and destroy tents and wagons, and a man on
foot caught in the rush has but a small chance for his life. A buffalo
stampede is much worse--or rather was much worse, in the old days--
because of the great weight and immense numbers of the beasts, which,
in a fury of heedless terror, plunged over cliffs and into rivers, and
bore down whatever was in their path. On the occasion in question, my
brother and cousin were on their way homeward. They were just mounting
one of the long, low swells, into which the prairie was broken, when
they heard a low, muttering, rumbling noise, like far-off thunder. It
grew steadily louder, and, not knowing what it meant, they hurried
forward to the top of the rise. As they reached it, they stopped short
in terror and amazement, for before them the whole prairie was black
with madly rushing buffaloes.

Afterward they learned that another couple of hunters, four or five
miles off, had fired into and stampeded a large herd. This herd, in
its rush, gathered others, all thundering along together in
uncontrollable and increasing panic.

The surprised hunters were far away from any broken ground or other
place of refuge, while the vast herd of huge, plunging, maddened
beasts was charging straight down on them not a quarter of a mile
distant. Down they came!--thousands upon thousands, their front
extending a mile in breadth, while the earth shook beneath their
thunderous gallop, and, as they came closer, their shaggy frontlets
loomed dimly through the columns of dust thrown up from the dry soil.
The two hunters knew that their only hope for life was to split the
herd, which, though it had so broad a front, was not very deep. If
they failed they would inevitably be trampled to death.

Waiting until the beasts were in close range, they opened a rapid fire
from their heavy breech-loading rifles, yelling at the top of their
voices. For a moment the result seemed doubtful. The line thundered
steadily down on them; then it swayed violently, as two or three of
the brutes immediately in front fell beneath the bullets, while their
neighbors made violent efforts to press off sideways. Then a narrow
wedge-shaped rift appeared in the line, and widened as it came closer,
and the buffaloes, shrinking from their foes in front, strove
desperately to edge away from the dangerous neighborhood; the shouts
and shots were redoubled; the hunters were almost choked by the cloud
of dust, through which they could see the stream of dark huge bodies
passing within rifle-length on either side; and in a moment the peril
was over, and the two men were left alone on the plain, unharmed,
though with their nerves terribly shaken. The herd careered on toward
the horizon, save five individuals which had been killed or disabled
by the shots.

On another occasion, when my brother was out with one of his friends,
they fired at a small herd containing an old bull; the bull charged
the smoke, and the whole herd followed him. Probably they were simply
stampeded, and had no hostile intention; at any rate, after the death
of their leader, they rushed by without doing any damage.

But buffaloes sometimes charged with the utmost determination, and
were then dangerous antagonists. My cousin, a very hardy and resolute
hunter, had a narrow escape from a wounded cow which he had followed
up a steep bluff or sand cliff. Just as he reached the summit, he was
charged, and was only saved by the sudden appearance of his dog, which
distracted the cow's attention. He thus escaped with only a tumble and
a few bruises.

My brother also came in for a charge, while killing the biggest bull
that was slain by any of the party. He was out alone, and saw a small
herd of cows and calves at some distance, with a huge bull among them,
towering above them like a giant. There was no break in the ground,
nor any tree nor bush near them, but, by making a half-circle, my
brother managed to creep up against the wind behind a slight roll in
the prairie surface, until he was within seventy-five yards of the
grazing and unconscious beasts. There were some cows and calves
between him and the bull, and he had to wait some moments before they
shifted position, as the herd grazed onward and gave him a fair shot;
in the interval they had moved so far forward that he was in plain
view. His first bullet struck just behind the shoulders; the herd
started and looked around, but the bull merely lifted his head and
took a step forward, his tail curled up over his back. The next bullet
likewise struck fair, nearly in the same place, telling with a loud
"pack!" against the thick hide, and making the dust fly up from the
matted hair. Instantly the great bull wheeled and charged in headlong
anger, while the herd fled in the opposite direction. On the bare
prairie, with no spot of refuge, it was useless to try to escape, and
the hunter, with reloaded rifle, waited until the bull was not far
off, then drew up his weapon and fired. Either he was nervous, or the
bull at the moment bounded over some obstacle, for the bullet went a
little wild; nevertheless, by good luck, it broke a fore-leg, and the
great beast came crashing to the earth, and was slain before it could
struggle to its feet.

Two days after this even, a war party of Comanches swept down along
the river. They "jumped" a neighboring camp, killing one man and
wounding two more, and at the same time ran off all but three of the
horses belonging to our eight adventurers. With the remaining three
horses and one wagon they set out homeward. The march was hard and
tedious; they lost their way and were in jeopardy from quicksands and
cloudbursts; they suffered from thirst and cold, their shoes gave out,
and their feet were lamed by cactus spines. At last they reached Fort
Griffen in safety, and great was their ravenous rejoicing when they
procured some bread--for during the final fortnight of the hunt they
had been without flour or vegetables of any kind, or even coffee, and
had subsisted on fresh meat "straight." Nevertheless, it was a very
healthy, as well as a very pleasant and exciting experience; and I
doubt if any of those who took part in it will ever forget their great
buffalo-hunt on the Brazos.

My friend, Gen. W. H. Walker, of Virginia, had an experience in the
early '50's with buffaloes on the upper Arkansas River, which gives
some idea of their enormous numbers at that time. He was camped with a
scouting party on the banks of the river, and had gone out to try to
shoot some meat. There were many buffaloes in sight, scattered,
according to their custom, in large bands. When he was a mile or two
away from the river a dull roaring sound in the distance attracted his
attention, and he saw that a herd of buffalo far to the south, away
from the river, had been stampeded and was running his way. He knew
that if he was caught in the open by the stampeded herd his chance for
life would be small, and at once ran for the river. By desperate
efforts he reached the breaks in the sheer banks just as the buffaloes
reached them, and got into a position of safety on the pinnacle of a
little bluff. From this point of vantage he could see the entire
plain. To the very verge of the horizon the brown masses of the
buffalo bands showed through the dust clouds, coming on with a
thunderous roar like that of surf. Camp was a mile away, and the
stampede luckily passed to one side of it. Watching his chance he
finally dodged back to the tent, and all that afternoon watched the
immense masses of buffalo, as band after band tore to the brink of the
bluffs on one side, raced down them, rushed through the water, up the
bluffs on the other side, and again off over the plain, churning the
sandy, shallow stream into a ceaseless tumult. When darkness fell
there was no apparent decrease in the numbers that were passing, and
all through that night the continuous roar showed that the herds were
still threshing across the river. Towards dawn the sound at last
ceased, and General Walker arose somewhat irritated, as he had
reckoned on killing an ample supply of meat, and he supposed that
there would be now no bison left south of the river. To his
astonishment, when he strolled up on the bluffs and looked over the
plain, it was still covered far and wide with groups of buffalo,
grazing quietly. Apparently there were as many on that side as ever,
in spite of the many scores of thousands that must have crossed over
the river during the stampede of the afternoon and night. The barren-
ground caribou is the only American animal which is now ever seen in
such enormous herds.

In 1862 Mr. Clarence King, while riding along the overland trail
through western Kansas, passed through a great buffalo herd, and was
himself injured in an encounter with a bull. The great herd was then
passing north, and Mr. King reckoned that it must have covered an area
nearly seventy miles by thirty in extent; the figures representing his
rough guess, made after travelling through the herd crosswise, and
upon knowing how long it took to pass a given point going northward.
This great herd of course was not a solid mass of buffaloes; it
consisted of innumerable bands of every size, dotting the prairie
within the limits given. Mr. King was mounted on a somewhat
unmanageable horse. On one occasion in following a band he wounded a
large bull, and became so wedged in by the maddened animals that he
was unable to avoid the charge of the bull, which was at its last
gasp. Coming straight toward him it leaped into the air and struck the
afterpart of the saddle full with its massive forehead. The horse was
hurled to the ground with a broken back, and King's leg was likewise
broken, while the bull turned a complete somerset over them and never
rose again.

In the recesses of the Rocky Mountains, from Colorado northward
through Alberta, and in the depths of the subarctic forest beyond the
Saskatchewan, there have always been found small numbers of the bison,
locally called the mountain buffalo and wood buffalo; often indeed the
old hunters term these animals "bison," although they never speak of
the plains animals save as buffalo. They form a slight variety of what
was formerly the ordinary plains bison, intergrading with it; on the
whole they are darker in color, with longer, thicker hair, and in
consequence with the appearance of being heavier-bodied and shorter-
legged. They have been sometimes spoken of as forming a separate
species; but, judging from my own limited experience, and from a
comparison of the many hides I have seen, I think they are really the
same animal, many individuals of the two so-called varieties being
quite indistinguishable. In fact, the only moderate-sized herd of wild
bison in existence to-day, the protected herd in the Yellowstone Park,
is composed of animals intermediate in habits and coat between the
mountain and plains varieties--as were all the herds of the Bighorn,
Big Hole, Upper Madison, and Upper Yellowstone valleys.

However, the habitat of these wood and mountain bison yielded them
shelter from hunters in a way that the plains never could, and hence
they have always been harder to kill in the one place than in the
other; for precisely the same reasons that have held good with the
elk, which have been completely exterminated from the plains, while
still abundant in many of the forest fastnesses of the Rockies.
Moreover, the bison's dull eyesight is no special harm in the woods,
while it is peculiarly hurtful to the safety of any beast on the
plains, where eyesight avails more than any other sense, the true game
of the plains being the prong-buck, the most keen-sighted of American
animals. On the other hand the bison's hearing, of little avail on the
plains, is of much assistance in the woods; and its excellent nose
helps equally in both places.

Though it was always more difficult to kill the bison of the forests
and the mountains than the bison of the prairie, yet now that the
species is, in its wild state, hovering on the brink of extinction,
the difficulty is immeasurably increased. A merciless and terrible
process of natural selection, in which the agents were rifle-bearing
hunters, has left as the last survivors in a hopeless struggle for
existence only the wariest of the bison and those gifted with the
sharpest senses. That this was true of the last lingering individuals
that survived the great slaughter on the plains is well shown by Mr.
Hornaday in his graphic account of his campaign against the few
scattered buffalo which still lived in 1886 between the Missouri and
the Yellowstone, along the Big Dry. The bison of the plains and the
prairies have now vanished; and so few of their brethren of the
mountains and the northern forests are left, that they can just barely
be reckoned among American game; but whoever is so fortunate as to
find any of these animals must work his hardest, and show all his
skill as a hunter if he wishes to get one.

In the fall of 1889 I heard that a very few bison were still left
around the head of Wisdom river. Thither I went and hunted faithfully;
there was plenty of game of other kind, but of bison not a trace did
we see. Nevertheless a few days later that same year I came across
these great wild cattle at a time when I had no idea of seeing them.

It was, as nearly as we could tell, in Idaho, just south of the
Montana boundary line, and some twenty-five miles west of the line of
Wyoming. We were camped high among the mountains, with a small pack-
train. On the day in question we had gone out to find moose, but had
seen no sign of them, and had then begun to climb over the higher
peaks with an idea of getting sheep. The old hunter who was with me
was, very fortunately, suffering from rheumatism, and he therefore
carried a long staff instead of his rifle; I say fortunately, for if
he had carried his rifle it would have been impossible to stop his
firing at such game as bison, nor would he have spared the cows and
calves.

About the middle of the afternoon we crossed a low, rocky ridge, above
timber line, and saw at our feet a basin or round valley of singular
beauty. Its walls were formed by steep mountains. At its upper end lay
a small lake, bordered on one side by a meadow of emerald green. The
lake's other side marked the edge of the frowning pine forest which
filled the rest of the valley, and hung high on the sides of the gorge
which formed its outlet. Beyond the lake the ground rose in a pass
evidently much frequented by game in bygone days, their trails lying
along it in thick zigzags, each gradually fading out after a few
hundred yards, and then starting again in a little different place, as
game trails so often seem to do.

We bent our steps toward these trails, and no sooner had we reached
the first than the old hunter bent over it with a sharp exclamation of
wonder. There in the dust were the unmistakable hoof-marks of a small
band of bison, apparently but a few hours old. They were headed
towards the lake. There had been a half a dozen animals in the party;
one a big bull, and two calves.

We immediately turned and followed the trail. It led down to the
little lake, where the beasts had spread and grazed on the tender,
green blades, and had drunk their fill. The footprints then came
together again, showing where the animals had gathered and walked off
in single file to the forest. Evidently they had come to the pool in
the early morning, walking over the game pass from some neighboring
valley, and after drinking and feeding had moved into the pine forest
to find some spot for their noontide rest.

It was a very still day, and there were nearly three hours of daylight
left. Without a word my silent companion, who had been scanning the
whole country with hawk-eyed eagerness, besides scrutinizing the sign
on his hands and knees, took the trail, motioning me to follow. In a
moment we entered the woods, breathing a sigh of relief as we did so;
for while in the meadow we could never tell that the buffalo might not
see us, if they happened to be lying in some place with a commanding
lookout.

The old hunter was thoroughly roused, and he showed himself a very
skilful tracker. We were much favored by the character of the forest,
which was rather open, and in most places free from undergrowth and
down timber. As in most Rocky Mountain forests the timber was small,
not only as compared to the giant trees of the groves of the Pacific
coast, but as compared to the forests of the northeast. The ground was
covered with pine needles and soft moss, so that it was not difficult
to walk noiselessly. Once or twice when I trod on a small dry twig, or
let the nails in my shoes clink slightly against a stone, the hunter
turned to me with a frown of angry impatience; but as he walked
slowly, continually halting to look ahead, as well as stooping over to
examine the trail, I did not find it very difficult to move silently.
I kept a little behind him, and to one side, save when he crouched to
take advantage of some piece of cover, and I crept in his footsteps. I
did not look at the trail at all, but kept watching ahead, hoping at
any moment to see the game.

It was not very long before we struck their day beds, which were made
on a knoll, where the forest was open and where there was much down
timber. After leaving the day beds the animals had at first fed
separately around the grassy base and sides of the knoll, and had then
made off in their usual single file, going straight to a small pool in
the forest. After drinking they had left this pool, and travelled down
towards the gorge at the mouth of the basin, the trail leading along
the sides of the steep hill, which were dotted by open glades; while
the roar of the cataracts by which the stream was broken, ascended
from below. Here we moved with redoubled caution, for the sign had
grown very fresh and the animals had once more scattered and begun
feeding. When the trail led across the glades we usually skirted them
so as to keep in the timber.

At last, on nearing the edge of one of these glades we saw a movement
among the young trees on the other side, not fifty yards away. Peering
through the safe shelter yielded by some thick evergreen bushes, we
speedily made out three bison, a cow, a calf, and a yearling, grazing
greedily on the other side of the glade, under the fringing timber;
all with their heads up hill. Soon another cow and calf stepped out
after them. I did not wish to shoot, waiting for the appearance of the
big bull which I knew was accompanying them.

So for several minutes I watched the great, clumsy, shaggy beasts, as
all unconscious they grazed in the open glade. Behind them rose the
dark pines. At the left of the glade the ground fell away to form the
side of a chasm; down in its depths the cataracts foamed and
thundered; beyond, the huge mountains towered, their crests crimsoned
by the sinking sun. Mixed with the eager excitement of the hunter was
a certain half melancholy feeling as I gazed on these bison,
themselves part of the last remnant of a doomed and nearly vanished
race. Few, indeed, are the men who now have, or evermore shall have,
the chance of seeing the mightiest of American beasts, in all his wild
vigor, surrounded by the tremendous desolation of his far-off mountain
home.

At last, when I had begun to grow very anxious lest the others should
take alarm, the bull likewise appeared on the edge of the glade, and
stood with outstretched head, scratching his throat against a young
tree, which shook violently. I aimed low, behind his shoulder, and
pulled trigger. At the crack of the rifle all the bison, without the
momentary halt of terror-struck surprise so common among game, turned
and raced off at headlong speed. The fringe of young pines beyond and
below the glade cracked and swayed as if a whirlwind were passing, and
in another moment they reached the top of a very steep incline,
thickly strewn with boulders and dead timber. Down this they plunged
with reckless speed; their surefootedness was a marvel in such
seemingly unwieldy beasts. A column of dust obscured their passage,
and under its cover they disappeared in the forest; but the trail of
the bull was marked by splashes of frothy blood, and we followed it at
a trot. Fifty yards beyond the border of the forest we found the stark
black body stretched motionless. He was a splendid old bull, still in
his full vigor, with large, sharp horns, and heavy mane and glossy
coat; and I felt the most exulting pride as I handled and examined
him; for I had procured a trophy such as can fall henceforth to few
hunters indeed.

It was too late to dress the beast that evening; so, after taking out
the tongue and cutting off enough meat for supper and breakfast, we
scrambled down to near the torrent, and after some search found a good
spot for camping. Hot and dusty from the day's hard tramp, I undressed
and took a plunge in the stream, the icy water making me gasp. Then,
having built a slight lean-to of brush, and dragged together enough
dead timber to burn all night, we cut long alder twigs, sat down
before some embers raked apart, and grilled and ate our buffalo meat
with the utmost relish. Night had fallen; a cold wind blew up the
valley; the torrent roared as it leaped past us, and drowned our words
as we strove to talk over our adventures and success; while the flame
of the fire flickered and danced, lighting up with continual vivid
flashes the gloom of the forest round about.



                             CHAPTER II.

                           THE BLACK BEAR.

Next to the whitetail deer the black bear is the commonest and most
widely distributed of American big game. It is still found quite
plentifully in northern New England, in the Adirondacks, Catskills,
and along the entire length of the Alleghanies, as well as in the
swamps and canebrakes of the southern States. It is also common in the
great forests of northern Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, and
throughout the Rocky Mountains and the timbered ranges of the Pacific
coast. In the East it has always ranked second only to the deer among
the beasts of chase. The bear and the buck were the staple objects of
pursuit of all the old hunters. They were more plentiful than the
bison and elk even in the long vanished days when these two great
monarchs of the forest still ranged eastward to Virginia and
Pennsylvania. The wolf and the cougar were always too scarce and too
shy to yield much profit to the hunters. The black bear is a timid,
cowardly animal, and usually a vegetarian, though it sometimes preys
on the sheep, hogs, and even cattle of the settler, and is very fond
of raiding his corn and melons. Its meat is good and its fur often
valuable; and in its chase there is much excitement, and occasionally
a slight spice of danger, just enough to render it attractive; so it
has always been eagerly followed. Yet it still holds its own, though
in greatly diminished numbers, in the more thinly settled portions of
the country. One of the standing riddles of American zoology is the
fact that the black bear, which is easier killed and less prolific
than the wolf, should hold its own in the land better than the latter,
this being directly the reverse of what occurs in Europe, where the
brown bear is generally exterminated before the wolf.

In a few wild spots in the East, in northern Maine for instance, here
and there in the neighborhood of the upper Great Lakes, in the east
Tennessee and Kentucky mountains and the swamps of Florida and
Mississippi, there still lingers an occasional representative of the
old wilderness hunters. These men live in log-cabins in the
wilderness. They do their hunting on foot, occasionally with the help
of a single trailing dog. In Maine they are as apt to kill moose and
caribou as bear and deer; but elsewhere the two last, with an
occasional cougar or wolf, are the beasts of chase which they follow.
Nowadays as these old hunters die there is no one to take their
places, though there are still plenty of backwoods settlers in all of
the regions named who do a great deal of hunting and trapping. Such an
old hunter rarely makes his appearance at the settlements except to
dispose of his peltry and hides in exchange for cartridges and
provisions, and he leads a life of such lonely isolation as to insure
his individual characteristics developing into peculiarities. Most of
the wilder districts in the eastern States still preserve memories of
some such old hunter who lived his long life alone, waging ceaseless
warfare on the vanishing game, whose oddities, as well as his courage,
hardihood, and woodcraft, are laughingly remembered by the older
settlers, and who is usually best known as having killed the last wolf
or bear or cougar ever seen in the locality.

Generally the weapon mainly relied on by these old hunters is the
rifle; and occasionally some old hunter will be found even to this day
who uses a muzzle loader, such as Kit Carson carried in the middle of
the century. There are exceptions to this rule of the rifle however.
In the years after the Civil War one of the many noted hunters of
southwest Virginia and east Tennessee was Wilber Waters, sometimes
called The Hunter of White Top. He often killed black bear with a
knife and dogs. He spent all his life in hunting and was very
successful, killing the last gang of wolves to be found in his
neighborhood; and he slew innumerable bears, with no worse results to
himself than an occasional bite or scratch.

In the southern States the planters living in the wilder regions have
always been in the habit of following the black bear with horse and
hound, many of them keeping regular packs of bear hounds. Such a pack
includes not only pure-bred hounds, but also cross-bred animals, and
some sharp, agile, hard-biting fierce dogs and terriers. They follow
the bear and bring him to bay but do not try to kill him, although
there are dogs of the big fighting breeds which can readily master a
black bear if loosed at him three or four at a time; but the dogs of
these southern bear-hound packs are not fitted for such work, and if
they try to close with the bear he is certain to play havoc with them,
disemboweling them with blows of his paws or seizing them in his arms
and biting through their spines or legs. The riders follow the hounds
through the canebrakes, and also try to make cutoffs and station
themselves at open points where they think the bear will pass, so that
they may get a shot at him. The weapons used are rifles, shotguns, and
occasionally revolvers.

Sometimes, however, the hunter uses the knife. General Wade Hampton,
who has probably killed more black bears than any other man living in
the United States, frequently used the knife, slaying thirty or forty
with this weapon. His plan was, when he found that the dogs had the
bear at bay, to walk up close and cheer them on. They would instantly
seize the bear in a body, and he would then rush in and stab it behind
the shoulder, reaching over so as to inflict the wound on the opposite
side from that where he stood. He escaped scathless from all these
encounters save one, in which he was rather severely torn in the
forearm. Many other hunters have used the knife, but perhaps none so
frequently as he; for he was always fond of steel, as witness his
feats with the "white arm" during the Civil War.

General Hampton always hunted with large packs of hounds, managed
sometimes by himself and sometimes by his negro hunters. He
occasionally took out forty dogs at a time. He found that all his dogs
together could not kill a big fat bear, but they occasionally killed
three-year-olds, or lean and poor bears. During the course of his life
he has himself killed, or been in at the death of, five hundred bears,
at least two thirds of them falling by his own hand. In the year just
before the war he had on one occasion, in Mississippi, killed sixty-
eight bears in five months. Once he killed four bears in a day; at
another time three, and frequently two. The two largest bears he
himself killed weighed, respectively, 408 and 410 pounds. They were
both shot in Mississippi. But he saw at least one bear killed which
was much larger than either of these. These figures were taken down at
the time, when the animals were actually weighed on the scales. Most
of his hunting for bear was done in northern Mississippi, where one of
his plantations was situated, near Greenville. During the half century
that he hunted, on and off, in this neighborhood, he knew of two
instances where hunters were fatally wounded in the chase of the black
bear. Both of the men were inexperienced, one being a raftsman who
came down the river, and the other a man from Vicksburg. He was not
able to learn the particulars in the last case, but the raftsman came
too close to a bear that was at bay, and it broke through the dogs,
rushed at and overthrew him, then lying on him, it bit him deeply in
the thigh, through the femoral artery, so that he speedily bled to
death.

But a black bear is not usually a formidable opponent, and though he
will sometimes charge home he is much more apt to bluster and bully
than actually to come to close quarters. I myself have but once seen a
man who had been hurt by one of these bears. This was an Indian. He
had come on the beast close up in a thick wood, and had mortally
wounded it with his gun; it had then closed with him, knocking the gun
out of his hand, so that he was forced to use his knife. It charged
him on all fours, but in the grapple, when it had failed to throw him
down, it raised itself on its hind legs, clasping him across the
shoulders with its fore-paws. Apparently it had no intention of
hugging, but merely sought to draw him within reach of his jaws. He
fought desperately against this, using the knife freely, and striving
to keep its head back; and the flow of blood weakened the animal, so
that it finally fell exhausted, before being able dangerously to
injure him. But it had bitten his left arm very severely, and its
claws had made long gashes on his shoulders.

Black bears, like grislies, vary greatly in their modes of attack.
Sometimes they rush in and bite; and again they strike with their
fore-paws. Two of my cowboys were originally from Maine, where I knew
them well. There they were fond of trapping bears and caught a good
many. The huge steel gins, attached by chains to heavy clogs,
prevented the trapped beasts from going far; and when found they were
always tied tight round some tree or bush, and usually nearly
exhausted. The men killed them either with a little 32-calibre pistol
or a hatchet. But once did they meet with any difficulty. On this
occasion one of them incautiously approached a captured bear to knock
it on the head with his hatchet, but the animal managed to partially
untwist itself, and with its free fore-arm made a rapid sweep at him;
he jumped back just in time, the bear's claws tearing his clothes--
after which he shot it. Bears are shy and have very keen noses; they
are therefore hard to kill by fair hunting, living, as they generally
do, in dense forests or thick brush. They are easy enough to trap,
however. Thus, these two men, though they trapped so many, never but
once killed them in any other way. On this occasion one of them, in
the winter, found in a great hollow log a den where a she and two
well-grown cubs had taken up their abode, and shot all three with his
rifle as they burst out.

Where they are much hunted, bear become purely nocturnal; but in the
wilder forests I have seen them abroad at all hours, though they do
not much relish the intense heat of noon. They are rather comical
animals to watch feeding and going about the ordinary business of
their lives. Once I spent half an hour lying at the edge of a wood and
looking at a black bear some three hundred yards off across an open
glade. It was in good stalking country, but the wind was unfavorable
and I waited for it to shift--waited too long as it proved, for
something frightened the beast and he made off before I could get a
shot at him. When I first saw him he was shuffling along and rooting
in the ground, so that he looked like a great pig. Then he began to
turn over the stones and logs to hunt for insects, small reptiles, and
the like. A moderate-sized stone he would turn over with a single clap
of his paw, and then plunge his nose down into the hollow to gobble up
the small creatures beneath while still dazed by the light. The big
logs and rocks he would tug and worry at with both paws; once, over-
exerting his clumsy strength, he lost his grip and rolled clean on his
back. Under some of the logs he evidently found mice and chipmunks;
then, as soon as the log was overturned, he would be seen jumping
about with grotesque agility, and making quick dabs here and there, as
the little, scurrying rodent turned and twisted, until at last he put
his paw on it and scooped it up into his mouth. Sometimes, probably
when he smelt the mice underneath, he would cautiously turn the log
over with one paw, holding the other lifted and ready to strike. Now
and then he would halt and sniff the air in every direction, and it
was after one of these halts that he suddenly shuffled off into the
woods.

Black bears generally feed on berries, nuts, insects, carrion, and the
like; but at times they take to killing very large animals. In fact,
they are curiously irregular in their food. They will kill deer if
they can get at them; but generally the deer are too quick. Sheep and
hogs are their favorite prey, especially the latter, for bears seem to
have a special relish for pork. Twice I have known a black bear kill
cattle. Once the victim was a bull which had got mired, and which the
bear deliberately proceeded to eat alive, heedless of the bellows of
the unfortunate beast. On the other occasion, a cow was surprised and
slain among some bushes at the edge of a remote pasture. In the
spring, soon after the long winter sleep, they are very hungry, and
are especially apt to attack large beasts at this time; although
during the very first days of their appearance, when they are just
breaking their fast, they eat rather sparingly, and by preference the
tender shoots of green grass and other herbs, or frogs and crayfish;
it is not for a week or two that they seem to be overcome by lean,
ravenous hunger. They will even attack and master that formidable
fighter the moose, springing at it from an ambush as it passes--for a
bull moose would surely be an overmatch for one of them if fronted
fairly in the open. An old hunter, whom I could trust, told me that he
had seen in the snow in early spring the place where a bear had sprung
at two moose, which were trotting together; he missed his spring, and
the moose got off, their strides after they settled down into their
pace being tremendous, and showing how thoroughly they were
frightened. Another time he saw a bear chase a moose into a lake,
where it waded out a little distance, and then turned to bay, bidding
defiance to his pursuer, the latter not daring to approach in the
water. I have been told--but cannot vouch for it--that instances have
been known where the bear, maddened by hunger, has gone in on a moose
thus standing at bay, only to be beaten down under the water by the
terrible fore-hoofs of the quarry, and to yield its life in the
contest. A lumberman told me that he once saw a moose, evidently much
startled, trot through a swamp, and immediately afterwards a bear came
up following the tracks. He almost ran into the man, and was evidently
not in a good temper, for he growled and blustered, and two or three
times made feints of charging, before he finally concluded to go off.

Bears will occasionally visit hunters' or lumberman's camps, in the
absence of the owners, and play sad havoc with all that therein is,
devouring everything eatable, especially if sweet, and trampling into
a dirty mess whatever they do not eat. The black bear does not average
much more than a third the size of the grisly; but, like all its kind,
it varies greatly in weight. The largest I myself ever saw weighed was
in Maine, and tipped the scale at 346 pounds; but I have a perfectly
authentic record of one in Maine that weighed 397, and my friend, Dr.
Hart Merriam, tells me that he has seen several in the Adirondacks
that when killed weighed about 350.

I have myself shot but one or two black bears, and these were obtained
under circumstances of no special interest, as I merely stumbled on
them while after other game, and killed them before they had a chance
either to run or show fight.



                             CHAPTER III.

                    OLD EPHRAIM, THE GRISLY BEAR.

The king of the game beasts of temperate North America, because the
most dangerous to the hunter, is the grisly bear; known to the few
remaining old-time trappers of the Rockies and the Great Plains,
sometimes as "Old Ephraim" and sometimes as "Moccasin Joe"--the last
in allusion to his queer, half-human footprints, which look as if made
by some mishapen giant, walking in moccasins.

Bear vary greatly in size and color, no less than in temper and
habits. Old hunters speak much of them in their endless talks over the
camp fires and in the snow-bound winter huts. They insist on many
species; not merely the black and the grisly but the brown, the
cinnamon, the gray, the silver-tip, and others with names known only
in certain localities, such as the range bear, the roach-back, and the
smut-face. But, in spite of popular opinion to the contrary, most old
hunters are very untrustworthy in dealing with points of natural
history. They usually know only so much about any given animal as will
enable them to kill it. They study its habits solely with this end in
view; and once slain they only examine it to see about its condition
and fur. With rare exceptions they are quite incapable of passing
judgment upon questions of specific identity or difference. When
questioned, they not only advance perfectly impossible theories and
facts in support of their views, but they rarely even agree as to the
views themselves. One hunter will assert that the true grisly is only
found in California, heedless of the fact that the name was first used
by Lewis and Clarke as one of the titles they applied to the large
bears of the plains country round the Upper Missouri, a quarter of a
century before the California grisly was known to fame. Another hunter
will call any big brindled bear a grisly no matter where it is found;
and he and his companions will dispute by the hour as to whether a
bear of large, but not extreme, size is a grisly or a silver-tip. In
Oregon the cinnamon bear is a phase of the small black bear; in
Montana it is the plains variety of the large mountain silver-tip. I
have myself seen the skins of two bears killed on the upper waters of
Tongue River; one was that of a male, one of a female, and they had
evidently just mated; yet one was distinctly a "silver-tip" and the
other a "cinnamon." The skin of one very big bear which I killed in
the Bighorn has proved a standing puzzle to almost all the old hunters
to whom I have showed it; rarely do any two of them agree as to
whether it is a grisly, a silver-tip, a cinnamon, or a "smut-face."
Any bear with unusually long hair on the spine and shoulders,
especially if killed in the spring, when the fur is shaggy, is
forthwith dubbed a "roach-back." The average sporting writer moreover
joins with the more imaginative members of the "old hunter" variety in
ascribing wildly various traits to these different bears. One comments
on the superior prowess of the roach-back; the explanation being that
a bear in early spring is apt to be ravenous from hunger. The next
insists that the California grisly is the only really dangerous bear;
while another stoutly maintains that it does not compare in ferocity
with what he calls the "smaller" silver-tip or cinnamon. And so on,
and so on, without end. All of which is mere nonsense.

Nevertheless it is no easy task to determine how many species or
varieties of bear actually do exist in the United States, and I cannot
even say without doubt that a very large set of skins and skulls would
not show a nearly complete intergradation between the most widely
separated individuals. However, there are certainly two very distinct
types, which differ almost as widely from each other as a wapiti does
from a mule deer, and which exist in the same localities in most
heavily timbered portions of the Rockies. One is the small black bear,
a bear which will average about two hundred pounds weight, with fine,
glossy, black fur, and the fore-claws but little longer than the
hinder ones; in fact the hairs of the fore-paw often reach to their
tips. This bear is a tree climber. It is the only kind found east of
the great plains, and it is also plentiful in the forest-clad portions
of the Rockies, being common in most heavily timbered tracts
throughout the United States. The other is the grisly, which weighs
three or four times as much as the black, and has a pelt of coarse
hair, which is in color gray, grizzled, or brown of various shades. It
is not a tree climber, and the fore-claws are very long, much longer
than the hinder ones. It is found from the great plains west of the
Mississippi to the Pacific coast. This bear inhabits indifferently
lowland and mountain; the deep woods, and the barren plains where the
only cover is the stunted growth fringing the streams. These two types
are very distinct in every way, and their differences are not at all
dependent upon mere geographical considerations; for they are often
found in the same district. Thus I found them both in the Bighorn
Mountains, each type being in extreme form, while the specimens I shot
showed no trace of intergradation. The huge grizzled, long-clawed
beast, and its little glossy-coated, short-clawed, tree-climbing
brother roamed over exactly the same country in those mountains; but
they were as distinct in habits, and mixed as little together as moose
and caribou.

On the other hand, when a sufficient number of bears, from widely
separated regions are examined, the various distinguishing marks are
found to be inconstant and to show a tendency--exactly how strong I
cannot say--to fade into one another. The differentiation of the two
species seems to be as yet scarcely completed; there are more or less
imperfect connecting links, and as regards the grisly it almost seems
as if the specific character were still unstable. In the far
northwest, in the basin of the Columbia the "black" bear is as often
brown as any other color; and I have seen the skins of two cubs, one
black and one brown, which were shot when following the same dam. When
these brown bears have coarser hair than usual their skins are with
difficulty to be distinguished from those of certain varieties of the
grisly. Moreover, all bears vary greatly in size; and I have seen the
bodies of very large black or brown bears with short fore-claws which
were fully as heavy as, or perhaps heavier than, some small but full-
grown grislies with long fore-claws. These very large bears with short
claws are very reluctant to climb a tree; and are almost as clumsy
about it as is a young grisly. Among the grislies the fur varies much
in color and texture even among bears of the same locality; it is of
course richest in the deep forest, while the bears of the dry plains
and mountains are of a lighter, more washed-out hue.

A full grown grisly will usually weigh from five to seven hundred
pounds; but exceptional individuals undoubtedly reach more than twelve
hundredweight. The California bears are said to be much the largest.
This I think is so, but I cannot say it with certainty--at any rate I
have examined several skins of full-grown California bears which were
no larger than many I have seen from the northern Rockies. The Alaskan
bears, particularly those of the peninsula, are even bigger beasts;
the skin of one which I saw in the possession of Mr. Webster, the
taxidermist, was a good deal larger than the average polar bear skin;
and the animal when alive, if in good condition, could hardly have
weighed less than 1,400 pounds.[*] Bears vary wonderfully in weight,
even to the extent of becoming half as heavy again, according as they
are fat or lean; in this respect they are more like hogs than like any
other animals.

[*] Both this huge Alaskan bear and the entirely distinct bear of the
    barren grounds differ widely from the true grisly, at least in
    their extreme forms.

The grisly is now chiefly a beast of the high hills and heavy timber;
but this is merely because he has learned that he must rely on cover
to guard him from man, and has forsaken the open ground accordingly.
In old days, and in one or two very out-of-the-way places almost to
the present time, he wandered at will over the plains. It is only the
wariness born of fear which nowadays causes him to cling to the thick
brush of the large river-bottoms throughout the plains country. When
there were no rifle-bearing hunters in the land, to harass him and
make him afraid, he roved thither and thither at will, in burly self-
confidence. Then he cared little for cover, unless as a weather-break,
or because it happened to contain food he liked. If the humor seized
him he would roam for days over the rolling or broken prairie,
searching for roots, digging up gophers, or perhaps following the
great buffalo herds either to prey on some unwary straggler which he
was able to catch at a disadvantage in a washout, or else to feast on
the carcasses of those which died by accident. 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. Hence he has
held his own far better than such game as the bison and elk. He is
much less common than formerly, but he is still to be found throughout
most of his former range; save of course in the immediate neighborhood
of the large towns.

In most places the grisly hibernates, or as old hunters say "holes
up," during the cold season, precisely as does the black bear; but as
with the latter species, those animals which live farthest south spend
the whole year abroad in mild seasons. The grisly rarely chooses that
favorite den of his little black brother, a hollow tree or log, for
his winter sleep, seeking or making some cavernous hole in the ground
instead. The hole is sometimes in a slight hillock in a river bottom
but more often on a hill-side, and may be either shallow or deep. In
the mountains it is generally a natural cave in the rock, but among
the foothills and on the plains the bear usually has to take some
hollow or opening, and then fashion it into a burrow to his liking
with his big digging claws.

Before the cold weather sets in the bear begins to grow restless, and
to roam about seeking for a good place in which to hole up. One will
often try and abandon several caves or partially dug-out burrows in
succession before finding a place to its taste. It always endeavors to
choose a spot where there is little chance of discovery or
molestation, taking great care to avoid leaving too evident trace of
its work. Hence it is not often that the dens are found.

Once in its den the bear passes the cold months in lethargic sleep;
yet, in all but the coldest weather, and sometimes even then, its
slumber is but light, and if disturbed it will promptly leave its den,
prepared for fight or flight as the occasion may require. Many times
when a hunter has stumbled on the winter resting-place of a bear and
has left it, as he thought, without his presence being discovered, he
has returned only to find that the crafty old fellow was aware of the
danger all the time, and sneaked off as soon as the coast was clear.
But in very cold weather hibernating bears can hardly be wakened from
their torpid lethargy.

The length of time a bear stays in its den depends of course upon the
severity of the season and the latitude and altitude of the country.
In the northernmost and coldest regions all the bears hole up, and
spend half the year in a state of lethargy; whereas in the south only
the she's with young and the fat he-bears retire for the sleep, and
these but for a few weeks, and only if the season is severe.

When the bear first leaves its den the fur is in very fine order, but
it speedily becomes thin and poor, and does not recover its condition
until the fall. Sometimes the bear does not betray any great hunger
for a few days after its appearance; but in a short while it becomes
ravenous. During the early spring, when the woods are still entirely
barren and lifeless, while the snow yet lies in deep drifts, the bear,
hungry brute, both maddened and weakened by long fasting, is more of a
flesh eater than at any other time. It is at this period that it is
most apt to turn true beast of prey, and show its prowess either at
the expense of the wild game, or of the flocks of the settler and the
herds of the ranchman. Bears are very capricious in this respect,
however. Some are confirmed game, and cattle-killers; others are not;
while yet others either are or are not accordingly as the freak seizes
them, and their ravages vary almost unaccountably, both with the
season and the locality.

Throughout 1889, for instance, no cattle, so far as I heard, were
killed by bears anywhere near my range on the Little Missouri in
western Dakota; yet I happened to know that during that same season
the ravages of the bears among the herds of the cowmen in the Big Hole
Basin, in western Montana, were very destructive.

In the spring and early summer of 1888, the bears killed no cattle
near my ranch; but in the late summer and early fall of that year a
big bear, which we well knew by its tracks, suddenly took to cattle-
killing. This was a brute which had its headquarters on some very
large brush bottoms a dozen miles below my ranch house, and which
ranged to and fro across the broken country flanking the river on each
side. It began just before berry time, but continued its career of
destruction long after the wild plums and even buffalo berries had
ripened. I think that what started it was a feast on a cow which had
mired and died in the bed of the creek; at least it was not until
after we found that it had been feeding at the carcass and had eaten
every scrap, that we discovered traces of its ravages among the
livestock. It seemed to attack the animals wholly regardless of their
size and strength; its victims including a large bull and a beef
steer, as well as cows, yearlings, and gaunt, weak trail "doughgies,"
which had been brought in very late by a Texas cow-outfit--for that
year several herds were driven up from the overstocked, eaten-out, and
drought-stricken ranges of the far south. Judging from the signs, the
crafty old grisly, as cunning as he was ferocious, usually lay in wait
for the cattle when they came down to water, choosing some thicket of
dense underbrush and twisted cottonwoods, through which they had to
pass before reaching the sand banks on the river's brink. Sometimes he
pounced on them as they fed through the thick, low cover of the
bottoms, where an assailant could either lie in ambush by one of the
numerous cattle trails, or else creep unobserved towards some browsing
beast. When within a few feet a quick rush carried him fairly on the
terrified quarry; and though but a clumsy animal compared to the great
cats, the grisly is far quicker than one would imagine from viewing
his ordinary lumbering gait. In one or two instances the bear had
apparently grappled with his victim by seizing it near the loins and
striking a disabling blow over the small of the back; in at least one
instance he had jumped on the animal's head, grasping it with his
fore-paws, while with his fangs he tore open the throat or crunched
the neck bone. Some of his victims were slain far from the river, in
winding, brushy coulies of the Bad Lands, where the broken nature of
the ground rendered stalking easy. Several of the ranchmen, angered at
their losses, hunted their foe eagerly, but always with ill success;
until one of them put poison in a carcass, and thus at last, in
ignoble fashion, slew the cattle-killer.

Mr. Clarence King informs me that he was once eye-witness to a bear's
killing a steer, in California. The steer was in a small pasture, and
the bear climbed over, partly breaking down, the rails which barred
the gateway. The steer started to run, but the grisly overtook it in
four or five bounds, and struck it a tremendous blow on the flank with
one paw, knocking several ribs clear away from the spine, and killing
the animal outright by the shock.

Horses no less than horned cattle at times fall victims to this great
bear, which usually spring on them from the edge of a clearing as they
graze in some mountain pasture, or among the foot-hills; and there is
no other animal of which horses seem so much afraid. Generally the
bear, whether successful or unsuccessful in its raids on cattle and
horses, comes off unscathed from the struggle; but this is not always
the case, and it has much respect for the hoofs or horns of its
should-be prey. Some horses do not seem to know how to fight at all;
but others are both quick and vicious, and prove themselves very
formidable foes, lashing out behind, and striking with their fore-
hoofs. I have elsewhere given an instance of a stallion which beat off
a bear, breaking its jaw.

Quite near my ranch, once, a cowboy in my employ found unmistakable
evidence of the discomfiture of a bear by a long-horned range cow. It
was in the early spring, and the cow with her new-born calf was in a
brush-bordered valley. The footprints in the damp soil were very
plain, and showed all that had happened. The bear had evidently come
out of the bushes with a rush, probably bent merely on seizing the
calf; and had slowed up when the cow instead of flying faced him. He
had then begun to walk round his expected dinner in a circle, the cow
fronting him and moving nervously back and forth, so that her sharp
hoofs cut and trampled the ground. Finally she had charged savagely;
whereupon the bear had bolted; and, whether frightened at the charge,
or at the approach of some one, he had not returned.

The grisly is even fonder of sheep and pigs than is its smaller black
brother. Lurking round the settler's house until after nightfall, it
will vault into the fold or sty, grasp a helpless, bleating fleece-
bearer, or a shrieking, struggling member of the bristly brotherhood,
and bundle it out over the fence to its death. In carrying its prey a
bear sometimes holds the body in its teeth, walking along on all-fours
and dragging it as a wolf does. Sometimes, however, it seizes an
animal in its forearms or in one of them, and walks awkwardly on three
legs or two, adopting this method in lifting and pushing the body over
rocks and down timber.

When a grisly can get at domestic animals it rarely seeks to molest
game, the former being far less wary and more helpless. Its heaviness
and clumsiness do not fit it well for a life of rapine against shy
woodland creatures. Its vast strength and determined temper, however,
more than make amends for lack of agility in the actual struggle with
the stricken prey; its difficulty lies in seizing, not in killing, the
game. Hence, when a grisly does take to game-killing, it is likely to
attack bison, moose, and elk; it is rarely able to catch deer, still
less sheep or antelope. In fact these smaller game animals often show
but little dread of its neighborhood, and, though careful not to let
it come too near, go on grazing when a bear is in full sight.
Whitetail deer are frequently found at home in the same thicket in
which a bear has its den, while they immediately desert the temporary
abiding place of a wolf or cougar. Nevertheless, they sometimes
presume too much on this confidence. A couple of years before the
occurrence of the feats of cattle-killing mentioned above as happening
near my ranch, either the same bear that figured in them, or another
of similar tastes, took to game-hunting. The beast lived in the same
succession of huge thickets which cover for two or three miles the
river bottoms and the mouths of the inflowing creeks; and he suddenly
made a raid on the whitetail deer which were plentiful in the dense
cover. The shaggy, clumsy monster was cunning enough to kill several
of these knowing creatures. The exact course of procedure I never
could find out; but apparently the bear laid in wait beside the game
trails, along which the deer wandered.

In the old days when the innumerable bison grazed free on the prairie,
the grisly sometimes harassed their bands as it now does the herds of
the ranchman. The bison was the most easily approached of all game,
and the great bear could often get near some outlying straggler, in
its quest after stray cows, yearlings, or calves. In default of a
favorable chance to make a prey of one of these weaker members of the
herds, it did not hesitate to attack the mighty bulls themselves; and
perhaps the grandest sights which it was ever the good fortune of the
early hunters to witness was one of these rare battles between a
hungry grisly and a powerful buffalo bull. Nowadays, however, the few
last survivors of the bison are vanishing even from the inaccessible
mountain fastnesses in which they sought a final refuge from their
destroyers.

At present the wapiti is of all wild game that which is most likely to
fall a victim to the grisly, when the big bear is in the mood to turn
hunter. Wapiti are found in the same places as the grisly, and in some
spots they are yet very plentiful; they are less shy and active than
deer, while not powerful enough to beat off so ponderous a foe; and
they live in cover where there is always a good chance either to stalk
or to stumble on them. At almost any season bear will come and feast
on an elk carcass; and if the food supply runs short, in early spring,
or in a fall when the berry crop fails, they sometimes have to do
their own killing. Twice I have come across the remains of elk, which
had seemingly been slain and devoured by bears. I have never heard of
elk making a fight against a bear; yet, at close quarters and at bay,
a bull elk in the rutting season is an ugly foe.

A bull moose is even more formidable, being able to strike the most
lightning-like blows with his terrible forefeet, his true weapons of
defense. I doubt if any beast of prey would rush in on one of these
woodland giants, when his horns were grown, and if he was on his guard
and bent on fight. Nevertheless, the moose sometimes fall victims to
the uncouth prowess of the grisly, in the thick wet forests of the
high northern Rockies, where both beasts dwell. An old hunter who a
dozen years ago wintered at Jackson Lake, in northwestern Wyoming,
told me that when the snows got deep on the mountains the moose came
down and took up their abode near the lake, on its western side.
Nothing molested them during the winter. Early in the spring a grisly
came out of its den, and he found its tracks in many places, as it
roamed restlessly about, evidently very hungry. Finding little to eat
in the bleak, snow-drifted woods, it soon began to depredate on the
moose, and killed two or three, generally by lying in wait and dashing
out on them as they passed near its lurking-place. Even the bulls were
at that season weak, and of course hornless, with small desire to
fight; and in each case the rush of the great bear--doubtless made
with the ferocity and speed which so often belie the seeming
awkwardness of the animal--bore down the startled victim, taken
utterly unawares before it had a chance to defend itself. In one case
the bear had missed its spring; the moose going off, for a few rods,
with huge jumps, and then settling down into its characteristic trot.
The old hunter who followed the tracks said he would never have deemed
it possible for any animal to make such strides while in a trot.

Nevertheless, the grisly is only occasionally, not normally, a
formidable predatory beast, a killer of cattle and of large game.
Although capable of far swifter movement than is promised by his frame
of seemingly clumsy strength, and in spite of his power of charging
with astonishing suddenness and speed, he yet lacks altogether the
supple agility of such finished destroyers as the cougar and the wolf;
and for the absence of this agility no amount of mere huge muscle can
atone. He is more apt to feast on animals which have met their death
by accident, or which have been killed by other beasts or by man, than
to do his own killing. He is a very foul feeder, with a strong relish
for carrion, and possesses a grewsome and cannibal fondness for the
flesh of his own kind; a bear carcass will toll a brother bear to the
ambushed hunter better than almost any other bait, unless it is the
carcass of a horse.

Nor do these big bears always content themselves merely with the
carcasses of their brethren. A black bear would have a poor chance if
in the clutches of a large, hungry grisly; and an old male will kill
and eat a cub, especially if he finds it at a disadvantage. A rather
remarkable instance of this occurred in the Yellowstone National Park,
in the spring of 1891. The incident is related in the following letter
written to Mr. William Hallett Phillips, of Washington, by another
friend, Mr. Elwood Hofer. Hofer is an old mountain-man; I have hunted
with him myself, and know his statements to be trustworthy. He was, at
the time, at work in the Park getting animals for the National Museum
at Washington, and was staying at Yancey's "hotel" near Tower Falls,
His letter which was dated June 21st, 1891, runs in part as follows:

 "I had a splendid Grizzly or Roachback cub and was going to send
  him into the Springs next morning the team was here. I heard a
  racket outside, went out, and found him dead. An old bear that
  made a 9 1/2 inch track had killed and partly eaten him. Last
  night another one came, one that made a 8 1/2 inch track, and
  broke Yancy up in the milk business. You know how the cabins stand
  here. There is a hitching post between the saloon and old house,
  the little bear was killed there. In a creek close by was a milk
  house, last night another bear came there and smashed the whole
  thing up, leaving nothing but a few flattened buckets and pans and
  boards. I was sleeping in the old cabin, I heard the tin ware
  rattle but thought it was all right, supposed it was cows or
  horses about. I don't care about the milk but the damn cuss dug up
  the remains of the cub I had buried in the old ditch, he visited
  the old meat house but found nothing. Bear are very thick in this
  part of the Park, and are getting very fresh. I sent in the game
  to Capt. Anderson, hear its doing well."

Grislies are fond of fish; and on the Pacific slope, where the salmon
run, they, like so many other beasts, travel many scores of miles and
crowd down to the rivers to gorge themselves upon the fish which are
thrown up on the banks. Wading into the water a bear will knock out
the salmon right and left when they are running thick.

Flesh and fish do not constitute the grisly's ordinary diet. At most
times the big bear is a grubber in the ground, an eater of insects,
roots, nuts, and berries. Its dangerous fore-claws are normally used
to overturn stones and knock rotten logs to pieces, that it may lap up
the small tribes of darkness which swarm under the one and in the
other. It digs up the camas roots, wild onions, and an occasional
luckless woodchuck or gopher. If food is very plenty bears are lazy,
but commonly they are obliged to be very industrious, it being no
light task to gather enough ants, beetles, crickets, tumble-bugs,
roots, and nuts to satisfy the cravings of so huge a bulk. The sign of
a bear's work is, of course, evident to the most unpracticed eye; and
in no way can one get a better idea of the brute's power than by
watching it busily working for its breakfast, shattering big logs and
upsetting boulders by sheer strength. There is always a touch of the
comic, as well as a touch of the strong and terrible, in a bear's look
and actions. It will tug and pull, now with one paw, now with two, now
on all fours, now on its hind legs, in the effort to turn over a large
log or stone; and when it succeeds it jumps round to thrust its muzzle
into the damp hollow and lap up the affrighted mice or beetles while
they are still paralyzed by the sudden exposure.

The true time of plenty for bears is the berry season. Then they feast
ravenously on huckleberries, blueberries, kinnikinnic berries, buffalo
berries, wild plums, elderberries, and scores of other fruits. They
often smash all the bushes in a berry patch, gathering the fruit with
half-luxurious, half-laborious greed, sitting on their haunches, and
sweeping the berries into their mouths with dexterous paws. So
absorbed do they become in their feasts on the luscious fruit that
they grow reckless of their safety, and feed in broad daylight, almost
at midday; while in some of the thickets, especially those of the
mountain haws, they make so much noise in smashing the branches that
it is a comparatively easy matter to approach them unheard. That
still-hunter is in luck who in the fall finds an accessible berry-
covered hillside which is haunted by bears; but, as a rule, the berry
bushes do not grow close enough together to give the hunter much
chance.

Like most other wild animals, bears which have known the neighborhood
of man are beasts of the darkness, or at least of the dusk and the
gloaming. But they are by no means such true night-lovers as the big
cats and the wolves. In regions where they know little of hunters they
roam about freely in the daylight, and in cool weather are even apt to
take their noontide slumbers basking in the sun. Where they are much
hunted they finally almost reverse their natural habits and sleep
throughout the hours of light, only venturing abroad after nightfall
and before sunrise; but even yet this is not the habit of those bears
which exist in the wilder localities where they are still plentiful.
In these places they sleep, or at least rest, during the hours of
greatest heat, and again in the middle part of the night, unless there
is a full moon. They start on their rambles for food about mid-
afternoon, and end their morning roaming soon after the sun is above
the horizon. If the moon is full, however, they may feed all night
long, and then wander but little in the daytime.

Aside from man, the full-grown grisly has hardly any foe to fear.
Nevertheless, in the early spring, when weakened by the hunger that
succeeds the winter sleep, it behooves even the grisly, if he dwells
in the mountain fastnesses of the far northwest, to beware of a
famished troop of great timber wolves. These northern Rocky Mountain
wolves are most formidable beasts, and when many of them band together
in times of famine they do not hesitate to pounce on the black bear
and cougar; and even a full-grown grisly is not safe from their
attacks, unless he can back up against some rock which will prevent
them from assailing him from behind. A small ranchman whom I knew
well, who lived near Flathead Lake, once in April found where a troop
of these wolves had killed a good-sized yearling grisly. Either cougar
or wolf will make a prey of a grisly which is but a few months old;
while any fox, lynx, wolverine, or fisher will seize the very young
cubs. The old story about wolves fearing to feast on game killed by a
grisly is all nonsense. Wolves are canny beasts, and they will not
approach a carcass if they think a bear is hidden near by and likely
to rush out at them; but under ordinary circumstances they will feast
not only on the carcasses of the grisly's victims, but on the carcass
of the grisly himself after he has been slain and left by the hunter.
Of course wolves would only attack a grisly if in the most desperate
straits for food, as even a victory over such an antagonist must be
purchased with heavy loss of life; and a hungry grisly would devour
either a wolf or a cougar, or any one of the smaller carnivora off-
hand if it happened to corner it where it could not get away.

The grisly occasionally makes its den in a cave and spends therein the
midday hours. But this is rare. Usually it lies in the dense shelter
of the most tangled piece of woods in the neighborhood, choosing by
preference some bit where the young growth is thick and the ground
strewn with boulders and fallen logs. Often, especially if in a
restless mood and roaming much over the country, it merely makes a
temporary bed, in which it lies but once or twice; and again it may
make a more permanent lair or series of lairs, spending many
consecutive nights in each. Usually the lair or bed is made some
distance from the feeding ground; but bold bears, in very wild
localities, may lie close by a carcass, or in the middle of a berry
ground. The deer-killing bear above mentioned had evidently dragged
two or three of his victims to his den, which was under an
impenetrable mat of bull-berries and dwarf box-alders, hemmed by a cut
bank on one side and a wall of gnarled cottonwoods on the other. Round
this den, and rendering it noisome, were scattered the bones of
several deer and a young steer or heifer. When we found it we thought
we could easily kill the bear, but the fierce, cunning beast must have
seen or smelt us, for though we laid in wait for it long and
patiently, it did not come back to its place; nor, on our subsequent
visits, did we ever find traces of its having done so.

Bear are fond of wallowing in the water, whether in the sand, on the
edge of a rapid plains river, on the muddy margin of a pond, or in the
oozy moss of a clear, cold mountain spring. One hot August afternoon,
as I was clambering down a steep mountain-side near Pend'Oreille lake,
I heard a crash some distance below, which showed that a large beast
was afoot. On making my way towards the spot, I found I had disturbed
a big bear as it was lolling at ease in its bath; the discolored water
showed where it had scrambled hastily out and galloped off as I
approached. The spring welled out at the base of a high granite rock,
forming a small pool of shimmering broken crystal. The soaked moss lay
in a deep wet cushion round about, and jutted over the edges of the
pool like a floating shelf. Graceful, water-loving ferns swayed to and
fro. Above, the great conifers spread their murmuring branches,
dimming the light, and keeping out the heat; their brown boles sprang
from the ground like buttressed columns. On the barren mountain-side
beyond the heat was oppressive. It was small wonder that Bruin should
have sought the spot to cool his gross carcass in the fresh spring
water.

The bear is a solitary beast, and although many may assemble together,
in what looks like a drove, on some favorite feeding-ground--usually
where the berries are thick, or by the banks of a salmon-thronged
river--the association is never more than momentary, each going its
own way as soon as its hunger is satisfied. The males always live
alone by choice, save in the rutting season, when they seek the
females. Then two or three may come together in the course of their
pursuit and rough courtship of the female; and if the rivals are well
matched, savage battles follow, so that many of the old males have
their heads seamed with scars made by their fellows' teeth. At such
times they are evil tempered and prone to attack man or beast on
slight provocation.

The she brings forth her cubs, one, two, or three in number, in her
winter den. They are very small and helpless things, and it is some
time after she leaves her winter home before they can follow her for
any distance. They stay with her throughout the summer and the fall,
leaving her when the cold weather sets in. By this time they are well
grown; and hence, especially if an old male has joined the she, the
family may number three or four individuals, so as to make what seems
like quite a little troop of bears. A small ranchman who lived a dozen
miles from me on the Little Missouri once found a she-bear and three
half-grown cubs feeding at a berry-patch in a ravine. He shot the old
she in the small of the back, whereat she made a loud roaring and
squealing. One of the cubs rushed towards her; but its sympathy proved
misplaced, for she knocked it over with a hearty cuff, either out of
mere temper, or because she thought her pain must be due to an
unprovoked assault from one of her offspring. The hunter then killed
one of the cubs, and the other two escaped. When bears are together
and one is wounded by a bullet, but does not see the real assailant,
it often falls tooth and nail upon its comrade, apparently attributing
its injury to the latter.

Bears are hunted in many ways. Some are killed by poison; but this
plan is only practised by the owners of cattle or sheep who have
suffered from their ravages. Moreover, they are harder to poison than
wolves. Most often they are killed in traps, which are sometimes dead-
falls, on the principle of the little figure-4 trap familiar to every
American country boy, sometimes log-pens in which the animal is taken
alive, but generally huge steel gins. In some states there is a bounty
for the destruction of grislies; and in many places their skins have a
market price, although much less valuable than those of the black
bear. The men who pursue them for the bounty, or for their fur, as
well as the ranchmen who regard them as foes to stock, ordinarily use
steel traps. The trap is very massive, needing no small strength to
set, and it is usually chained to a bar or log of wood, which does not
stop the bear's progress outright, but hampers and interferes with it,
continually catching in tree stumps and the like. The animal when
trapped makes off at once, biting at the trap and the bar; but it
leaves a broad wake and sooner or later is found tangled up by the
chain and bar. A bear is by no means so difficult to trap as a wolf or
fox although more so than a cougar or a lynx. In wild regions a
skilful trapper can often catch a great many with comparative ease. A
cunning old grisly however, soon learns the danger, and is then almost
impossible to trap, as it either avoids the neighborhood altogether or
finds out some way by which to get at the bait without springing the
trap, or else deliberately springs it first. I have been told of bears
which spring traps by rolling across them, the iron jaws slipping
harmlessly off the big round body. An old horse is the most common
bait.

It is, of course, all right to trap bears when they are followed
merely as vermin or for the sake of the fur. Occasionally, however,
hunters who are out merely for sport adopt this method; but this
should never be done. To shoot a trapped bear for sport is a
thoroughly unsportsmanlike proceeding. A funny plea sometimes advanced
in its favor is that it is "dangerous." No doubt in exceptional
instances this is true; exactly as it is true that in exceptional
instances it is "dangerous" for a butcher to knock over a steer in the
slaughter-house. A bear caught only by the toes may wrench itself free
as the hunter comes near, and attack him with pain-maddened fury; or
if followed at once, and if the trap and bar are light, it may be
found in some thicket, still free, and in a frenzy of rage. But even
in such cases the beast has been crippled, and though crazy with pain
and anger is easily dealt with by a good shot; while ordinarily the
poor brute is found in the last stages of exhaustion, tied tight to a
tree where the log or bar has caught, its teeth broken to splinted
stumps by rabid snaps at the cruel trap and chain. Some trappers kill
the trapped grislies with a revolver; so that it may easily be seen
that the sport is not normally dangerous. Two of my own cowboys,
Seawell and Dow, were originally from Maine, where they had trapped a
number of black bears; and they always killed them either with a
hatchet or a small 32-calibre revolver. One of them, Seawell, once
came near being mauled by a trapped bear, seemingly at the last gasp
which he approached incautiously with his hatchet.

There is, however, one very real danger to which the solitary bear-
trapper is exposed, the danger of being caught in his own trap. The
huge jaws of the gin are easy to spring and most hard to open. If any
unwary passer-by should tread between them and be caught by the leg,
his fate would be doubtful, though he would probably die under the
steadily growing torment of the merciless iron jaws, as they pressed
ever deeper into the sore flesh and broken bones. But if caught by the
arms, while setting or fixing the trap, his fate would be in no doubt
at all, for it would be impossible for the stoutest man to free
himself by any means. Terrible stories are told of solitary mountain
hunters who disappeared, and were found years later in the lonely
wilderness, as mouldering skeletons, the shattered bones of the
forearms still held in the rusty jaws of the gin.

Doubtless the grisly could be successfully hunted with dogs, if the
latter were trained to the purpose, but as yet this has not been done,
and though dogs are sometimes used as adjuncts in grisly hunting they
are rarely of much service. It is sometimes said that very small dogs
are the best for this end. But this is only so with grislies that have
never been hunted. In such a case the big bear sometimes becomes so
irritated with the bouncing, yapping little terriers or fice-dogs that
he may try to catch them and thus permit the hunter to creep upon him.
But the minute he realizes, as he speedily does, that the man is his
real foe, he pays no further heed whatever to the little dogs, who can
then neither bring him to bay nor hinder his flight. Ordinary hounds,
of the kinds used in the south for fox, deer, wild-cat, and black
bear, are but little better. I have known one or two men who at
different times tried to hunt the grisly with a pack of hounds and
fice-dogs wonted to the chase of the black bear, but they never met
with success. This was probably largely owing to the nature of the
country in which they hunted, a vast tangled mass of forest and craggy
mountain; but it was also due to the utter inability of the dogs to
stop the quarry from breaking bay when it wished. Several times a
grisly was bayed, but always in some inaccessible spot which it took
hard climbing to reach, and the dogs were never able to hold the beast
until the hunters came up.

Still a well-trained pack of large hounds which were both bold and
cunning could doubtless bay even a grisly. Such dogs are the big half-
breed hounds sometimes used in the Alleghanies of West Virginia, which
are trained not merely to nip a bear, but to grip him by the hock as
he runs and either throw him or twirl him round. A grisly could not
disregard a wary and powerful hound capable of performing this trick,
even though he paid small heed to mere barking and occasional nipping.
Nor do I doubt that it would be possible to get together a pack of
many large, fierce dogs, trained to dash straight at the head and hold
on like a vise, which could fairly master a grisly and, though unable,
of course, to kill him, would worry him breathless and hold him down
so that he could be slain with ease. There have been instances in
which five or six of the big so-called blood-hounds of the southern
States--not pure blood-hounds at all, but huge, fierce, ban-dogs, with
a cross of the ferocious Cuban blood-hound, to give them good scenting
powers--have by themselves mastered the cougar and the black bear.
Such instances occurred in the hunting history of my own forefathers
on my mother's side, who during the last half of the eighteenth, and
the first half of the present, century lived in Georgia and over the
border in what are now Alabama and Florida. These big dogs can only
overcome such foes by rushing in in a body and grappling all together;
if they hang back, lunging and snapping, a cougar or bear will destroy
them one by one. With a quarry so huge and redoubtable as the grisly,
no number of dogs, however large and fierce, could overcome him unless
they all rushed on him in a mass, the first in the charge seizing by
the head or throat. If the dogs hung back, or if there were only a few
of them, or if they did not seize around the head, they would be
destroyed without an effort. It is murder to slip merely one or two
close-quarter dogs at a grisly. Twice I have known a man take a large
bulldog with his pack when after one of these big bears, and in each
case the result was the same. In one instance the bear was trotting
when the bulldog seized it by the cheek, and without so much as
altering its gait, it brushed off the hanging dog with a blow from the
fore-paw that broke the latter's back. In the other instance the bear
had come to bay, and when seized by the ear it got the dog's body up
to its jaws, and tore out the life with one crunch.

A small number of dogs must rely on their activity, and must hamper
the bear's escape by inflicting a severe bite and avoiding the
counter-stroke. The only dog I ever heard of which, single-handed, was
really of service in stopping a grisly, was a big Mexican sheep-dog,
once owned by the hunter Tazewell Woody. It was an agile beast with
powerful jaws, and possessed both intelligence and a fierce, resolute
temper. Woody killed three grislies with its aid. It attacked with
equal caution and ferocity, rushing at the bear as the latter ran, and
seizing the outstretched hock with a grip of iron, stopping the bear
short, but letting go before the angry beast could whirl round and
seize it. It was so active and wary that it always escaped damage; and
it was so strong and bit so severely that the bear could not possibly
run from it at any speed. In consequence, if it once came to close
quarters with its quarry, Woody could always get near enough for a
shot.

Hitherto, however, the mountain hunters--as distinguished from the
trappers--who have followed the grisly have relied almost solely on
their rifles. In my own case about half the bears I have killed I
stumbled across almost by accident; and probably this proportion holds
good generally. The hunter may be after bear at the time, or he may be
after blacktail deer or elk, the common game in most of the haunts of
the grisly; or he may merely be travelling through the country or
prospecting for gold. Suddenly he comes over the edge of a cut bank,
or round the sharp spur of a mountain or the shoulder of a cliff which
walls in a ravine, or else the indistinct game trail he has been
following through the great trees twists sharply to one side to avoid
a rock or a mass of down timber, and behold he surprises old Ephraim
digging for roots, or munching berries, or slouching along the path,
or perhaps rising suddenly from the lush, rank plants amid which he
has been lying. Or it may be that the bear will be spied afar rooting
in an open glade or on a bare hill-side.

In the still-hunt proper it is necessary to find some favorite
feeding-ground, where there are many roots or berry-bearing bushes, or
else to lure the grisly to a carcass. This last method of "baiting"
for bears is under ordinary circumstances the only way which affords
even a moderately fair chance of killing them. They are very cunning,
with the sharpest of noses, and where they have had experience of
hunters they dwell only in cover where it is almost impossible for the
best of still-hunters to approach them.

Nevertheless, in favorable ground a man can often find and kill them
by fair stalking, in berry time, or more especially in the early
spring, before the snow has gone from the mountains, and while the
bears are driven by hunger to roam much abroad and sometimes to seek
their food in the open. In such cases the still-hunter is stirring by
the earliest dawn, and walks with stealthy speed to some high point of
observation from which he can overlook the feeding-grounds where he
has previously discovered sign. From this vantage he scans the country
far and near, either with his own keen eyes or with powerful glasses;
and he must combine patience and good sight with the ability to
traverse long distances noiselessly and yet at speed. He may spend two
or three hours sitting still and looking over a vast tract of country
before he will suddenly spy a bear; or he may see nothing after the
most careful search in a given place, and must then go on half a dozen
miles to another, watching warily as he walks, and continuing this
possibly for several days before getting a glimpse of his game. If the
bear are digging roots, or otherwise procuring their food on the bare
hill sides and table-lands, it is of course comparatively easy to see
them; and it is under such circumstances that this kind of hunting is
most successful. Once seen, the actual stalk may take two or three
hours, the nature of the ground and the direction of the wind often
necessitating a long circuit; perhaps a gully, a rock, or a fallen log
offers a chance for an approach to within two hundred yards, and
although the hunter will, if possible, get much closer than this, yet
even at such a distance a bear is a large enough mark to warrant
taking a shot.

Usually the berry grounds do not offer such favorable opportunities,
as they often lie in thick timber, or are covered so densely with
bushes as to obstruct the view; and they are rarely commanded by a
favorable spot from which to spy. On the other hand, as already said,
bears occasionally forget all their watchfulness while devouring
fruit, and make such a noise rending and tearing the bushes that, if
once found, a man can creep upon them unobserved.



                             CHAPTER IV.

                         HUNTING THE GRISLY.

If out in the late fall or early spring, it is often possible to
follow a bear's trail in the snow; having come upon it either by
chance or hard hunting, or else having found where it leads from some
carcass on which the beast has been feeding. In the pursuit one must
exercise great caution, as at such times the hunter is easily seen a
long way off, and game is always especially watchful for any foe that
may follow its trail.

Once I killed a grisly in this manner. It was early in the fall, but
snow lay on the ground, while the gray weather boded a storm. My camp
was in a bleak, wind-swept valley, high among the mountains which form
the divide between the head-waters of the Salmon and Clarke's Fork of
the Columbia. All night I had lain in my buffalo-bag, under the lea of
a windbreak of branches, in the clump of fir-trees, where I had halted
the preceding evening. At my feet ran a rapid mountain torrent, its
bed choked with ice-covered rocks; I had been lulled to sleep by the
stream's splashing murmur, and the loud moaning of the wind along the
naked cliffs. At dawn I rose and shook myself free of the buffalo
robe, coated with hoar-frost. The ashes of the fire were lifeless; in
the dim morning the air was bitter cold. I did not linger a moment,
but snatched up my rifle, pulled on my fur cap and gloves, and strode
off up a side ravine; as I walked I ate some mouthfuls of venison,
left over from supper.

Two hours of toil up the steep mountain brought me to the top of a
spur. The sun had risen, but was hidden behind a bank of sullen
clouds. On the divide I halted, and gazed out over a vast landscape,
inconceivably wild and dismal. Around me towered the stupendous
mountain masses which make up the backbone of the Rockies. From my
feet, as far as I could see, stretched a rugged and barren chaos of
ridges and detached rock masses. Behind me, far below, the stream
wound like a silver ribbon, fringed with dark conifers and the
changing, dying foliage of poplar and quaking aspen. In front the
bottoms of the valleys were filled with the sombre evergreen forest,
dotted here and there with black, ice-skimmed tarns; and the dark
spruces clustered also in the higher gorges, and were scattered thinly
along the mountain sides. The snow which had fallen lay in drifts and
streaks, while, where the wind had scope it was blown off, and the
ground left bare.

For two hours I walked onwards across the ridges and valleys. Then
among some scattered spruces, where the snow lay to the depth of half
a foot, I suddenly came on the fresh, broad trail of a grisly. The
brute was evidently roaming restlessly about in search of a winter
den, but willing, in passing, to pick up any food that lay handy. At
once I took the trail, travelling above and to one side, and keeping a
sharp look-out ahead. The bear was going across wind, and this made my
task easy. I walked rapidly, though cautiously; and it was only in
crossing the large patches of bare ground that I had to fear making a
noise. Elsewhere the snow muffled my footsteps, and made the trail so
plain that I scarcely had to waste a glance upon it, bending my eyes
always to the front.

At last, peering cautiously over a ridge crowned with broken rocks, I
saw my quarry, a big, burly bear, with silvered fur. He had halted on
an open hillside, and was busily digging up the caches of some rock
gophers or squirrels. He seemed absorbed in his work, and the stalk
was easy. Slipping quietly back, I ran towards the end of the spur,
and in ten minutes struck a ravine, of which one branch ran past
within seventy yards of where the bear was working. In this ravine was
a rather close growth of stunted evergreens, affording good cover,
although in one or two places I had to lie down and crawl through the
snow. When I reached the point for which I was aiming, the bear had
just finished rooting, and was starting off. A slight whistle brought
him to a standstill, and I drew a bead behind his shoulder, and low
down, resting the rifle across the crooked branch of a dwarf spruce.
At the crack he ran off at speed, making no sound, but the thick
spatter of blood splashes, showing clear on the white snow, betrayed
the mortal nature of the wound. For some minutes I followed the trail;
and then, topping a ridge, I saw the dark bulk lying motionless in a
snow drift at the foot of a low rock-wall, from which he had tumbled.

The usual practice of the still-hunter who is after grisly is to toll
it to baits. The hunter either lies in ambush near the carcass, or
approaches it stealthily when he thinks the bear is at its meal.

One day while camped near the Bitter Root Mountains in Montana I found
that a bear had been feeding on the carcass of a moose which lay some
five miles from the little open glade in which my tent was pitched,
and I made up my mind to try to get a shot at it that afternoon. I
stayed in camp till about three o'clock, lying lazily back on the bed
of sweet-smelling evergreen boughs, watching the pack ponies as they
stood under the pines on the edge of the open, stamping now and then,
and switching their tails. The air was still, the sky a glorious blue;
at that hour in the afternoon even the September sun was hot. The
smoke from the smouldering logs of the camp fire curled thinly
upwards. Little chipmunks scuttled out from their holes to the packs,
which lay in a heap on the ground, and then scuttled madly back again.
A couple of drab-colored whisky-jacks, with bold mien and fearless
bright eyes, hopped and fluttered round, picking up the scraps, and
uttering an extraordinary variety of notes, mostly discordant; so tame
were they that one of them lit on my outstretched arm as I half dozed,
basking in the sunshine.

When the shadows began to lengthen, I shouldered my rifle and plunged
into the woods. At first my route lay along a mountain side; then for
half a mile over a windfall, the dead timber piled about in crazy
confusion. After that I went up the bottom of a valley by a little
brook, the ground being carpeted with a sponge of soaked moss. At the
head of this brook was a pond covered with water-lilies; and a
scramble through a rocky pass took me into a high, wet valley, where
the thick growth of spruce was broken by occasional strips of meadow.
In this valley the moose carcass lay, well at the upper end.

In moccasined feet I trod softly through the soundless woods. Under
the dark branches it was already dusk, and the air had the cool chill
of evening. As I neared the clump where the body lay, I walked with
redoubled caution, watching and listening with strained alertness.
Then I heard a twig snap; and my blood leaped, for I knew the bear was
at his supper. In another moment I saw his shaggy, brown form. He was
working with all his awkward giant strength, trying to bury the
carcass, twisting it to one side and the other with wonderful ease.
Once he got angry and suddenly gave it a tremendous cuff with his paw;
in his bearing he had something half humorous, half devilish. I crept
up within forty yards; but for several minutes he would not keep his
head still. Then something attracted his attention in the forest, and
he stood motionless looking towards it, broadside to me, with his
fore-paws planted on the carcass. This gave me my chance. I drew a
very fine bead between his eye and ear; and pulled trigger. He dropped
like a steer when struck with a pole-axe.

If there is a good hiding-place handy it is better to lie in wait at
the carcass. One day on the head-waters of the Madison, I found that a
bear was coming to an elk I had shot some days before; and I at once
determined to ambush the beast when he came back that evening. The
carcass lay in the middle of a valley a quarter of a mile broad. The
bottom of this valley was covered by an open forest of tall pines; a
thick jungle of smaller evergreens marked where the mountains rose on
either hand. There were a number of large rocks scattered here and
there, one, of very convenient shape, being only some seventy or
eighty yards from the carcass. Up this I clambered. It hid me
perfectly, and on its top was a carpet of soft pine needles, on which
I could lie at my ease.

Hour after hour passed by. A little black woodpecker with a yellow
crest ran nimbly up and down the tree-trunks for some time and then
flitted away with a party of chickadees and nut-hatches. Occasionally
a Clarke's crow soared about overhead or clung in any position to the
swaying end of a pine branch, chattering and screaming. Flocks of
cross-bills, with wavy flight and plaintive calls, flew to a small
mineral lick near by, where they scraped the clay with their queer
little beaks.

As the westering sun sank out of sight beyond the mountains these
sounds of bird-life gradually died away. Under the great pines the
evening was still with the silence of primeval desolation. The sense
of sadness and loneliness, the melancholy of the wilderness, came over
me like a spell. Every slight noise made my pulses throb as I lay
motionless on the rock gazing intently into the gathering gloom. I
began to fear that it would grow too dark to shoot before the grisly
came.

Suddenly and without warning, the great bear stepped out of the bushes
and trod across the pine needles with such swift and silent footsteps
that its bulk seemed unreal. It was very cautious, continually halting
to peer around; and once it stood up on its hind legs and looked long
down the valley towards the red west. As it reached the carcass I put
a bullet between its shoulders. It rolled over, while the woods
resounded with its savage roaring. Immediately it struggled to its
feet and staggered off; and fell again to the next shot, squalling and
yelling. Twice this was repeated; the brute being one of those bears
which greet every wound with a great outcry, and sometimes seem to
lose their feet when hit--although they will occasionally fight as
savagely as their more silent brethren. In this case the wounds were
mortal, and the bear died before reaching the edge of the thicket.

I spent much of the fall of 1889 hunting on the head-waters of the
Salmon and Snake in Idaho, and along the Montana boundary line from
the Big Hole Basin and the head of the Wisdom River to the
neighborhood of Red Rock Pass and to the north and west of Henry's
Lake. During the last fortnight my companion was the old mountain man,
already mentioned, named Griffeth or Griffin--I cannot tell which, as
he was always called either "Hank" or "Griff." He was a crabbedly
honest old fellow, and a very skilful hunter; but he was worn out with
age and rheumatism, and his temper had failed even faster than his
bodily strength. He showed me a greater variety of game than I had
ever seen before in so short a time; nor did I ever before or after
make so successful a hunt. But he was an exceedingly disagreeable
companion on account of his surly, moody ways. I generally had to get
up first, to kindle the fire and make ready breakfast, and he was very
quarrelsome. Finally, during my absence from camp one day, while not
very far from Red Rock pass, he found my whisky-flask, which I kept
purely for emergencies, and drank all the contents. When I came back
he was quite drunk. This was unbearable, and after some high words I
left him, and struck off homeward through the woods on my own account.
We had with us four pack and saddle horses; and of these I took a very
intelligent and gentle little bronco mare, which possessed the
invaluable trait of always staying near camp, even when not hobbled. I
was not hampered with much of an outfit, having only my buffalo
sleeping-bag, a fur coat, and my washing kit, with a couple of spare
pairs of socks and some handkerchiefs. A frying-pan, some salt pork,
and a hatchet, made up a light pack, which, with the bedding, I
fastened across the stock saddle by means of a rope and a spare
packing cinch. My cartridges and knife were in my belt; my compass and
matches, as always, in my pocket. I walked, while the little mare
followed almost like a dog, often without my having to hold the lariat
which served as halter.

The country was for the most part fairly open, as I kept near the
foot-hills where glades and little prairies broke the pine forest. The
trees were of small size. There was no regular trail, but the course
was easy to keep, and I had no trouble of any kind save on the second
day. That afternoon I was following a stream which at last "canyoned
up," that is sank to the bottom of a canyon-like ravine impossible for
a horse. I started up a side valley, intending to cross from its head
coulies to those of another valley which would lead in below the
canyon.

However, I got enmeshed in the tangle of winding valleys at the foot
of the steep mountains, and as dusk was coming on I halted and camped
in a little open spot by the side of a small, noisy brook, with
crystal water. The place was carpeted with soft, wet, green moss,
dotted red with the kinnikinnic berries, and at its edge, under the
trees where the ground was dry, I threw down the buffalo bed on a mat
of sweet-smelling pine needles. Making camp took but a moment. I
opened the pack, tossed the bedding on a smooth spot, knee-haltered
the little mare, dragged up a few dry logs, and then strolled off,
rifle on shoulder, through the frosty gloaming, to see if I could pick
up a grouse for supper.

For half a mile I walked quickly and silently over the pine needles,
across a succession of slight ridges separated by narrow, shallow
valleys. The forest here was composed of lodge-pole pines, which on
the ridges grew close together, with tall slender trunks, while in the
valleys the growth was more open. Though the sun was behind the
mountains there was yet plenty of light by which to shoot, but it was
fading rapidly.

At last, as I was thinking of turning towards camp, I stole up to the
crest of one of the ridges, and looked over into the valley some sixty
yards off. Immediately I caught the loom of some large, dark object;
and another glance showed me a big grisly walking slowly off with his
head down. He was quartering to me, and I fired into his flank, the
bullet, as I afterwards found, ranging forward and piercing one lung.
At the shot he uttered a loud, moaning grunt and plunged forward at a
heavy gallop, while I raced obliquely down the hill to cut him off.
After going a few hundred feet he reached a laurel thicket, some
thirty yards broad, and two or three times as long which he did not
leave. I ran up to the edge and there halted, not liking to venture
into the mass of twisted, close-growing stems and glossy foliage.
Moreover, as I halted, I head him utter a peculiar, savage kind of
whine from the heart of the brush. Accordingly, I began to skirt the
edge, standing on tiptoe and gazing earnestly to see if I could not
catch a glimpse of his hide. When I was at the narrowest part of the
thicket, he suddenly left it directly opposite, and then wheeled and
stood broadside to me on the hill-side, a little above. He turned his
head stiffly towards me; scarlet strings of froth hung from his lips;
his eyes burned like embers in the gloom.

I held true, aiming behind the shoulder, and my bullet shattered the
point or lower end of his heart, taking out a big nick. Instantly the
great bear turned with a harsh roar of fury and challenge, blowing the
blood foam from his mouth, so that I saw the gleam of his white fangs;
and then he charged straight at me, crashing and bounding through the
laurel bushes, so that it was hard to aim. I waited until he came to a
fallen tree, raking him as he topped it with a ball, which entered his
chest and went through the cavity of his body, but he neither swerved
nor flinched, and at the moment I did not know that I had struck him.
He came steadily on, and in another second was almost upon me. I fired
for his forehead, but my bullet went low, entering his open mouth,
smashing his lower jaw and going into the neck. I leaped to one side
almost as I pulled trigger; and through the hanging smoke the first
thing I saw was his paw as he made a vicious side blow at me. The rush
of his charge carried him past. As he struck he lurched forward,
leaving a pool of bright blood where his muzzle hit the ground; but he
recovered himself and made two or three jumps onwards, while I
hurriedly jammed a couple of cartridges into the magazine, my rifle
holding only four, all of which I had fired. Then he tried to pull up,
but as he did so his muscles seemed suddenly to give way, his head
drooped, and he rolled over and over like a shot rabbit. Each of my
first three bullets had inflicted a mortal wound.

It was already twilight, and I merely opened the carcass, and then
trotted back to camp. Next morning I returned and with much labor took
off the skin. The fur was very fine, the animal being in excellent
trim, and unusually bright-colored. Unfortunately, in packing it out I
lost the skull, and had to supply its place with one of plaster. The
beauty of the trophy, and the memory of the circumstances under which
I procured it, make me value it perhaps more highly than any other in
my house.

This is the only instance in which I have been regularly charged by a
grisly. On the whole, the danger of hunting these great bears has been
much exaggerated. At the beginning of the present century, when white
hunters first encountered the grisly, he was doubtless an exceedingly
savage beast, prone to attack without provocation, and a redoubtable
foe to persons armed with the clumsy, small-bore muzzle-loading rifles
of the day. But at present bitter experience has taught him caution.
He has been hunted for the bounty, and hunted as a dangerous enemy to
stock, until, save in the very wildest districts, he has learned to be
more wary than a deer and to avoid man's presence almost as carefully
as the most timid kind of game. Except in rare cases he will not
attack of his own accord, and, as a rule, even when wounded his object
is escape rather than battle.

Still, when fairly brought to bay, or when moved by a sudden fit of
ungovernable anger, the grisly is beyond peradventure a very dangerous
antagonist. The first shot, if taken at a bear a good distance off and
previously unwounded and unharried, is not usually fraught with much
danger, the startled animal being at the outset bent merely on flight.
It is always hazardous, however, to track a wounded and worried grisly
into thick cover, and the man who habitually follows and kills this
chief of American game in dense timber, never abandoning the bloody
trail whithersoever it leads, must show no small degree of skill and
hardihood, and must not too closely count the risk to life or limb.
Bears differ widely in temper, and occasionally one may be found who
will not show fight, no matter how much he is bullied; but, as a rule,
a hunter must be cautious in meddling with a wounded animal which has
retreated into a dense thicket, and had been once or twice roused; and
such a beast, when it does turn, will usually charge again and again,
and fight to the last with unconquerable ferocity. The short distance
at which the bear can be seen through the underbrush, the fury of his
charge, and his tenacity of life make it necessary for the hunter on
such occasions to have steady nerves and a fairly quick and accurate
aim. It is always well to have two men in following a wounded bear
under such conditions. This is not necessary, however, and a good
hunter, rather than lose his quarry, will, under ordinary
circumstances, follow and attack it, no matter how tangled the
fastness in which it has sought refuge; but he must act warily and
with the utmost caution and resolution, if he wishes to escape a
terrible and probably fatal mauling. An experienced hunter is rarely
rash, and never heedless; he will not, when alone, follow a wounded
bear into a thicket, if by that exercise of patience, skill, and
knowledge of the game's habits he can avoid the necessity; but it is
idle to talk of the feat as something which ought in no case to be
attempted. While danger ought never to be needlessly incurred, it is
yet true that the keenest zest in sport comes from its presence, and
from the consequent exercise of the qualities necessary to overcome
it. The most thrilling moments of an American hunter's life are those
in which, with every sense on the alert, and with nerves strung to the
highest point, he is following alone into the heart of its forest
fastness the fresh and bloody footprints of an angered grisly; and no
other triumph of American hunting can compare with the victory to be
thus gained.

These big bears will not ordinarily charge from a distance of over a
hundred yards; but there are exceptions to this rule. In the fall of
1890 my friend Archibald Rogers was hunting in Wyoming, south of the
Yellowstone Park, and killed seven bears. One, an old he, was out on a
bare table-land, grubbing for roots, when he was spied. It was early
in the afternoon, and the hunters, who were on a high mountain slope,
examined him for some time through their powerful glasses before
making him out to be a bear. They then stalked up to the edge of the
wood which fringed on the table-land on one side, but could get no
nearer than about three hundred yards, the plains being barren of all
cover. After waiting for a couple of hours Rogers risked the shot, in
despair of getting nearer, and wounded the bear, though not very
seriously. The animal made off, almost broadside to, and Rogers ran
forward to intercept it. As soon as it saw him it turned and rushed
straight for him, not heeding his second shot, and evidently bent on
charging home. Rogers then waited until it was within twenty yards,
and brained it with his third bullet.

In fact bears differ individually in courage and ferocity precisely as
men do, or as the Spanish bulls, of which it is said that not more
than one in twenty is fit to stand the combat of the arena. One grisly
can scarcely be bullied into resistance; the next may fight to the
end, against any odds, without flinching, or even attack unprovoked.
Hence men of limited experience in this sport, generalizing from the
actions of the two or three bears each has happened to see or kill,
often reach diametrically opposite conclusions as to the fighting
temper and capacity of the quarry. Even old hunters--who indeed, as a
class, are very narrow-minded and opinionated--often generalize just
as rashly as beginners. One will portray all bears as very dangerous;
another will speak and act as if he deemed them of no more consequence
than so many rabbits. I knew one old hunter who had killed a score
without ever seeing one show fight. On the other hand, Dr. James C.
Merrill, U. S. A., who has had about as much experience with bears as
I have had, informs me that he has been charged with the utmost
determination three times. In each case the attack was delivered
before the bear was wounded or even shot at, the animal being roused
by the approach of the hunter from his day bed, and charging headlong
at them from a distance of twenty or thirty paces. All three bears
were killed before they could do any damage. There was a very
remarkable incident connected with the killing of one of them. It
occurred in the northern spurs of the Bighorn range. Dr. Merrill, in
company with an old hunter, had climbed down into a deep, narrow
canyon. The bottom was threaded with well-beaten elk trails. While
following one of these the two men turned a corner of the canyon and
were instantly charged by an old she-grisly, so close that it was only
by good luck that one of the hurried shots disabled her and caused her
to tumble over a cut bank where she was easily finished. They found
that she had been lying directly across the game trail, on a smooth
well beaten patch of bare earth, which looked as if it had been dug
up, refilled, and trampled down. Looking curiously at this patch they
saw a bit of hide only partially covered at one end; digging down they
found the body of a well grown grisly cub. Its skull had been crushed,
and the brains licked out, and there were signs of other injuries. The
hunters pondered long over this strange discovery, and hazarded many
guesses as to its meaning. At last they decided that probably the cub
had been killed, and its brains eaten out, either by some old male-
grisly or by a cougar, that the mother had returned and driven away
the murderer, and that she had then buried the body and lain above it,
waiting to wreak her vengeance on the first passer-by.

Old Tazewell Woody, during his thirty years' life as a hunter in the
Rockies and on the great plains, killed very many grislies. He always
exercised much caution in dealing with them; and, as it happened, he
was by some suitable tree in almost every case when he was charged. He
would accordingly climb the tree (a practice of which I do not approve
however); and the bear would look up at him and pass on without
stopping. Once, when he was hunting in the mountains with a companion,
the latter, who was down in a valley, while Woody was on the hill-
side, shot at a bear. The first thing Woody knew the wounded grisly,
running up-hill, was almost on him from behind. As he turned it seized
his rifle in its jaws. He wrenched the rifle round, while the bear
still gripped it, and pulled trigger, sending a bullet into its
shoulder; whereupon it struck him with its paw, and knocked him over
the rocks. By good luck he fell in a snow bank and was not hurt in the
least. Meanwhile the bear went on and they never got it.

Once he had an experience with a bear which showed a very curious
mixture of rashness and cowardice. He and a companion were camped in a
little tepee or wigwam, with a bright fire in front of it, lighting up
the night. There was an inch of snow on the ground. Just after they
went to bed a grisly came close to camp. Their dog rushed out and they
could hear it bark round in the darkness for nearly an hour; then the
bear drove it off and came right into camp. It went close to the fire,
picking up the scraps of meat and bread, pulled a haunch of venison
down from a tree, and passed and repassed in front of the tepee,
paying no heed whatever to the two men, who crouched in the doorway
talking to one another. Once it passed so close that Woody could
almost have touched it. Finally his companion fired into it, and off
it ran, badly wounded, without an attempt at retaliation. Next morning
they followed its tracks in the snow, and found it a quarter or a mile
away. It was near a pine and had buried itself under the loose earth,
pine needles, and snow; Woody's companion almost walked over it, and
putting his rifle to its ear blew out its brains.

In all his experience Woody had personally seen but four men who were
badly mauled by bears. Three of these were merely wounded. One was
bitten terribly in the back. Another had an arm partially chewed off.
The third was a man named George Dow, and the accident happened to him
on the Yellowstone about the year 1878. He was with a pack animal at
the time, leading it on a trail through a wood. Seeing a big she-bear
with cubs he yelled at her; whereat she ran away, but only to cache
her cubs, and in a minute, having hidden them, came racing back at
him. His pack animal being slow he started to climb a tree; but before
he could get far enough up she caught him, almost biting a piece out
of the calf of his leg, pulled him down, bit and cuffed him two or
three times, and then went on her way.

The only time Woody ever saw a man killed by a bear was once when he
had given a touch of variety to his life by shipping on a New Bedford
whaler which had touched at one of the Puget Sound ports. The whaler
went up to a part of Alaska where bears were very plentiful and bold.
One day a couple of boats' crews landed; and the men, who were armed
only with an occasional harpoon or lance, scattered over the beach,
one of them, a Frenchman, wading into the water after shell-fish.
Suddenly a bear emerged from some bushes and charged among the
astonished sailors, who scattered in every direction; but the bear,
said Woody, "just had it in for that Frenchman," and went straight at
him. Shrieking with terror he retreated up to his neck in the water;
but the bear plunged in after him, caught him, and disembowelled him.
One of the Yankee mates then fired a bomb lance into the bear's hips,
and the savage beast hobbled off into the dense cover of the low
scrub, where the enraged sailor folk were unable to get at it.

The truth is that while the grisly generally avoids a battle if
possible, and often acts with great cowardice, it is never safe to
take liberties with him; he usually fights desperately and dies hard
when wounded and cornered, and exceptional individuals take the
aggressive on small provocation.

During the years I lived on the frontier I came in contact with many
persons who had been severely mauled or even crippled for life by
grislies; and a number of cases where they killed men outright were
also brought under my ken. Generally these accidents, as was natural,
occurred to hunters who had roused or wounded the game.

A fighting bear sometimes uses his claws and sometimes his teeth. I
have never known one to attempt to kill an antagonist by hugging, in
spite of the popular belief to this effect; though he will sometimes
draw an enemy towards him with his paws the better to reach him with
his teeth, and to hold him so that he cannot escape from the biting.
Nor does the bear often advance on his hind legs to the attack;
though, if the man has come close to him in thick underbrush, or has
stumbled on him in his lair unawares, he will often rise up in this
fashion and strike a single blow. He will also rise in clinching with
a man on horseback. In 1882 a mounted Indian was killed in this manner
on one of the river bottoms some miles below where my ranch house now
stands, not far from the junction of the Beaver and Little Missouri.
The bear had been hunted into a thicket by a band of Indians, in whose
company my informant, a white squaw-man, with whom I afterward did
some trading, was travelling. One of them in the excitement of the
pursuit rode across the end of the thicket; as he did so the great
beast sprang at him with wonderful quickness, rising on its hind legs,
and knocking over the horse and rider with a single sweep of its
terrible fore-paws. It then turned on the fallen man and tore him
open, and though the other Indians came promptly to his rescue and
slew his assailant, they were not in time to save their comrade's
life.

A bear is apt to rely mainly on his teeth or claws according to
whether his efforts are directed primarily to killing his foe or to
making good his own escape. In the latter event he trusts chiefly to
his claws. If cornered, he of course makes a rush for freedom, and in
that case he downs any man who is in his way with a sweep of his great
paw, but passes on without stopping to bite him. If while sleeping or
resting in thick brush some one suddenly stumbles on him close up he
pursues the same course, less from anger than from fear, being
surprised and startled. Moreover, if attacked at close quarters by men
and dogs he strikes right and left in defence.

Sometimes what is called a charge is rather an effort to get away. In
localities where he has been hunted, a bear, like every other kind of
game, is always on the look-out for an attack, and is prepared at any
moment for immediate flight. He seems ever to have in his mind,
whether feeding, sunning himself, or merely roaming around, the
direction--usually towards the thickest cover or most broken ground--
in which he intends to run if molested. When shot at he instantly
starts towards this place; or he may be so confused that he simply
runs he knows not whither; and in either event he may take a line that
leads almost directly to or by the hunter, although he had at first no
thought of charging. In such a case he usually strikes a single knock-
down blow and gallops on without halting, though that one blow may
have taken life. If the claws are long and fairly sharp (as in early
spring, or even in the fall, if the animal has been working over soft
ground) they add immensely to the effect of the blow, for they cut
like blunt axes. Often, however, late in the season, and if the ground
has been dry and hard, or rocky, the claws are worn down nearly to the
quick, and the blow is then given mainly with the under side of the
paw; although even under this disadvantage a thump from a big bear
will down a horse or smash in a man's breast. The hunter Hofer once
lost a horse in this manner. He shot at and wounded a bear which
rushed off, as ill luck would have it, past the place where his horse
was picketed; probably more in fright than in anger it struck the poor
beast a blow which, in the end, proved mortal.

If a bear means mischief and charges not to escape but to do damage,
its aim is to grapple with or throw down its foe and bite him to
death. The charge is made at a gallop, the animal sometimes coming on
silently, with the mouth shut, and sometimes with the jaws open, the
lips drawn back and teeth showing, uttering at the same time a
succession of roars or of savage rasping snarls. Certain bears charge
without any bluster and perfectly straight; while others first
threaten and bully, and even when charging stop to growl, shake the
head and bite at a bush or knock holes in the ground with their fore-
paws. Again, some of them charge home with a ferocious resolution
which their extreme tenacity of life renders especially dangerous;
while others can be turned or driven back even by a shot which is not
mortal. They show the same variability in their behavior when wounded.
Often a big bear, especially if charging, will receive a bullet in
perfect silence, without flinching or seeming to pay any heed to it;
while another will cry out and tumble about, and if charging, even
though it may not abandon the attack, will pause for a moment to whine
or bite at the wound.

Sometimes a single bite causes death. One of the most successful bear
hunters I ever knew, an old fellow whose real name I never heard as he
was always called Old Ike, was killed in this way in the spring or
early summer of 1886 on one of the head-waters of the Salmon. He was a
very good shot, had killed nearly a hundred bears with the rifle, and,
although often charged, had never met with any accident, so that he
had grown somewhat careless. On the day in question he had met a
couple of mining prospectors and was travelling with them, when a
grisly crossed his path. The old hunter immediately ran after it,
rapidly gaining, as the bear did not hurry when it saw itself pursued,
but slouched slowly forwards, occasionally turning its head to grin
and growl. It soon went into a dense grove of young spruce, and as the
hunter reached the edge it charged fiercely out. He fired one hasty
shot, evidently wounding the animal, but not seriously enough to stop
or cripple it; and as his two companions ran forward they saw the bear
seize him with its wide-spread jaws, forcing him to the ground. They
shouted and fired, and the beast abandoned the fallen man on the
instant and sullenly retreated into the spruce thicket, whither they
dared not follow it. Their friend was at his last gasp; for the whole
side of the chest had been crushed in by the one bite, the lungs
showing between the rent ribs.

Very often, however, a bear does not kill a man by one bite, but after
throwing him lies on him, biting him to death. Usually, if no
assistance is at hand, such a man is doomed; although if he pretends
to be dead, and has the nerve to lie quiet under very rough treatment,
it is just possible that the bear may leave him alive, perhaps after
half burying what it believes to be the body. In a very few
exceptional instances men of extraordinary prowess with the knife have
succeeded in beating off a bear, and even in mortally wounding it, but
in most cases a single-handed struggle, at close quarters, with a
grisly bent on mischief, means death.

Occasionally the bear, although vicious, is also frightened, and
passes on after giving one or two bites; and frequently a man who is
knocked down is rescued by his friends before he is killed, the big
beast mayhap using his weapons with clumsiness. So a bear may kill a
foe with a single blow of its mighty fore-arm, either crushing in the
head or chest by sheer force of sinew, or else tearing open the body
with its formidable claws; and so on the other hand he may, and often
does, merely disfigure or maim the foe by a hurried stroke. Hence it
is common to see men who have escaped the clutches of a grisly, but
only at the cost of features marred beyond recognition, or a body
rendered almost helpless for life. Almost every old resident of
western Montana or northern Idaho has known two or three unfortunates
who have suffered in this manner. I have myself met one such man in
Helena, and another in Missoula; both were living at least as late as
1889, the date at which I last saw them. One had been partially
scalped by a bear's teeth; the animal was very old and so the fangs
did not enter the skull. The other had been bitten across the face,
and the wounds never entirely healed, so that his disfigured visage
was hideous to behold.

Most of these accidents occur in following a wounded or worried bear
into thick cover; and under such circumstances an animal apparently
hopelessly disabled, or in the death throes, may with a last effort
kill one or more of its assailants. In 1874 my wife's uncle, Captain
Alexander Moore, U. S. A., and my friend Captain Bates, with some men
of the 2nd and 3rd Cavalry, were scouting in Wyoming, near the
Freezeout Mountains. One morning they roused a bear in the open
prairie and followed it at full speed as it ran towards a small creek.
At one spot in the creek beavers had built a dam, and as usual in such
places there was a thick growth of bushes and willow saplings. Just as
the bear reached the edge of this little jungle it was struck by
several balls, both of its forelegs being broken. Nevertheless, it
managed to shove itself forward on its hind-legs, and partly rolled,
partly pushed itself into the thicket, the bushes though low being so
dense that its body was at once completely hidden. The thicket was a
mere patch of brush, not twenty yards across in any direction. The
leading troopers reached the edge almost as the bear tumbled in. One
of them, a tall and powerful man named Miller, instantly dismounted
and prepared to force his way in among the dwarfed willows, which were
but breast-high. Among the men who had ridden up were Moore and Bates,
and also the two famous scouts, Buffalo Bill--long a companion of
Captain Moore,--and California Joe, Custer's faithful follower.
California Joe had spent almost all his life on the plains and in the
mountains, as a hunter and Indian fighter; and when he saw the trooper
about to rush into the thicket he called out to him not to do so,
warning him of the danger. But the man was a very reckless fellow and
he answered by jeering at the old hunter for his over-caution in being
afraid of a crippled bear. California Joe made no further effort to
dissuade him, remarking quietly: "Very well, sonny, go in; it's your
own affair." Miller then leaped off the bank on which they stood and
strode into the thicket, holding his rifle at the port. Hardly had he
taken three steps when the bear rose in front of him, roaring with
rage and pain. It was so close that the man had no chance to fire. Its
fore-arms hung useless and as it reared unsteadily on its hind-legs,
lunging forward at him, he seized it by the ears and strove to hold it
back. His strength was very great, and he actually kept the huge head
from his face and braced himself so that he was not overthrown; but
the bear twisted its muzzle from side to side, biting and tearing the
man's arms and shoulders. Another soldier jumping down slew the beast
with a single bullet, and rescued his comrade; but though alive he was
too badly hurt to recover and died after reaching the hospital.
Buffalo Bill was given the bear-skin, and I believe has it now.

The instances in which hunters who have rashly followed grislies into
thick cover have been killed or severely mauled might be multiplied
indefinitely. I have myself known of eight cases in which men have met
their deaths in this manner.

It occasionally happens that a cunning old grisly will lie so close
that the hunter almost steps on him; and he then rises suddenly with a
loud, coughing growl and strikes down or seizes the man before the
latter can fire off his rifle. More rarely a bear which is both
vicious and crafty deliberately permits the hunter to approach fairly
near to, or perhaps pass by, its hiding-place, and then suddenly
charges him with such rapidity that he has barely time for the most
hurried shot. The danger in such a case is of course great.

Ordinarily, however, even in the brush, the bear's object is to slink
away, not to fight, and very many are killed even under the most
unfavorable circumstances without accident. If an unwounded bear
thinks itself unobserved it is not apt to attack; and in thick cover
it is really astonishing to see how one of these large animals can
hide, and how closely it will lie when there is danger. About twelve
miles below my ranch there are some large river bottoms and creek
bottoms covered with a matted mass of cottonwood, box-alders, bull-
berry bushes, rosebushes, ash, wild plums, and other bushes. These
bottoms have harbored bears ever since I first saw them; but, though
often in company with a large party, I have repeatedly beaten through
them, and though we must at times have been very near indeed to the
game, we never so much as heard it run.

When bears are shot, as they usually must be, in open timber or on the
bare mountain, the risk is very much less. Hundreds may thus be killed
with comparatively little danger; yet even under these circumstances
they will often charge, and sometimes make their charge good. The
spice of danger, especially to a man armed with a good repeating
rifle, is only enough to add zest to the chase, and the chief triumph
is in outwitting the wary quarry and getting within range. Ordinarily
the only excitement is in the stalk, the bear doing nothing more than
keep a keen look-out and manifest the utmost anxiety to get away. As
is but natural, accidents occasionally occur; yet they are usually due
more to some failure in man or weapon than to the prowess of the bear.
A good hunter whom I once knew, at a time when he was living in Butte,
received fatal injuries from a bear he attacked in open woodland. The
beast charged after the first shot, but slackened its pace on coming
almost up to the man. The latter's gun jambed, and as he was
endeavoring to work it he kept stepping slowly back, facing the bear
which followed a few yards distant, snarling and threatening.
Unfortunately while thus walking backwards the man struck a dead log
and fell over it, whereupon the beast instantly sprang on him and
mortally wounded him before help arrived.

On rare occasions men who are not at the time hunting it fall victims
to the grisly. This is usually because they stumble on it unawares and
the animal attacks them more in fear than in anger. One such case,
resulting fatally, occurred near my own ranch. The man walked almost
over a bear while crossing a little point of brush, in a bend of the
river, and was brained with a single blow of the paw. In another
instance which came to my knowledge the man escaped with a shaking up,
and without even a fight. His name was Perkins, and he was out
gathering huckleberries in the woods on a mountain side near
Pend'Oreille Lake. Suddenly he was sent flying head over heels, by a
blow which completely knocked the breath out of his body; and so
instantaneous was the whole affair that all he could ever recollect
about it was getting a vague glimpse of the bear just as he was bowled
over. When he came to he found himself lying some distance down the
hill-side, much shaken, and without his berry pail, which had rolled a
hundred yards below him, but not otherwise the worse for his
misadventure; while the footprints showed that the bear, after
delivering the single hurried stoke at the unwitting disturber of its
day-dreams, had run off up-hill as fast as it was able.

A she-bear with cubs is a proverbially dangerous beast; yet even under
such conditions different grislies act in directly opposite ways. Some
she-grislies, when their cubs are young, but are able to follow them
about, seem always worked up to the highest pitch of anxious and
jealous rage, so that they are likely to attack unprovoked any
intruder or even passer-by. Others when threatened by the hunter leave
their cubs to their fate without a visible qualm of any kind, and seem
to think only of their own safety.

In 1882 Mr. Casper W. Whitney, now of New York, met with a very
singular adventure with a she-bear and cub. He was in Harvard when I
was, but left it and, like a good many other Harvard men of that time,
took to cow-punching in the West. He went on a ranch in Rio Arriba
County, New Mexico, and was a keen hunter, especially fond of the
chase of cougar, bear, and elk. One day while riding a stony mountain
trail he saw a grisly cub watching him from the chaparral above, and
he dismounted to try to capture it; his rifle was a 40-90 Sharp's.
Just as he neared the cub, he heard a growl and caught a glimpse of
the old she, and he at once turned up-hill, and stood under some tall,
quaking aspens. From this spot he fired at and wounded the she, then
seventy yards off; and she charged furiously. He hit her again, but as
she kept coming like a thunderbolt he climbed hastily up the aspen,
dragging his gun with him, as it had a strap. When the bear reached
the foot of the aspen she reared, and bit and clawed the slender
trunk, shaking it for a moment, and he shot her through the eye. Off
she sprang for a few yards, and then spun round a dozen times, as if
dazed or partially stunned; for the bullet had not touched the brain.
Then the vindictive and resolute beast came back to the tree and again
reared up against it; this time to receive a bullet that dropped her
lifeless. Mr. Whitney then climbed down and walked to where the cub
had been sitting as a looker-on. The little animal did not move until
he reached out his hand; when it suddenly struck at him like an angry
cat, dove into the bushes, and was seen no more.

In the summer of 1888 an old-time trapper, named Charley Norton, while
on Loon Creek, of the middle fork of the Salmon, meddled with a she
and her cubs. She ran at him and with one blow of her paw almost
knocked off his lower jaw; yet he recovered, and was alive when I last
heard of him.

Yet the very next spring the cowboys with my own wagon on the Little
Missouri round-up killed a mother bear which made but little more
fight than a coyote. She had two cubs, and was surprised in the early
morning on the prairie far from cover. There were eight or ten cowboys
together at the time, just starting off on a long circle, and of
course they all got down their ropes in a second, and putting spurs to
their fiery little horses started toward the bears at a run, shouting
and swinging their loops round their heads. For a moment the old she
tried to bluster and made a half-hearted threat of charging; but her
courage failed before the rapid onslaught of her yelling, rope-
swinging assailants; and she took to her heels and galloped off,
leaving the cubs to shift for themselves. The cowboys were close
behind, however, and after half a mile's run she bolted into a shallow
cave or hole in the side of a butte, where she stayed cowering and
growling, until one of the men leaped off his horse, ran up to the
edge of the hole, and killed her with a single bullet from his
revolver, fired so close that the powder burned her hair. The
unfortunate cubs were roped, and then so dragged about that they were
speedily killed instead of being brought alive to camp, as ought to
have been done.

In the cases mentioned above the grisly attacked only after having
been itself assailed, or because it feared an assault, for itself or
for its young. In the old days, however, it may almost be said that a
grisly was more apt to attack than to flee. Lewis and Clarke and the
early explorers who immediately succeeded them, as well as the first
hunters and trappers, the "Rocky Mountain men" of the early decades of
the present century, were repeatedly assailed in this manner; and not
a few of the bear hunters of that period found that it was unnecessary
to take much trouble about approaching their quarry, as the grisly was
usually prompt to accept the challenge and to advance of its own
accord, as soon as it discovered the foe. All this is changed now. Yet
even at the present day an occasional vicious old bear may be found,
in some far-off and little-trod fastness, which still keeps up the
former habit of its kind. All old hunters have tales of this sort to
relate, the prowess, cunning, strength, and ferocity of the grisly
being favorite topics for camp-fire talk throughout the Rockies; but
in most cases it is not safe to accept these stories without careful
sifting.

Still it is just as unsafe to reject them all. One of my own cowboys
was once attacked by a grisly, seemingly in pure wantonness. He was
riding up a creek bottom and had just passed a clump of rose and bull-
berry bushes when his horse gave such a leap as almost to unseat him,
and then darted madly forward. Turning round in the saddle to his
utter astonishment he saw a large bear galloping after him, at the
horse's heels. For a few jumps the race was close, then the horse drew
away and the bear wheeled and went into a thicket of wild plums. The
amazed and indignant cowboy, as soon as he could rein in his steed,
drew his revolver and rode back to and around the thicket, endeavoring
to provoke his late pursuer to come out and try conclusions on more
equal terms; but prudent Ephraim had apparently repented of his freak
of ferocious bravado, and declined to leave the secure shelter of the
jungle.

Other attacks are of a much more explicable nature. Mr. Huffman, the
photographer of Miles City, informed me once when butchering some
slaughtered elk he was charged twice by a she-bear and two well-grown
cubs. This was a piece of sheer bullying, undertaken solely with the
purpose of driving away the man and feasting on the carcasses; for in
each charge the three bears, after advancing with much blustering,
roaring, and growling, halted just before coming to close quarters. In
another instance a gentleman I once knew, a Mr. S. Carr. was charged
by a grisly from mere ill temper at being disturbed at mealtime. The
man was riding up a valley; and the bear was at an elk carcass, near a
clump of firs. As soon as it became aware of the approach of the
horseman, while he was yet over a hundred yards distant, it jumped on
the carcass, looked at him a moment, and then ran straight for him.
There was no particular reason why it should have charged, for it was
fat and in good trim, though when killed its head showed scars made by
the teeth of rival grislies. Apparently it had been living so well,
principally on flesh, that it had become quarrelsome; and perhaps its
not over sweet disposition had been soured by combats with others of
its own kind. In yet another case, a grisly charged with even less
excuse. An old trapper, from whom I occasionally bought fur, was
toiling up a mountain pass when he spied a big bear sitting on his
haunches on the hill-side above. The trapper shouted and waved his
cap; whereupon, to his amazement, the bear uttered a loud "wough" and
charged straight down on him--only to fall a victim to misplaced
boldness.

I am even inclined to think that there have been wholly exceptional
occasions when a grisly has attacked a man with the deliberate purpose
of making a meal of him; when, in other words, it has started on the
career of a man-eater. At least, on any other theory I find it
difficult to account for an attack which once came to my knowledge. I
was at Sand point, on Pend'Oreille Lake, and met some French and Meti
trappers, then in town with their bales of beaver, otter, and sable.
One of them, who gave his name as Baptiste Lamoche, had his head
twisted over to one side, the result of the bite of a bear. When the
accident occurred he was out on a trapping trip with two companions.
They had pitched camp right on the shore of a cove in a little lake,
and his comrades were off fishing in a dugout or pirogue. He himself
was sitting near the shore, by a little lean-to, watching some beaver
meat which was sizzling over the dying embers. Suddenly, and without
warning, a great bear, which had crept silently up beneath the shadows
of the tall evergreens, rushed at him, with a guttural roar, and
seized him before he could rise to his feet. It grasped him with its
jaws at the junction of the neck and shoulder, making the teeth meet
through bone, sinew, and muscle; and turning, tracked off towards the
forest, dragging with it the helpless and paralyzed victim. Luckily
the two men in the canoe had just paddled round the point, in sight
of, and close to, camp. The man in the bow, seeing the plight of their
comrade, seized his rifle and fired at the bear. The bullet went
through the beast's lungs, and it forthwith dropped its prey, and
running off some two hundred yards, lay down on its side and died. The
rescued man recovered full health and strength, but never again
carried his head straight.

Old hunters and mountain-men tell many stories, not only of malicious
grislies thus attacking men in camp, but also of their even dogging
the footsteps of some solitary hunter and killing him when the
favorable opportunity occurs. Most of these tales are mere fables; but
it is possible that in altogether exceptional instances they rest on a
foundation of fact. One old hunter whom I knew told me such a story.
He was a truthful old fellow and there was no doubt that he believed
what he said, and that his companion was actually killed by a bear;
but it is probable that he was mistaken in reading the signs of his
comrade's fate, and that the latter was not dogged by the bear at all,
but stumbled on him and was slain in the surprise of the moment.

At any rate, cases of wanton assaults by grislies are altogether out
of the common. The ordinary hunter may live out his whole life in the
wilderness and never know aught of a bear attacking a man unprovoked;
and the great majority of bears are shot under circumstances of no
special excitement, as they either make no fight at all, or, if they
do fight, are killed before there is any risk of their doing damage.
If surprised on the plains, at some distance from timber or from badly
broken ground, it is no uncommon feat for a single horseman to kill
them with a revolver. Twice of late years it has been performed in the
neighborhood of my ranch. In both instances the men were not hunters
out after game, but simply cowboys, riding over the range in early
morning in pursuance of their ordinary duties among the cattle. I knew
both men and have worked with them on the round-up. Like most cowboys,
they carried 44-calibre Colt revolvers, and were accustomed to and
fairly expert in their use, and they were mounted on ordinary cow-
ponies--quick, wiry, plucky little beasts. In one case the bear was
seen from quite a distance, lounging across a broad table-land. The
cowboy, by taking advantage of a winding and rather shallow coulie,
got quite close to him. He then scrambled out of the coulie, put spurs
to his pony, and raced up to within fifty yards of the astonished bear
ere the latter quite understood what it was that was running at him
through the gray dawn. He made no attempt at fight, but ran at top
speed towards a clump of brush not far off at the head of a creek.
Before he could reach it, however, the galloping horsemen was
alongside, and fired three shots into his broad back. He did not turn,
but ran on into the bushes and then fell over and died.

In the other case the cowboy, a Texan, was mounted on a good cutting
pony, a spirited, handy, agile little animal, but excitable, and with
a habit of dancing, which rendered it difficult to shoot from its
back. The man was with the round-up wagon, and had been sent off by
himself to make a circle through some low, barren buttes, where it was
not thought more than a few head of stock would be found. On rounding
the corner of a small washout he almost ran over a bear which was
feeding on the carcass of a steer that had died in an alkali hole.
After a moment of stunned surprise the bear hurled himself at the
intruder with furious impetuosity; while the cowboy, wheeling his
horse on its haunches and dashing in the spurs, carried it just clear
of his assailant's headlong rush. After a few springs he reined in and
once more wheeled half round, having drawn his revolver, only to find
the bear again charging and almost on him. This time he fired into it,
near the joining of the neck and shoulder, the bullet going downwards
into the chest hollow; and again by a quick dash to one side he just
avoided the rush of the beast and the sweep of its mighty forepaw. The
bear then halted for a minute, and he rode close by it at a run,
firing a couple of shots, which brought on another resolute charge.
The ground was somewhat rugged and broken, but his pony was as quick
on its feet as a cat, and never stumbled, even when going at full
speed to avoid the bear's first mad rushes. It speedily became so
excited, however, as to render it almost impossible for the rider to
take aim. Sometimes he would come up close to the bear and wait for it
to charge, which it would do, first at a trot, or rather rack, and
then at a lumbering but swift gallop; and he would fire one or two
shots before being forced to run. At other times, if the bear stood
still in a good place, he would run by it, firing as he rode. He spent
many cartridges, and though most of them were wasted occasionally a
bullet went home. The bear fought with the most savage courage,
champing its bloody jaws, roaring with rage, and looking the very
incarnation of evil fury. For some minutes it made no effort to flee,
either charging or standing at bay. Then it began to move slowly
towards a patch of ash and wild plums in the head of a coulie, some
distance off. Its pursuer rode after it, and when close enough would
push by it and fire, while the bear would spin quickly round and
charge as fiercely as ever, though evidently beginning to grow weak.
At last, when still a couple of hundred yards from cover the man found
he had used up all his cartridges, and then merely followed at a safe
distance. The bear no longer paid heed to him, but walked slowly
forwards, swaying its great head from side to side, while the blood
streamed from between its half-opened jaws. On reaching the cover he
could tell by the waving of the bushes that it walked to the middle
and then halted. A few minutes afterwards some of the other cowboys
rode up, having been attracted by the incessant firing. They
surrounded the thicket, firing and throwing stones into the bushes.
Finally, as nothing moved, they ventured in and found the indomitable
grisly warrior lying dead.

Cowboys delight in nothing so much as the chance to show their skill
as riders and ropers; and they always try to ride down and rope any
wild animal they come across in favorable ground and close enough up.
If a party of them meets a bear in the open they have great fun; and
the struggle between the shouting, galloping, rough-riders and their
shaggy quarry is full of wild excitement and not unaccompanied by
danger. The bear often throws the noose from his head so rapidly that
it is a difficult matter to catch him; and his frequent charges
scatter his tormentors in every direction while the horses become wild
with fright over the roaring, bristling beast--for horses seem to
dread a bear more than any other animal. If the bear cannot reach
cover, however, his fate is sealed. Sooner or later, the noose
tightens over one leg, or perchance over the neck and fore-paw, and as
the rope straightens with a "plunk," the horse braces itself
desperately and the bear tumbles over. Whether he regains his feet or
not the cowboy keeps the rope taut; soon another noose tightens over a
leg, and the bear is speedily rendered helpless.

I have known of these feats being performed several times in northern
Wyoming, although never in the immediate neighborhood of my ranch. Mr.
Archibald Roger's cowhands have in this manner caught several bears,
on or near his ranch on the Gray Bull, which flows into the Bighorn;
and those of Mr. G. B. Grinnell have also occasionally done so. Any
set of moderately good ropers and riders, who are accustomed to back
one another up and act together, can accomplish the feat if they have
smooth ground and plenty of room. It is, however, indeed a feat of
skill and daring for a single man; and yet I have known of more than
one instance in which it has been accomplished by some reckless knight
of the rope and the saddle. One such occurred in 1887 on the Flathead
Reservation, the hero being a half-breed; and another in 1890 at the
mouth of the Bighorn, where a cowboy roped, bound, and killed a large
bear single-handed.

My friend General "Red" Jackson, of Bellemeade, in the pleasant mid-
county of Tennessee, once did a feat which casts into the shade even
the feats of the men of the lariat. General Jackson, who afterwards
became one of the ablest and most renowned of the Confederate cavalry
leaders, was at the time a young officer in the Mounted Rifle
Regiment, now known as the 3rd United States Cavalry. It was some
years before the Civil War, and the regiment was on duty in the
Southwest, then the debatable land of Comanche and Apache. While on a
scout after hostile Indians, the troops in their march roused a large
grisly which sped off across the plain in front of them. Strict orders
had been issued against firing at game, because of the nearness of the
Indians. Young Jackson was a man of great strength, a keen swordsman,
who always kept the finest edge on his blade, and he was on a swift
and mettled Kentucky horse, which luckily had but one eye. Riding at
full speed he soon overtook the quarry. As the horse hoofs sounded
nearer, the grim bear ceased its flight, and whirling round stood at
bay, raising itself on its hind-legs and threatening its pursuer with
bared fangs and spread claws. Carefully riding his horse so that its
blind side should be towards the monster, the cavalryman swept by at a
run, handling his steed with such daring skill that he just cleared
the blow of the dreaded fore-paw, while with one mighty sabre stroke
he cleft the bear's skull, slaying the grinning beast as it stood
upright.



                              CHAPTER V.

                             THE COUGAR.

No animal of the chase is so difficult to kill by fair still-hunting
as the cougar--that beast of many names, known in the East as panther
and painter, in the West as mountain lion, in the Southwest as Mexican
lion, and in the southern continent as lion and puma.

Without hounds its pursuit is so uncertain that from the still-
hunter's standpoint it hardly deserves to rank as game at all--though,
by the way, it is itself a more skilful still-hunter than any human
rival. It prefers to move abroad by night or at dusk; and in the
daytime usually lies hid in some cave or tangled thicket where it is
absolutely impossible even to stumble on it by chance. It is a beast
of stealth and rapine; its great, velvet paws never make a sound, and
it is always on the watch whether for prey or for enemies, while it
rarely leaves shelter even when it thinks itself safe. Its soft,
leisurely movements and uniformity of color make it difficult to
discover at best, and its extreme watchfulness helps it; but it is the
cougar's reluctance to leave cover at any time, its habit of slinking
off through the brush, instead of running in the open, when startled,
and the way in which it lies motionless in its lair even when a man is
within twenty yards, that render it so difficult to still-hunt.

In fact it is next to impossible with any hope of success regularly to
hunt the cougar without dogs or bait. Most cougars that are killed by
still-hunters are shot by accident while the man is after other game.
This has been my own experience. Although not common, cougars are
found near my ranch, where the ground is peculiarly favorable for the
solitary rifleman; and for ten years I have, off and on, devoted a day
or two to their pursuit; but never successfully. One December a large
cougar took up his abode on a densely wooded bottom two miles above
the ranch house. I did not discover his existence until I went there
one evening to kill a deer, and found that he had driven all the deer
off the bottom, having killed several, as well as a young heifer. Snow
was falling at the time, but the storm was evidently almost over; the
leaves were all off the trees and bushes; and I felt that next day
there would be such a chance to follow the cougar as fate rarely
offered. In the morning by dawn I was at the bottom, and speedily
found his trail. Following it I came across his bed, among some cedars
in a dark, steep gorge, where the buttes bordered the bottom. He had
evidently just left it, and I followed his tracks all day. But I never
caught a glimpse of him, and late in the afternoon I trudged wearily
homewards. When I went out next morning I found that as soon as I
abandoned the chase, my quarry, according to the uncanny habit
sometimes displayed by his kind, coolly turned likewise, and
deliberately dogged my footsteps to within a mile of the ranch house;
his round footprints being as clear as writing in the snow.

This was the best chance of the kind that I ever had; but again and
again I have found fresh signs of cougar, such as a lair which they
had just left, game they had killed, or one of our venison caches
which they had robbed, and have hunted for them all day without
success. My failures were doubtless due in part to various
shortcomings in hunter's-craft on my own part; but equally without
doubt they were mainly due to the quarry's wariness and its sneaking
ways.

I have seen a wild cougar alive but twice, and both times by chance.
On one occasion one of my men, Merrifield, and I surprised one eating
a skunk in a bull-berry patch; and by our own bungling frightened it
away from its unsavory repast without getting a shot.

On the other occasion luck befriended me. I was with a pack train in
the Rockies, and one day, feeling lazy, and as we had no meat in camp,
I determined to try for deer by lying in wait beside a recently
travelled game trail. The spot I chose was a steep, pine-clad slope
leading down to a little mountain lake. I hid behind a breastwork of
rotten logs, with a few young evergreens in front--an excellent
ambush. A broad game trail slanted down the hill directly past me. I
lay perfectly quiet for about an hour, listening to the murmur of the
pine forests, and the occasional call of a jay or woodpecker, and
gazing eagerly along the trail in the waning light of the late
afternoon. Suddenly, without noise or warning of any kind, a cougar
stood in the trail before me. The unlooked-for and unheralded approach
of the beast was fairly ghost-like. With its head lower than its
shoulders, and its long tail twitching, it slouched down the path,
treading as softly as a kitten. I waited until it had passed and then
fired into the short ribs, the bullet ranging forward. Throwing its
tail up in the air, and giving a bound, the cougar galloped off over a
slight ridge. But it did not go far; within a hundred yards I found it
stretched on its side, its jaws still working convulsively.

The true way to hunt the cougar is to follow it with dogs. If the
chase is conducted in this fashion, it is very exciting, and resembles
on a larger scale the ordinary method of hunting the wildcat or small
lynx, as practised by the sport-loving planters of the southern
States. With a very little training, hounds readily and eagerly pursue
the cougar, showing in this kind of chase none of the fear and disgust
they are so prone to exhibit when put on the trail of the certainly no
more dangerous wolf. The cougar, when the hounds are on its track, at
first runs, but when hard-pressed takes to a tree, or possibly comes
to bay in thick cover. Its attention is then so taken up with the
hounds that it can usually be approached and shot without much
difficulty; though some cougars break bay when the hunters come near,
and again make off, when they can only be stopped by many large and
fierce hounds. Hounds are often killed in these fights; and if hungry
a cougar will pounce on any dog for food; yet, as I have elsewhere
related, I know of one instance in which a small pack of big, savage
hounds killed a cougar unassisted. General Wade Hampton, who with
horse and hound has been the mightiest hunter America has ever seen,
informs me that he has killed with his pack some sixteen cougars,
during the fifty years he has hunted in South Carolina and
Mississippi. I believe they were all killed in the latter State.
General Hampton's hunting has been chiefly for bear and deer, though
his pack also follows the lynx and the gray fox; and, of course, if
good fortune throws either a wolf or a cougar in his way it is
followed as the game of all others. All the cougars he killed were
either treed or brought to bay in a canebrake by the hounds; and they
often handled the pack very roughly in the death struggle. He found
them much more dangerous antagonists than the black bear when assailed
with the hunting knife, a weapon of which he was very fond. However,
if his pack had held a few very large, savage, dogs, put in purely for
fighting when the quarry was at bay, I think the danger would have
been minimized.

General Hampton followed his game on horseback; but in following the
cougar with dogs this is by no means always necessary. Thus Col. Cecil
Clay, of Washington, killed a cougar in West Virginia, on foot with
only three or four hounds. The dogs took the cold trail, and he had to
run many miles over the rough, forest-clad mountains after them.
Finally they drove the cougar up a tree; where he found it, standing
among the branches, in a half-erect position, its hind-feet on one
limb and its fore-feet on another, while it glared down at the dogs,
and switched its tail from side to side. He shot it through both
shoulders, and down it came in a heap, whereupon the dogs jumped in
and worried it, for its fore-legs were useless, though it managed to
catch one dog in its jaws and bite him severely.

A wholly exceptional instance of the kind was related to me by my old
hunting friend Willis. In his youth, in southwest Missouri, he knew a
half-witted "poor white" who was very fond of hunting coons. He hunted
at night, armed with an axe, and accompanied by his dog Penny, a
large, savage, half-starved cur. One dark night the dog treed an
animal which he could not see; so he cut down the tree, and
immediately Penny jumped in and grabbed the beast. The man sung out
"Hold on, Penny," seeing that the dog had seized some large, wild
animal; the next moment the brute knocked the dog endways, and at the
same instant the man split open its head with the axe. Great was his
astonishment, and greater still the astonishment of the neighbors next
day when it was found that he had actually killed a cougar. These
great cats often take to trees in a perfectly foolish manner. My
friend, the hunter Woody, in all his thirty years' experience in the
wilds never killed but one cougar. He was lying out in camp with two
dogs at the time; it was about midnight, the fire was out, and the
night was pitch-black. He was roused by the furious barking of his two
dogs, who had charged into the gloom, and were apparently baying at
something in a tree close by. He kindled the fire, and to his
astonishment found the thing in the tree to be a cougar. Coming close
underneath he shot it with his revolver; thereupon it leaped down, ran
some forty yards, and climbed up another tree, where it died among the
branches.

If cowboys come across a cougar in open ground they invariably chase
and try to rope it--as indeed they do with any wild animal. I have
known several instances of cougars being roped in this way; in one the
animal was brought into camp alive by two strapping cowpunchers.

The cougar sometimes stalks its prey, and sometimes lies in wait for
it beside a game-trail or drinking pool--very rarely indeed does it
crouch on the limb of a tree. When excited by the presence of game it
is sometimes very bold. Willis once fired at some bighorn sheep, on a
steep mountain-side; he missed, and immediately after his shot, a
cougar made a dash into the midst of the flying band, in hopes to
secure a victim. The cougar roams over long distances, and often
changes its hunting ground, perhaps remaining in one place two or
three months, until the game is exhausted, and then shifting to
another. When it does not lie in wait it usually spends most of the
night, winter and summer, in prowling restlessly around the places
where it thinks it may come across prey, and it will patiently follow
an animal's trail. There is no kind of game, save the full-grown
grisly and buffalo, which it does not at times assail and master. It
readily snaps up grisly cubs or buffalo calves; and in at least one
instance, I have know of it springing on, slaying, and eating a full-
grown wolf. I presume the latter was taken by surprise. On the other
hand, the cougar itself has to fear the big timber wolves when
maddened by the winter hunger and gathered in small parties; while a
large grisly would of course be an overmatch for it twice over, though
its superior agility puts it beyond the grisly's power to harm it,
unless by some unlucky chance taken in a cave. Nor could a cougar
overcome a bull moose, or a bull elk either, if the latter's horns
were grown, save by taking it unawares. By choice, with such big game,
its victims are the cows and young. The prong-horn rarely comes within
reach of its spring; but it is the dreaded enemy of bighorn, white
goat, and every kind of deer, while it also preys on all the smaller
beasts, such as foxes, coons, rabbits, beavers, and even gophers,
rats, and mice. It sometimes makes a thorny meal of the porcupine, and
if sufficiently hungry attacks and eats its smaller cousin the lynx.
It is not a brave animal; nor does it run its prey down in open chase.
It always makes its attacks by stealth, and if possible from behind,
and relies on two or three tremendous springs to bring it on the
doomed creature's back. It uses its claws as well as its teeth in
holding and killing the prey. If possible it always seizes a large
animal by the throat, whereas the wolf's point of attack is more often
the haunch or flank. Small deer or sheep it will often knock over and
kill, merely using its big paws; sometimes it breaks their necks. It
has a small head compared to the jaguar, and its bite is much less
dangerous. Hence, as compared to its larger and bolder relative, it
places more trust in its claws and less in its teeth.

Though the cougar prefers woodland, it is not necessarily a beast of
the dense forests only; for it is found in all the plains country,
living in the scanty timber belts which fringe the streams, or among
the patches of brush in the Bad Lands. The persecution of hunters
however always tends to drive it into the most thickly wooded and
broken fastnesses of the mountains. The she has from one to three
kittens, brought forth in a cave or a secluded lair, under a dead log
or in very thick brush. It is said that the old he's kill the small
male kittens when they get a chance. They certainly at times during
the breeding season fight desperately among themselves. Cougars are
very solitary beasts; it is rare to see more than one at a time, and
then only a mother and young, or a mated male and female. While she
has kittens, the mother is doubly destructive to game. The young begin
to kill for themselves very early. The first fall, after they are
born, they attack large game, and from ignorance are bolder in making
their attacks than their parents; but they are clumsy and often let
the prey escape. Like all cats, cougars are comparatively easy to
trap, much more so than beasts of the dog kind, such as the fox and
wolf.

They are silent animals; but old hunters say that at mating time the
males call loudly, while the females have a very distinct answer. They
are also sometimes noisy at other seasons. I am not sure that I have
ever heard one; but one night, while camped in a heavily timbered
coulie near Kildeer Mountains, where, as their footprints showed, the
beasts were plentiful, I twice heard a loud, wailing scream ringing
through the impenetrable gloom which shrouded the hills around us. My
companion, an old plainsman, said that this was the cry of the cougar
prowling for its prey. Certainly no man could well listen to a stranger
and wilder sound.

Ordinarily the rifleman is in no danger from a hunted cougar; the
beast's one idea seems to be flight, and even if its assailant is very
close, it rarely charges if there is any chance for escape. Yet there
are occasions when it will show fight. In the spring of 1890, a man
with whom I had more than once worked on the round-up--though I never
knew his name--was badly mauled by a cougar near my ranch. He was
hunting with a companion and they unexpectedly came on the cougar on a
shelf of sandstone above their herds, only some ten feet off. It
sprang down on the man, mangled him with teeth and claws for a moment,
and then ran away. Another man I knew, a hunter named Ed. Smith, who
had a small ranch near Helena, was once charged by a wounded cougar;
he received a couple of deep scratches, but was not seriously hurt.

Many old frontiersmen tell tales of the cougar's occasionally itself
making the attack, and dogging to his death some unfortunate wayfarer.
Many others laugh such tales to scorn. It is certain that if such
attacks occur they are altogether exceptional, being indeed of such
extreme rarity that they may be entirely disregarded in practice. I
should have no more hesitation in sleeping out in a wood where there
were cougars, or walking through it after nightfall, than I should
have if the cougars were tomcats.

Yet it is foolish to deny that in exceptional instances attacks may
occur. Cougars vary wonderfully in size, and no less in temper. Indeed
I think that by nature they are as ferocious and bloodthirsty as they
are cowardly; and that their habit of sometimes dogging wayfarers for
miles is due to a desire for bloodshed which they lack the courage to
realize. In the old days, when all wild beasts were less shy than at
present, there was more danger from the cougar; and this was
especially true in the dark canebrakes of some of the southern States
where the man a cougar was most likely to encounter was a nearly naked
and unarmed negro. General Hampton tells me that near his Mississippi
plantation, many years ago, a negro who was one of a gang engaged in
building a railroad through low and wet ground was waylaid and killed
by a cougar late one night as he was walking alone through the swamp.

I knew two men in Missoula who were once attacked by cougars in a very
curious manner. It was in January, and they were walking home through
the snow after a hunt, each carrying on his back the saddle, haunches,
and hide of a deer he had slain. Just at dusk, as they were passing
through a narrow ravine, the man in front heard his partner utter a
sudden loud call for help. Turning, he was dumbfounded to see the man
lying on his face in the snow, with a cougar which had evidently just
knocked him down standing over him, grasping the deer meat; while
another cougar was galloping up to assist. Swinging his rifle round he
shot the first one in the brain, and it dropped motionless, whereat
the second halted, wheeled, and bounded into the woods. His companion
was not in the least hurt or even frightened, though greatly amazed.
The cougars were not full grown, but young of the year.

Now in this case I do not believe the beasts had any real intention of
attacking the men. They were young animals, bold, stupid, and very
hungry. The smell of the raw meat excited them beyond control, and
they probably could not make out clearly what the men were, as they
walked bent under their burdens, with the deer skins on their backs.
Evidently the cougars were only trying to get at the venison.

In 1886 a cougar killed an Indian near Flathead Lake. Two Indians were
hunting together on horseback when they came on the cougar. It fell at
once to their shots, and they dismounted and ran towards it. Just as
they reached it it came to, and seized one, killing him instantly with
a couple of savage bites in the throat and chest; it then raced after
the other, and, as he sprung on his horse, struck him across the
buttocks, inflicting a deep but not dangerous scratch. I saw this
survivor a year later. He evinced great reluctance to talk of the
event, and insisted that the thing which had slain his companion was
not really a cougar at all, but a devil.

A she-cougar does not often attempt to avenge the loss of her young,
but sometimes she does. A remarkable instance of the kind happened to
my friend, Professor John Bache McMaster, in 1875. He was camped near
the head of Green River, Wyoming. One afternoon he found a couple of
cougar kittens, and took them into camp; they were clumsy, playful,
friendly little creatures. The next afternoon he remained in camp with
the cook. Happening to look up suddenly he spied the mother cougar
running noiselessly down on them, her eyes glaring and tail twitching.
Snatching up his rifle, he killed her when she was barely twenty yards
distant.

A ranchman, named Trescott, who was at one time my neighbor, told me
that while he was living on a sheep-farm in the Argentine, he found
pumas very common, and killed many. They were very destructive to
sheep and colts, but were singularly cowardly when dealing with men.
Not only did they never attack human beings, under any stress of
hunger, but they made no effective resistance when brought to bay,
merely scratching and cuffing like a big cat; so that if found in a
cave, it was safe to creep in and shoot them with a revolver. Jaguars,
on the contrary, were very dangerous antagonists.



                             CHAPTER VI.

                    A PECCARY HUNT ON THE NUECES.

In the United States the peccary is only found in the southernmost
corner of Texas. In April 1892, I made a flying visit to the ranch
country of this region, starting from the town of Uvalde with a Texan
friend, Mr. John Moore. My trip being very hurried, I had but a couple
of days to devote to hunting.

Our first halting-place was at a ranch on the Frio; a low, wooden
building, of many rooms, with open galleries between them, and
verandas round about. The country was in some respects like, in others
strangely unlike, the northern plains with which I was so well
acquainted. It was for the most part covered with a scattered growth
of tough, stunted mesquite trees, not dense enough to be called a
forest, and yet sufficiently close to cut off the view. It was very
dry, even as compared with the northern plains. The bed of the Frio
was filled with coarse gravel, and for the most part dry as a bone on
the surface, the water seeping through underneath, and only appearing
in occasional deep holes. These deep holes or ponds never fail, even
after a year's drought; they were filled with fish. One lay quite near
the ranch house, under a bold rocky bluff; at its edge grew giant
cypress trees. In the hollows and by the watercourses were occasional
groves of pecans, live-oaks, and elms. Strange birds hopped among the
bushes; the chaparral cock--a big, handsome ground-cuckoo of
remarkable habits, much given to preying on small snakes and lizards--
ran over the ground with extraordinary rapidity. Beautiful swallow-
tailed king-birds with rosy plumage perched on the tops of the small
trees, and soared and flitted in graceful curves above them.
Blackbirds of many kinds scuttled in flocks about the corrals and
outbuildings around the ranches. Mocking-birds abounded, and were very
noisy, singing almost all the daytime, but with their usual irritating
inequality of performance, wonderfully musical and powerful snatches
of song being interspersed with imitations of other bird notes and
disagreeable squalling. Throughout the trip I did not hear one of them
utter the beautiful love song in which they sometimes indulge at
night.

The country was all under wire fence, unlike the northern regions, the
pastures however being sometimes many miles across. When we reached
the Frio ranch a herd of a thousand cattle had just been gathered, and
two or three hundred beeves and young stock were being cut out to be
driven northward over the trail. The cattle were worked in pens much
more than in the North, and on all the ranches there were chutes with
steering gates, by means of which individuals of a herd could be
dexterously shifted into various corrals. The branding of the calves
was done ordinarily in one of these corrals and on foot, the calf
being always roped by both forelegs; otherwise the work of the
cowpunchers was much like that of their brothers in the North. As a
whole, however, they were distinctly more proficient with the rope,
and at least half of them were Mexicans.

There were some bands of wild cattle living only in the densest timber
of the river bottoms which were literally as wild as deer, and
moreover very fierce and dangerous. The pursuit of these was exciting
and hazardous in the extreme. The men who took part in it showed not
only the utmost daring but the most consummate horsemanship and
wonderful skill in the use of the rope, the coil being hurled with the
force and precision of an iron quiot; a single man speedily
overtaking, roping, throwing, and binding down the fiercest steer or
bull.

There had been many peccaries, or, as the Mexicans and cowpunchers of
the border usually call them, javalinas, round this ranch a few years
before the date of my visit. Until 1886, or thereabouts, these little
wild hogs were not much molested, and abounded in the dense chaparral
around the lower Rio Grande. In that year, however, it was suddenly
discovered that their hides had a market value, being worth four bits
--that is, half a dollar--apiece; and many Mexicans and not a few
shiftless Texans went into the business of hunting them as a means of
livelihood. They were more easily killed than deer, and, as a result,
they were speedily exterminated in many localities where they had
formerly been numerous, and even where they were left were to be found
only in greatly diminished numbers. On this particular Frio ranch the
last little band had been killed nearly a year before. There were
three of them, a boar and two sows, and a couple of the cowboys
stumbled on them early one morning while out with a dog. After half a
mile's chase the three peccaries ran into a hollow pecan tree, and one
of the cowboys, dismounting, improvised a lance by tying his knife to
the end of a pole, and killed them all.

Many anecdotes were related to me of what they had done in the old
days when they were plentiful on the ranch. They were then usually
found in parties of from twenty to thirty, feeding in the dense
chaparral, the sows rejoining the herd with the young very soon after
the birth of the litter, each sow usually having but one or two at a
litter. At night they sometimes lay in the thickest cover, but always,
where possible, preferred to house in a cave or big hollow log, one
invariably remaining as a sentinel close to the mouth, looking out. If
this sentinel were shot, another would almost certainly take his
place. They were subject to freaks of stupidity, and were pugnacious
to a degree. Not only would they fight if molested, but they would
often attack entirely without provocation.

Once my friend Moore himself, while out with another cowboy on
horseback, was attacked in sheer wantonness by a drove of these little
wild hogs. The two men were riding by a grove of live-oaks along a
woodcutter's cart track, and were assailed without a moment's warning.
The little creatures completely surrounded them, cutting fiercely at
the horses' legs and jumping up at the riders' feet. The men, drawing
their revolvers, dashed through and were closely followed by their
pursuers for three or four hundred yards, although they fired right
and left with good effect. Both of the horses were badly cut. On
another occasion the bookkeeper of the ranch walked off to a water
hole but a quarter of a mile distant, and came face to face with a
peccary on a cattle trail, where the brush was thick. Instead of
getting out of his way the creature charged him instantly, drove him
up a small mesquite tree, and kept him there for nearly two hours,
looking up at him and champing its tusks.

I spent two days hunting round this ranch but saw no peccary sign
whatever, although deer were quite plentiful. Parties of wild geese
and sandhill cranes occasionally flew overhead. At nightfall the poor-
wills wailed everywhere through the woods, and coyotes yelped and
yelled, while in the early morning the wild turkeys gobbled loudly
from their roosts in the tops of the pecan trees.

Having satisfied myself that there were no javalinas left on the Frio
ranch, and being nearly at the end of my holiday, I was about to
abandon the effort to get any, when a passing cowman happened to
mention the fact that some were still to be found on the Nueces River
thirty miles or thereabouts to the southward. Thither I determined to
go, and next morning Moore and I started in a buggy drawn by a
redoubtable horse, named Jim Swinger, which we were allowed to use
because he bucked so under the saddle that nobody on the ranch could
ride him. We drove six or seven hours across the dry, waterless
plains. There had been a heavy frost a few days before, which had
blackened the budding mesquite trees, and their twigs still showed no
signs of sprouting. Occasionally we came across open space where there
was nothing but short brown grass. In most places, however, the
leafless, sprawling mesquites were scattered rather thinly over the
ground, cutting off an extensive view and merely adding to the
melancholy barrenness of the landscape. The road was nothing but a
couple of dusty wheel-tracks; the ground was parched, and the grass
cropped close by the gaunt, starved cattle. As we drove along buzzards
and great hawks occasionally soared overhead. Now and then we passed
lines of wild-looking, long-horned steers, and once we came on the
grazing horses of a cow-outfit, just preparing to start northward over
the trail to the fattening pasture. Occasionally we encountered one or
two cowpunchers: either Texans, habited exactly like their brethren in
the North, with broad-brimmed gray hats, blue shirts, silk
neckerchiefs, and leather leggings; or else Mexicans, more gaudily
dressed, and wearing peculiarly stiff, very broad-brimmed hats with
conical tops.

Toward the end of our ride we got where the ground was more fertile,
and there had recently been a sprinkling of rain. Here we came across
wonderful flower prairies. In one spot I kept catching glimpses
through the mesquite trees of lilac stretches which I had first
thought must be ponds of water. On coming nearer they proved to be
acres on acres thickly covered with beautiful lilac-colored flowers.
Farther on we came to where broad bands of red flowers covered the
ground for many furlongs; then their places were taken by yellow
blossoms, elsewhere by white. Generally each band or patch of ground
was covered densely by flowers of the same color, making a great vivid
streak across the landscape; but in places they were mixed together,
red, yellow, and purple, interspersed in patches and curving bands,
carpeting the prairie in a strange, bright pattern.

Finally, toward evening we reached the Nueces. Where we struck it
first the bed was dry, except in occasional deep, malarial-looking
pools, but a short distance below there began to be a running current.
Great blue herons were stalking beside these pools, and from one we
flushed a white ibis. In the woods were reddish cardinal birds, much
less brilliant in plumage than the true cardinals and the scarlet
tanagers; and yellow-headed titmice which had already built large
domed nests.

In the valley of the Nueces itself, the brush grew thick. There were
great groves of pecan trees, and ever-green live-oaks stood in many
places, long, wind-shaken tufts of gray moss hanging from their limbs.
Many of the trees in the wet spots were of giant size, and the whole
landscape was semi-tropical in character. High on a bluff shoulder
overlooking the course of the river was perched the ranch house,
toward which we were bending our steps; and here we were received with
the hearty hospitality characteristic of the ranch country everywhere.

The son of the ranchman, a tall, well-built young fellow, told me at
once that there were peccaries in the neighborhood, and that he had
himself shot one but two or three days before, and volunteered to lend
us horses and pilot us to the game on the morrow, with the help of his
two dogs. The last were big black curs with, as we were assured,
"considerable hound" in them. One was at the time staying at the ranch
house, the other was four or five miles off with a Mexican goat-
herder, and it was arranged that early in the morning we should ride
down to the latter place, taking the first dog with us and procuring
his companion when we reached the goat-herder's house.

We started after breakfast, riding powerful cow-ponies, well trained
to gallop at full speed through the dense chaparral. The big black
hound slouched at our heels. We rode down the banks of the Nueces,
crossing and recrossing the stream. Here and there were long, deep
pools in the bed of the river, where rushes and lilies grew and huge
mailed garfish swam slowly just beneath the surface of the water. Once
my two companions stopped to pull a mired cow out of a slough, hauling
with ropes from their saddle horns. In places there were half-dry
pools, out of the regular current of the river, the water green and
fetid. The trees were very tall and large. The streamers of pale gray
moss hung thickly from the branches of the live-oaks, and when many
trees thus draped stood close together they bore a strangely mournful
and desolate look.

We finally found the queer little hut of the Mexican goat-herder in
the midst of a grove of giant pecans. On the walls were nailed the
skins of different beasts, raccoons, wild-cats, and the tree-civet,
with its ringed tail. The Mexican's brown wife and children were in
the hut, but the man himself and the goats were off in the forest, and
it took us three or four hours' search before we found him. Then it
was nearly noon, and we lunched in his hut, a square building of split
logs, with bare earth floor, and roof of clap-boards and bark. Our
lunch consisted of goat's meat and /pan de mais/. The Mexican, a
broad-chested man with a stolid Indian face, was evidently quite a
sportsman, and had two or three half-starved hounds, besides the
funny, hairless little house dogs, of which Mexicans seem so fond.

Having borrowed the javalina hound of which we were in search, we rode
off in quest of our game, the two dogs trotting gayly ahead. The one
which had been living at the ranch had evidently fared well, and was
very fat; the other was little else but skin and bone, but as alert
and knowing as any New York street-boy, with the same air of
disreputable capacity. It was this hound which always did most in
finding the javalinas and bringing them to bay, his companion's chief
use being to make a noise and lend the moral support of his presence.

We rode away from the river on the dry uplands, where the timber,
though thick, was small, consisting almost exclusively of the thorny
mesquites. Mixed among them were prickly pears, standing as high as
our heads on horseback, and Spanish bayonets, looking in the distance
like small palms; and there were many other kinds of cactus, all with
poisonous thorns. Two or three times the dogs got on an old trail and
rushed off giving tongue, whereat we galloped madly after them,
ducking and dodging through and among the clusters of spine-bearing
tress and cactus, not without getting a considerable number of thorns
in our hands and legs. It was very dry and hot. Where the javalinas
live in droves in the river bottoms they often drink at the pools; but
when some distance from water they seem to live quite comfortably on
the prickly pear, slaking their thirst by eating its hard, juicy
fibre.

At last, after several false alarms, and gallops which led to nothing,
when it lacked but an hour of sundown we struck a band of five of the
little wild hogs. They were running off through the mesquites with a
peculiar hopping or bounding motion, and we all, dogs and men, tore
after them instantly.

Peccaries are very fast for a few hundred yards, but speedily tire,
lose their wind, and come to bay. Almost immediately one of these, a
sow, as it turned out, wheeled and charged at Moore as he passed,
Moore never seeing her but keeping on after another. The sow then
stopped and stood still, chattering her teeth savagely, and I jumped
off my horse and dropped her dead with a shot in the spine, over the
shoulders. Moore meanwhile had dashed off after his pig in one
direction, and killed the little beast with a shot from the saddle
when it had come to bay, turning and going straight at him. Two of the
peccaries got off; the remaining one, a rather large boar, was
followed by the two dogs, and as soon as I had killed the sow I leaped
again on my horse and made after them, guided by the yelping and
baying. In less than a quarter of a mile they were on his haunches,
and he wheeled and stood under a bush, charging at them when they came
near him, and once catching one, inflicting an ugly cut. All the while
his teeth kept going like castanets, with a rapid champing sound. I
ran up close and killed him by a shot through the backbone where it
joined the neck. His tusks were fine.

The few minutes' chase on horseback was great fun, and there was a
certain excitement in seeing the fierce little creatures come to bay;
but the true way to kill these peccaries would be with the spear. They
could often be speared on horseback, and where this was impossible, by
using dogs to bring them to bay they could readily be killed on foot;
though, as they are very active, absolutely fearless, and inflict a
most formidable bite, it would usually be safest to have two men go at
one together. Peccaries are not difficult beasts to kill, because
their short wind and their pugnacity make them come to bay before
hounds so quickly. Two or three good dogs can bring to a halt a herd
of considerable size. They then all stand in a bunch, or else with
their sterns against a bank, chattering their teeth at their
antagonist. When angry and at bay, they get their legs close together,
their shoulders high, and their bristles all ruffled and look the very
incarnation of anger, and they fight with reckless indifference to the
very last. Hunters usually treat them with a certain amount of
caution; but, as a matter of act, I know of but one case where a man
was hurt by them. He had shot at and wounded one, was charged both by
it and by its two companions, and started to climb a tree; but as he
drew himself from the ground, one sprang at him and bit him through
the calf, inflicting a very severe wound. I have known of several
cases of horses being cut, however, and the dogs are very commonly
killed. Indeed, a dog new to the business is almost certain to get
very badly scarred, and no dog that hunts steadily can escape without
some injury. If it runs in right at the heads of the animals, the
probabilities are that it will get killed; and, as a rule, even two
good-sized hounds cannot kill a peccary, though it is no larger than
either of them. However, a wary, resolute, hard-biting dog of good
size speedily gets accustomed to the chase, and can kill a peccary
single-handed, seizing it from behind and worrying it to death, or
watching its chance and grabbing it by the back of the neck where it
joins the head.

Peccaries have delicately moulded short legs, and their feet are
small, the tracks looking peculiarly dainty in consequence. Hence,
they do not swim well, though they take to the water if necessary.
They feed on roots, prickly pears, nuts, insects, lizards, etc. They
usually keep entirely separate from the droves of half-wild swine that
are so often found in the same neighborhoods; but in one case, on this
very ranch where I was staying a peccary deliberately joined a party
of nine pigs and associated with them. When the owner of the pigs came
up to them one day the peccary manifested great suspicion at his
presence, and finally sidled close up and threatened to attack him, so
that he had to shoot it. The ranchman's son told me that he had never
but once had a peccary assail him unprovoked, and even in this case it
was his dog that was the object of attack, the peccary rushing out at
it as it followed him home one evening through the chaparral. Even
around this ranch the peccaries had very greatly decreased in numbers,
and the survivors were learning some caution. In the old days it had
been no uncommon thing for a big band to attack entirely of their own
accord, and keep a hunter up a tree for hours at a time.



                             CHAPTER VII.

                         HUNTING WITH HOUNDS.

In hunting American big game with hounds, several entirely distinct
methods are pursued. The true wilderness hunters, the men who in the
early days lived alone in, or moved in parties through, the Indian-
haunted solitudes, like their successors of to-day, rarely made use of
a pack of hounds, and, as a rule, did not use dogs at all. In the
eastern forests occasionally an old time hunter would own one or two
track-hounds, slow, with a good nose, intelligent and obedient, of use
mainly in following wounded game. Some Rocky Mountain hunters nowadays
employ the same kind of a dog, but the old time trappers of the great
plains and the Rockies led such wandering lives of peril and hardship
that they could not readily take dogs with them. The hunters of the
Alleghanies and the Adirondacks have, however, always used hounds to
drive deer, killing the animal in the water or at a runaway.

As soon, however, as the old wilderness hunter type passes away,
hounds come into use among his successors, the rough border settlers
of the backwoods and the plains. Every such settler is apt to have
four or five large mongrel dogs with hound blood in them, which serve
to drive off beasts of prey from the sheepfold and cattle-shed, and
are also used, when the occasion suits, in regular hunting, whether
after bear or deer.

Many of the southern planters have always kept packs of fox-hounds,
which are used in the chase, not only of the gray and the red fox, but
also of the deer, the black bear, and the wildcat. The fox the dogs
themselves run down and kill, but as a rule in this kind of hunting,
when after deer, bear, or even wildcat, the hunters carry guns with
them on their horses, and endeavor either to get a shot at the fleeing
animal by hard and dexterous riding, or else to kill the cat when
treed, or the bear when it comes to bay. Such hunting is great sport.

Killing driven game by lying in wait for it to pass is the very
poorest kind of sport that can be called legitimate. This is the way
the deer is usually killed with hounds in the East. In the North the
red fox is often killed in somewhat the same manner, being followed by
a slow hound and shot at as he circles before the dog. Although this
kind of fox hunting is inferior to hunting on horseback, it
nevertheless has its merits, as the man must walk and run well, shoot
with some accuracy, and show considerable knowledge both of the
country and of the habits of the game.

During the last score of years an entirely different type of dog from
the fox-hound has firmly established itself in the field of American
sport. This is the greyhound, whether the smooth-haired, or the rough-
coated Scotch deer-hound. For half a century the army officers posted
in the far West have occasionally had greyhounds with them, using the
dogs to course jack-rabbit, coyote, and sometimes deer, antelope, and
gray wolf. Many of them were devoted to this sport,--General Custer,
for instance. I have myself hunted with many of the descendants of
Custer's hounds. In the early 70's the ranchmen of the great plains
themselves began to keep greyhounds for coursing (as indeed they had
already been used for a considerable time in California, after the
Pacific coast jack-rabbit), and the sport speedily assumed large
proportions and a permanent form. Nowadays the ranchmen of the cattle
country not only use their greyhounds after the jack-rabbit, but also
after every other kind of game animal to be found there, the antelope
and coyote being especial favorites. Many ranchmen soon grew to own
fine packs, coursing being the sport of all sports for the plains. In
Texas the wild turkey was frequently an object of the chase, and
wherever the locality enabled deer to be followed in the open, as for
instance in the Indian territory, and in many places in the
neighborhood of the large plains rivers, the whitetail was a favorite
quarry, the hunters striving to surprise it in the early morning when
feeding on the prairie.

I have myself generally coursed with scratch packs, including perhaps
a couple of greyhounds, a wire-haired deer-hound, and two or three
long legged mongrels. However, we generally had at least one very fast
and savage dog--a strike dog--in each pack, and the others were of
assistance in turning the game, sometimes in tiring it, and usually in
helping to finish it at the worry. With such packs I have had many a
wildly exciting ride over the great grassy plains lying near the
Little Missouri and the Knife and Heart Rivers. Usually our
proceedings on such a hunt were perfectly simple. We started on
horseback and when reaching favorable ground beat across it in a long
scattered line of men and dogs. Anything that we put up, from a fox to
a coyote or a prong-buck, was fair game, and was instantly followed at
full speed. The animals we most frequently killed were jack-rabbits.
They always gave good runs, though like other game they differed much
individually in speed. The foxes did not run so well, and whether they
were the little swift, or the big red prairie fox, they were speedily
snapped up if the dogs had a fair showing. Once our dogs roused a
blacktail buck close up out of the brush coulie where the ground was
moderately smooth, and after a headlong chase of a mile they ran into
him, threw him, and killed him before he could rise. (His stiff-legged
bounds sent him along at a tremendous pace at first, but he seemed to
tire rather easily.) On two or three occasions we killed whitetail
deer, and several times antelope. Usually, however, the antelopes
escaped. The bucks sometimes made a good fight, but generally they
were seized while running, some dogs catching by the throat, others by
the shoulders, and others again by the flank just in front of the
hind-leg. Wherever the hold was obtained, if the dog made his spring
cleverly, the buck was sure to come down with a crash, and if the
other dogs were anywhere near he was probably killed before he could
rise, although not infrequently the dogs themselves were more or less
scratched in the contests. Some greyhounds, even of high breeding,
proved absolutely useless from timidity, being afraid to take hold;
but if they got accustomed to the chase, being worked with old dogs,
and had any pluck at all, they proved singularly fearless. A big
ninety-pound greyhound or Scotch deer-hound is a very formidable
fighting dog; I saw one whip a big mastiff in short order, his
wonderful agility being of more account than his adversary's superior
weight.

The proper way to course, however, is to take the dogs out in a wagon
and drive them thus until the game is seen. This prevents their being
tired out. In my own hunting, most of the antelope aroused got away,
the dogs being jaded when the chase began. But really fine greyhounds,
accustomed to work together and to hunt this species of game, will
usually render a good account of a prong-buck if two or three are
slipped at once, fresh, and within a moderate distance.

Although most Westerners take more kindly to the rifle, now and then
one is found who is a devotee of the hound. Such a one was an old
Missourian, who may be called Mr. Cowley, whom I knew when he was
living on a ranch in North Dakota, west of the Missouri. Mr. Cowley
was a primitive person, of much nerve, which he showed not only in the
hunting field but in the startling political conventions of the place
and period. He was quite well off, but he was above the niceties of
personal vanity. His hunting garb was that in which he also paid his
rare formal calls--calls throughout which he always preserved the
gravity of an Indian, though having a disconcerting way of suddenly
tip-toeing across the room to some unfamiliar object, such as a
peacock screen or a vase, feeling it gently with one forefinger, and
returning with noiseless gait to his chair, unmoved, and making no
comment. On the morning of a hunt he would always appear on a stout
horse, clad in a long linen duster, a huge club in his hand, and his
trousers working half-way up his legs. He hunted everything on all
possible occasions; and he never under any circumstances shot an
animal that the dogs could kill. Once when a skunk got into his house,
with the direful stupidity of its perverse kind, he turned the hounds
on it; a manifestation of sporting spirit which roused the ire of even
his long-suffering wife. As for his dogs, provided they could run and
fight, he cared no more for their looks than for his own; he preferred
the animal to be half greyhound, but the other half could be fox-
hound, colley, or setter, it mattered nothing to him. They were a
wicked, hardbiting crew for all that, and Mr. Cowley, in his flapping
linen duster, was a first-class hunter and a good rider. He went
almost mad with excitement in every chase. His pack usually hunted
coyote, fox, jack-rabbit, and deer; and I have had more than one good
run with it.

My own experience is too limited to allow me to pass judgment with
certainty as to the relative speed of the different beasts of the
chase, especially as there is so much individual variation. I consider
the antelope the fleetest of all however; and in this opinion I am
sustained by Col. Roger D. Williams, of Lexington, Kentucky, who, more
than any other American, is entitled to speak upon coursing, and
especially upon coursing large game. Col. Williams, like a true son of
Kentucky, has bred his own thoroughbred horses and thoroughbred hounds
for many years; and during a series of long hunting trips extending
over nearly a quarter of a century he has tried his pack on almost
every game animal to be found among the foot-hills of the Rockies and
on the great plains. His dogs, both smooth-haired greyhounds and
rough-coated deer-hounds, have been bred by him for generations with a
special view to the chase of big game--not merely of hares; they are
large animals, excelling not only in speed but in strength, endurance,
and ferocious courage. The survivors of his old pack are literally
seamed all over with the scars of innumerable battles. When several
dogs were together they would stop a bull-elk, and fearlessly assail a
bear or cougar. This pack scored many a triumph over blacktail,
whitetail, and prong-buck. For a few hundred yards the deer were very
fast; but in a run of any duration the antelope showed much greater
speed, and gave the dogs far more trouble, although always overtaken
in the end, if a good start had been obtained. Col. Williams is a firm
believer in the power of the thoroughbred horse to outturn any animal
that breathes, in a long chase; he has not infrequently run down deer,
when they were jumped some miles from cover; and on two or three
occasions he ran down uninjured antelope, but in each case only after
a desperate ride of miles, which in one instance resulted in the death
of his gallant horse.

This coursing on the prairie, especially after big game, is an
exceedingly manly and attractive sport; the furious galloping, often
over rough ground with an occasional deep washout or gully, the sight
of the gallant hounds running and tackling, and the exhilaration of
the pure air and wild surrounding, all combine to give it a peculiar
zest. But there is really less need of bold and skilful horsemanship
than in the otherwise less attractive and more artificial sport of
fox-hunting, or riding to hounds, in a closed and long-settled
country.

Those of us who are in part of southern blood have a hereditary right
to be fond of cross-country riding; for our forefathers in Virginia,
Georgia, or the Carolinas, have for six generations followed the fox
with horse, horn, and hound. In the long-settled Northern States the
sport has been less popular, though much more so now than formerly;
yet it has always existed, here and there, and in certain places has
been followed quite steadily.

In no place in the Northeast is hunting the wild red fox put on a more
genuine and healthy basis than in the Geneseo Valley, in central New
York. There has always been fox-hunting in this valley, the farmers
having good horses and being fond of sport; but it was conducted in a
very irregular, primitive manner, until some twenty years ago Mr.
Austin Wadsworth turned his attention to it. He has been master of
fox-hounds ever since, and no pack in the country has yielded better
sport than his, or has brought out harder riders among the men and
stronger jumpers among the horses. Mr. Wadsworth began his hunting by
picking up some of the various trencher-fed hounds of the
neighborhood, the hunting of that period being managed on the
principle of each farmer bringing to the meet the hound or hounds he
happened to possess, and appearing on foot or horseback as his fancy
dictated. Having gotten together some of these native hounds and
started fox-hunting in localities where the ground was so open as to
necessitate following the chase on horseback, Mr. Wadsworth imported a
number of dogs from the best English kennels. He found these to be
much faster than the American dogs and more accustomed to work
together, but less enduring, and without such good noses. The American
hounds were very obstinate and self-willed. Each wished to work out
the trail for himself. But once found, they would puzzle it out, no
matter how cold, and would follow it if necessary for a day and night.
By a judicious crossing of the two Mr. Wadsworth finally got his
present fine pack, which for its own particular work on its own ground
would be hard to beat. The country ridden over is well wooded, and
there are many foxes. The abundance of cover, however, naturally
decreases the number of kills. It is a very fertile land, and there
are few farming regions more beautiful, for it is prevented from being
too tame in aspect by the number of bold hills and deep ravines. Most
of the fences are high posts-and-rails or "snake" fences, although
there is an occasional stone wall, haha, or water-jump. The steepness
of the ravines and the density of the timber make it necessary for a
horse to be sure-footed and able to scramble anywhere, and the fences
are so high that none but very good jumpers can possibly follow the
pack. Most of the horses used are bred by the farmers in the
neighborhood, or are from Canada, and they usually have thoroughbred
or trotting-stock blood in them.

One of the pleasantest days I ever passed in the saddle was after Mr.
Wadsworth's hounds. I was staying with him at the time, in company
with my friend Senator Cabot Lodge, of Boston. The meet was about
twelve miles distant from the house. It was only a small field of some
twenty-five riders, but there was not one who did not mean going. I
was mounted on a young horse, a powerful, big-boned black, a great
jumper, though perhaps a trifle hot-headed. Lodge was on a fine bay,
which could both run and jump. There were two or three other New
Yorkers and Bostonians present, several men who had come up from
Buffalo for the run, a couple of retired army officers, a number of
farmers from the neighborhood; and finally several members of a noted
local family of hard riders, who formed a class by themselves, all
having taken naturally to every variety of horsemanship from earliest
infancy.

It was a thoroughly democratic assemblage; every one was there for
sport, and nobody cared an ounce how he or anybody else was dressed.
Slouch hats, brown coats, corduroy breeches, and leggings, or boots,
were the order of the day. We cast off in a thick wood. The dogs
struck a trail almost immediately and were off with clamorous yelping,
while the hunt thundered after them like a herd of buffaloes. We went
headlong down the hill-side into and across a brook. Here the trail
led straight up a sheer bank. Most of the riders struck off to the
left for an easier place, which was unfortunate for them, for the
eight of us who went straight up the side (one man's horse falling
back with him) were the only ones who kept on terms with the hounds.
Almost as soon as we got to the top of the bank we came out of the
woods over a low but awkward rail fence, where one of our number, who
was riding a very excitable sorrel colt, got a fall. This left but
six, including the whip. There were two or three large fields with low
fences; then we came to two high, stiff doubles, the first real
jumping of the day, the fences being over four feet six, and so close
together that the horses barely had a chance to gather themselves. We
got over, however, crossed two or three stump-strewn fields, galloped
through an open wood, picked our way across a marshy spot, jumped a
small brook and two or three stiff fences, and then came a check. Soon
the hounds recovered the line and swung off to the right, back across
four or five fields, so as to enable the rest of the hunt, by making
an angle, to come up. Then we jumped over a very high board fence into
the main road, out of it again, and on over ploughed fields and grass
lands, separated by stiff snake fences. The run had been fast and the
horses were beginning to tail. By the time we suddenly rattled down
into a deep ravine and scrambled up the other side through thick
timber there were but four of us left, Lodge and myself being two of
the lucky ones. Beyond this ravine we came to one of the worst jumps
of the day, a fence out of the wood, which was practicable only at one
spot, where a kind of cattle trail led up to a panel. It was within an
inch or two of five feet high. However, the horses, thoroughly trained
to timber jumping and to rough and hard scrambling in awkward places,
and by this time well quieted, took the bars without mistake, each one
in turn trotting or cantering up to within a few yards, then making a
couple of springs and bucking over with a great twist of the powerful
haunches. I may explain that there was not a horse of the four that
had not a record of five feet six inches in the ring. We now got into
a perfect tangle of ravines, and the fox went to earth; and though we
started one or two more in the course of the afternoon, we did not get
another really first-class run.

At Geneseo the conditions for the enjoyment of this sport are
exceptionally favorable. In the Northeast generally, although there
are now a number of well-established hunts, at least nine out of ten
runs are after a drag. Most of the hunts are in the neighborhood of
great cities, and are mainly kept up by young men who come from them.
A few of these are men of leisure, who can afford to devote their
whole time to pleasure; but much the larger number are men in
business, who work hard and are obliged to make their sports
accommodate themselves to their more serious occupations. Once or
twice a week they can get off for an afternoon's ride across country,
and they then wish to be absolutely certain of having their run, and
of having it at the appointed time; and the only way to insure this is
to have a drag-hunt. It is not the lack of foxes that has made the
sport so commonly take the form of riding to drag-hounds, but rather
the fact that the majority of those who keep it up are hard-working
business men who wish to make the most out of every moment of the
little time they can spare from their regular occupations. A single
ride across country, or an afternoon at polo, will yield more
exercise, fun, and excitement than can be got out of a week's decorous
and dull riding in the park, and many young fellows have waked up to
this fact.

At one time I did a good deal of hunting with the Meadowbrook hounds,
in the northern part of Long Island. There were plenty of foxes around
us, both red and gray, but partly for the reasons given above, and
partly because the covers were so large and so nearly continuous, they
were not often hunted, although an effort was always made to have one
run every week or so after a wild fox, in order to give a chance for
the hounds to be properly worked and to prevent the runs from becoming
a mere succession of steeple-chases. The sport was mainly drag-
hunting, and was most exciting, as the fences were high and the pace
fast. The Long Island country needs a peculiar style of horse, the
first requisite being that he shall be a very good and high timber
jumper. Quite a number of crack English and Irish hunters have at
different times been imported, and some of them have turned out pretty
well; but when they first come over they are utterly unable to cross
our country, blundering badly at the high timber. Few of them have
done as well as the American horses. I have hunted half a dozen times
in England, with Pytchely, Essex, and North Warwickshire, and it seems
to me probable that English thoroughbreds, in a grass country, and
over the peculiar kinds of obstacles they have on the other side of
the water, would gallop away from a field of our Long Island horses;
for they have speed and bottom, and are great weight carriers. But on
our own ground, where the cross-country riding is more like leaping a
succession of five or six-bar gates than anything else, they do not as
a rule, in spite of the enormous prices paid for them, show themselves
equal to the native stock. The highest recorded jump, seven feet two
inches, was made by the American horse Filemaker, which I saw ridden
in the very front by Mr. H. L. Herbert, in the hunt at Sagamore Hill,
about to be described.

When I was a member of the Meadowbrook hunt, most of the meets were
held within a dozen miles or so of the kennels; at Farmingdale,
Woodbury, Wheatly, Locust Valley, Syosset, or near any one of twenty
other queer, quaint old Long Island hamlets. They were almost always
held in the afternoon, the business men who had come down from the
city jogging over behind the hounds to the appointed place, where they
were met by the men who had ridden over direct from their country-
houses. If the meet was an important one, there might be a crowd of
onlookers in every kind of trap, from a four-in-hand drag to a spider-
wheeled buggy drawn by a pair of long-tailed trotters, the money value
of which many times surpassed that of the two best hunters in the
whole field. Now and then a breakfast would be given the hunt at some
country-house, when the whole day was devoted to the sport; perhaps
after wild foxes in the morning, with a drag in the afternoon.

After one meet, at Sagamore Hill, I had the curiosity to go on foot
over the course we had taken, measuring the jumps; for it is very
difficult to form a good estimate of a fence's height when in the
field, and five feet of timber seems a much easier thing to take when
sitting around the fire after dinner than it does when actually faced
while the hounds are running. On the particular hunt in question we
ran about ten miles, at a rattling pace, with only two checks,
crossing somewhat more than sixty fences, most of them post-and-rails,
stiff as steel, the others being of the kind called "Virginia" or
snake, and not more than ten or a dozen in the whole lot under four
feet in height. The highest measured five feet and half an inch, two
others were four feet eleven, and nearly a third of the number
averaged about four and a half. There were also several rather awkward
doubles. When the hounds were cast off some forty riders were present,
but the first fence was a savage one, and stopped all who did not mean
genuine hard going. Twenty-six horses crossed it, one of them ridden
by a lady. A mile or so farther on, before there had been a chance for
much tailing, we came to a five-bar gate, out of a road--a jump of
just four feet five inches from the take-off. Up to this, of course,
we went one at a time, at a trot or hand-gallop, and twenty-five
horses cleared it in succession without a single refusal and with but
one mistake. Owing to the severity of the pace, combined with the
average height of the timber (although no one fence was of
phenomenally noteworthy proportions), a good many falls took place,
resulting in an unusually large percentage of accidents. The master
partly dislocated one knee, another man broke two ribs, and another--
the present writer--broke his arm. However, almost all of us managed
to struggle through to the end in time to see the death.

On this occasion I owed my broken arm to the fact that my horse, a
solemn animal originally taken out of a buggy, though a very clever
fencer, was too coarse to gallop alongside the blooded beasts against
which he was pitted. But he was so easy in his gaits, and so quiet,
being ridden with only a snaffle, that there was no difficulty in
following to the end of the run. I had divers adventures on this
horse. Once I tried a pair of so-called "safety" stirrups, which
speedily fell out, and I had to ride through the run without any, at
the cost of several tumbles. Much the best hunter I ever owned was a
sorrel horse named Sagamore. He was from Geneseo, was fast, a
remarkably good jumper, of great endurance, as quick on his feet as a
cat, and with a dauntless heart. He never gave me a fall, and
generally enabled me to see all the run.

It would be very unfair to think the sport especially dangerous on
account of the occasional accidents that happen. A man who is fond of
riding, but who sets a good deal of value, either for the sake of
himself, his family, or his business, upon his neck and limbs, can
hunt with much safety if he gets a quiet horse, a safe fencer, and
does not try to stay in the front rank. Most accidents occur to men on
green or wild horses, or else to those who keep in front only at the
expense of pumping their mounts; and a fall with a done-out beast is
always peculiarly disagreeable. Most falls, however, do no harm
whatever to either horse or rider, and after they have picked
themselves up and shaken themselves, the couple ought to be able to go
on just as well as ever. Of course a man who wishes to keep in the
first flight must expect to face a certain number of tumbles; but even
he will probably not be hurt at all, and he can avoid many a mishap by
easing up his horse whenever he can--that is, by always taking a gap
when possible, going at the lowest panel of every fence, and not
calling on his animal for all there is in him unless it cannot
possibly be avoided. It must be remembered that hard riding is a very
different thing from good riding; though a good rider to hounds must
also at times ride hard.

Cross-country riding in the rough is not a difficult thing to learn;
always provided the would-be learner is gifted with or has acquired a
fairly stout heart, for a constitutionally timid person is out of
place in the hunting field. A really finished cross-country rider, a
man who combines hand and seat, heart and head, is of course rare; the
standard is too high for most of us to hope to reach. But it is
comparatively easy to acquire a light hand and a capacity to sit
fairly well down in the saddle; and when a man has once got these, he
will find no especial difficulty in following the hounds on a trained
hunter.

Fox-hunting is a great sport, but it is as foolish to make a fetish of
it as it is to decry it. The fox is hunted merely because there is no
larger game to follow. As long as wolves, deer, or antelope remain in
the land, and in a country where hounds and horsemen can work, no one
could think of following the fox. It is pursued because the bigger
beasts of the chase have been killed out. In England it has reached
its present prominence only within two centuries; nobody followed the
fox while the stag and the boar were common. At the present day, on
Exmoor, where the wild stag is still found, its chase ranks ahead of
that of the fox. It is not really the hunting proper which is the
point of fox-hunting. It is the horsemanship, the galloping and
jumping, and the being out in the open air. Very naturally, however,
men who have passed their lives as fox-hunters grow to regard the
chase and the object of it alike with superstitious veneration. They
attribute almost mythical characters to the animal. I know some of my
good Virginian friends, for instance, who seriously believe that the
Virginia red fox is a beast quite unparalleled for speed and endurance
no less than for cunning. This is of course a mistake. Compared with a
wolf, an antelope, or even a deer, the fox's speed and endurance do
not stand very high. A good pack of hounds starting him close would
speedily run into him in the open. The reason that the hunts last so
long in some cases is because of the nature of the ground which favors
the fox at the expense of the dogs, because of his having the
advantage in the start, and because of his cunning in turning to
account everything which will tell in his favor and against his
pursuers. In the same way I know plenty of English friends who speak
with bated breath of fox-hunting but look down upon riding to drag-
hounds. Of course there is a difference in the two sports, and the fun
of actually hunting the wild beast in the one case more than
compensates for the fact that in the other the riding is apt to be
harder and the jumping higher; but both sports are really artificial,
and in their essentials alike. To any man who has hunted big game in a
wild country the stress laid on the differences between them seems a
little absurd, in fact cockney. It is of course nothing against either
that it is artificial; so are all sports in long-civilized countries,
from lacrosse to ice yachting.

It is amusing to see how natural it is for each man to glorify the
sport to which he has been accustomed at the expense of any other. The
old-school French sportsman, for instance, who followed the bear,
stag, and hare with his hounds, always looked down upon the chase of
the fox; whereas the average Englishman not only asserts but seriously
believes that no other kind of chase can compare with it, although in
actual fact the very points in which the Englishman is superior to the
continental sportsman--that is, in hard and straight-riding and
jumping--are those which drag-hunting tends to develop rather more
than fox-hunting proper. In the mere hunting itself the continental
sportsman is often unsurpassed.

Once, beyond the Missouri, I met an expatriated German baron, an
unfortunate who had failed utterly in the rough life of the frontier.
He was living in a squalid little hut, almost unfurnished, but studded
around with the diminutive horns of the European roebuck. These were
the only treasures he had taken with him to remind him of his former
life, and he was never tired of describing what fun it was to shoot
roebucks when driven by the little crooked-legged /dachshunds/. There
were plenty of deer and antelope roundabout, yielding good sport to
any rifleman, but this exile cared nothing for them; they were not
roebucks, and they could not be chased with his beloved /dachshunds/.
So, among my neighbors in the cattle country, is a gentleman from
France, a very successful ranchman and a thoroughly good fellow; he
cares nothing for hunting big game, and will not go after it, but is
devoted to shooting cotton-tails in the snow, this being a pastime
having much resemblance to one of the recognized sports of his own
land.

However, our own people afford precisely similar instances. I have met
plenty of men accustomed to killing wild turkeys and deer with small-
bore rifles in the southern forests who, when they got on the plains
and in the Rockies, were absolutely helpless. They not only failed to
become proficient in the art of killing big game at long ranges with
the large-bore rifle, at the cost of fatiguing tramps, but they had a
positive distaste of the sport and would never allow that it equalled
their own stealthy hunts in eastern forests. So I know plenty of men,
experts with the shot-gun, who honestly prefer shooting quail in the
East over well-trained setters or pointers, to the hardier, manlier
sports of the wilderness.

As it is with hunting, so it is with riding. The cowboy's scorn of
every method of riding save his own is as profound and as ignorant as
is that of the school rider, jockey, or fox-hunter. The truth is that
each of these is best in his own sphere and is at a disadvantage when
made to do the work of any of the others. For all-around riding and
horsemanship, I think the West Point graduate is somewhat ahead of any
of them. Taken as a class, however, and compared with other classes as
numerous, and not with a few exceptional individuals, the cowboy, like
the Rocky Mountain stage-driver, has no superiors anywhere for his own
work; and they are fine fellows, these iron-nerved reinsmen and rough-
riders.

When Buffalo Bill took his cowboys to Europe they made a practice in
England, France, Germany, and Italy of offering to break and ride, in
their own fashion, any horse given them. They were frequently given
spoiled animals from the cavalry services in the different countries
through which they passed, animals with which the trained horse-
breakers of the European armies could do nothing; and yet in almost
all cases the cowpunchers and bronco-busters with Buffalo Bill
mastered these beasts as readily as they did their own western horses.
At their own work of mastering and riding rough horses they could not
be matched by their more civilized rivals; but I have great doubts
whether they in turn would not have been beaten if they had essayed
kinds of horsemanship utterly alien to their past experience, such as
riding mettled thoroughbreds in a steeple-chase, or the like. Other
things being equal (which, however, they generally are not), a bad,
big horse fed on oats offers a rather more difficult problem than a
bad little horse fed on grass. After Buffalo Bill's men had returned,
I occasionally heard it said that they had tried cross-country riding
in England, and had shown themselves pre-eminently skilful thereat,
doing better than the English fox-hunters, but this I take the liberty
to disbelieve. I was in England at the time, hunted occasionally
myself, and was with many of the men who were all the time riding in
the most famous hunts; men, too, who were greatly impressed with the
exhibitions of rough riding then being given by Buffalo Bill and his
men, and who talked of them much; and yet I never, at the time, heard
of an instance in which one of the cowboys rode to hounds with any
marked success.[*] In the same way I have sometimes in New York or
London heard of men who, it was alleged, had been out West and proved
better riders than the bronco-busters themselves, just as I have heard
of similar men who were able to go out hunting in the Rockies or on
the plains and get more game than the western hunters; but in the
course of a long experience in the West I have yet to see any of these
men, whether from the eastern States or from Europe, actually show
such superiority or perform such feats.

[*] It is however, quite possible, now that Buffalo Bill's company has
    crossed the water several times, that a number of the cowboys have
    by practice become proficient in riding to hounds, and in steeple-
    chasing.

It would be interesting to compare the performances of the Australian
stock-riders with those of our own cowpunchers, both in cow-work and
in riding. The Australians have an entirely different kind of saddle,
and the use of the rope is unknown among them. A couple of years ago
the famous western rifle-shot, Carver, took some cowboys out to
Australia, and I am informed that many of the Australians began
themselves to practise with the rope after seeing the way it was used
by the Americans. An Australian gentleman, Mr. A. J. Sage, of
Melbourne, to whom I had written asking how the saddles and styles of
riding compared, answered me as follows:

 "With regard to saddles, here it is a moot question which is the
  better, yours or ours, for buck-jumpers. Carver's boys rode in
  their own saddles against our Victorians in theirs, all on
  Australian buckers, and honors seemed easy. Each was good in his
  own style, but the horses were not what I should call really good
  buckers, such as you might get on a back station, and so there was
  nothing in the show that could unseat the cowboys. It is only back
  in the bush that you can get a really good bucker. I have often
  seen one of them put both man and saddle off."

This last is a feat I have myself seen performed in the West. I
suppose the amount of it is that both the American and the Australian
rough riders are, for their own work, just as good as men possibly can
be.

One spring I had to leave the East in the midst of the hunting season,
to join a roundup in the cattle country of western Dakota, and it was
curious to compare the totally different styles of riding of the
cowboys and the cross-country men. A stock-saddle weighs thirty or
forty pounds instead of ten or fifteen and needs an utterly different
seat from that adopted in the East. A cowboy rides with very long
stirrups, sitting forked well down between his high pommel and cantle,
and depends upon balance as well as on the grip of his thighs. In
cutting out a steer from a herd, in breaking a vicious wild horse, in
sitting a bucking bronco, in stopping a night stampede of many hundred
maddened animals, or in the performance of a hundred other feats of
reckless and daring horsemanship, the cowboy is absolutely unequalled;
and when he has his own horse gear he sits his animal with the ease of
a centaur. Yet he is quite helpless the first time he gets astride one
of the small eastern saddles. One summer, while purchasing cattle in
Iowa, one of my ranch foremen had to get on an ordinary saddle to ride
out of town and see a bunch of steers. He is perhaps the best rider on
the ranch, and will without hesitation mount and master beasts that I
doubt if the boldest rider in one of our eastern hunts would care to
tackle; yet his uneasiness on the new saddle was fairly comical. At
first he did not dare to trot and the least plunge of the horse bid
fair to unseat him, nor did he begin to get accustomed to the
situation until the very end of the journey. In fact, the two kinds of
riding are so very different that a man only accustomed to one, feels
almost as ill at ease when he first tries the other as if he had never
sat on a horse's back before. It is rather funny to see a man who only
knows one kind, and is conceited enough to think that that is really
the only kind worth knowing, when first he is brought into contact
with the other. Two or three times I have known men try to follow
hounds on stock-saddles, which are about as ill-suited for the purpose
as they well can be; while it is even more laughable to see some young
fellow from the East or from England who thinks he knows entirely too
much about horses to be taught by barbarians, attempt in his turn to
do cow-work with his ordinary riding or hunting rig. It must be said,
however, that in all probability cowboys would learn to ride well
across country much sooner than the average cross-country rider would
master the dashing and peculiar style of horsemanship shown by those
whose life business is to guard the wandering herds of the great
western plains.

Of course, riding to hounds, like all sports in long settled, thickly
peopled countries, fails to develop in its followers some of the hardy
qualities necessarily incident to the wilder pursuits of the mountain
and the forest. While I was on the frontier I was struck by the fact
that of the men from the eastern States or from England who had shown
themselves at home to be good riders to hounds or had made their
records as college athletes, a larger proportion failed in the life of
the wilderness than was the case among those who had gained their
experience in such rough pastimes as mountaineering in the high Alps,
winter caribou-hunting in Canada, or deer-stalking--not deer-driving--
in Scotland.

Nevertheless, of all sports possible in civilized countries, riding to
hounds is perhaps the best if followed as it should be, for the sake
of the strong excitement, with as much simplicity as possible, and not
merely as a fashionable amusement. It tends to develop moral no less
than physical qualities; the rider needs nerve and head; he must
possess daring and resolution, as well as a good deal of bodily skill
and a certain amount of wiry toughness and endurance.



                            CHAPTER VIII.

                       WOLVES AND WOLF-HOUNDS.

The wolf is the arch type of ravin, the beast of waste and desolation.
It is still found scattered thinly throughout all the wilder portions
of the United States, but has everywhere retreated from the advance of
civilization.

Wolves show an infinite variety in color, size, physical formation,
and temper. Almost all the varieties intergrade with one another,
however, so that it is very difficult to draw a hard and fast line
between any two of them. Nevertheless, west of the Mississippi there
are found two distinct types. One is the wolf proper, or big wolf,
specifically akin to the wolves of the eastern States. The other is
the little coyote, or prairie wolf. The coyote and the big wolf are
found together in almost all the wilder districts from the Rio Grande
to the valleys of the upper Missouri and the upper Columbia.
Throughout this region there is always a sharp line of demarkation,
especially in size, between the coyotes and the big wolves of any
given district; but in certain districts the big wolves are very much
larger than their brethren in other districts. In the upper Columbia
country, for instance, they are very large; along the Rio Grande they
are small. Dr. Hart Merriam informs me that, according to his
experience, the coyote is largest in southern California. In many
respects the coyote differs altogether in habits from its big
relative. For one thing it is far more tolerant of man. In some
localities coyotes are more numerous around settlements, and even in
the close vicinity of large towns, than they are in the frowning and
desolate fastnesses haunted by their grim elder brother.

Big wolves vary far more in color than the coyotes do. I have seen
white, black, red, yellow, brown, gray, and grizzled skins, and others
representing every shade between, although usually each locality has
its prevailing tint. The grizzled, gray, and brown often have
precisely the coat of the coyote. The difference in size among wolves
of different localities, and even of the same locality, is quite
remarkable, and so, curiously enough, is the difference in the size of
the teeth, in some cases even when the body of one wolf is as big as
that of another. I have seen wolves from Texas and New Mexico which
were undersized, slim animals with rather small tusks, in no way to be
compared to the long-toothed giants of their race that dwell in the
heavily timbered mountains of the Northwest and in the far North. As a
rule, the teeth of the coyote are relatively smaller than those of the
gray wolf.

Formerly wolves were incredibly abundant in certain parts of the
country, notably on the great plains, where they were known as buffalo
wolves, and were regular attendants on the great herds of the bison.
Every traveller and hunter of the old days knew them as among the most
common sights of the plains, and they followed the hunting parties and
emigrant trains for the sake of the scraps left in camp. Now, however,
there is no district in which they are really abundant. The wolfers,
or professional wolf-hunters, who killed them by poisoning for the
sake of their fur, and the cattlemen, who likewise killed them by
poisoning because of their raids on the herds, have doubtless been the
chief instruments in working their decimation on the plains. In the
'70's, and even in the early '80's, many tens of thousands of wolves
were killed by the wolfers in Montana and northern Wyoming and western
Dakota. Nowadays the surviving wolves of the plains have learned
caution; they no longer move abroad at midday, and still less do they
dream of hanging on the footsteps of hunter and traveler. Instead of
being one of the most common they have become one of the rarest sights
of the plains. A hunter may wander far and wide through the plains for
months nowadays and never see a wolf, though he will probably see many
coyotes. However, the diminution goes on, not steadily but by fits and
starts, and moreover, the beasts now and then change their abodes, and
appear in numbers in places where they have been scarce for a long
period. In the present winter of 1892-'93 big wolves are more
plentiful in the neighborhood of my ranch than they have been for ten
years, and have worked some havoc among the cattle and young horses.
The cowboys have been carrying on the usual vindictive campaign
against them; a number have been poisoned, and a number of others have
fallen victims to their greediness, the cowboys surprising them when
gorged to repletion on the carcass of a colt or calf, and, in
consequence, unable to run, so that they are easily ridden down,
roped, and then dragged to death.

Yet even the slaughter wrought by man in certain localities does not
seem adequate to explain the scarcity or extinction of wolves,
throughout the country at large. In most places they are not followed
any more eagerly than are the other large beasts of prey, and they are
usually followed with less success. Of all animals the wolf is the
shyest and hardest to slay. It is almost or quite as difficult to
still-hunt as the cougar, and is far more difficult to kill with
hounds, traps, or poison; yet it scarcely holds its own as well as the
great cat, and it does not begin to hold its own as well as the bear,
a beast certainly never more readily killed, and one which produces
fewer young at a birth. Throughout the East the black bear is common
in many localities from which the wolf has vanished completely. It at
present exists in very scanty numbers in northern Maine and the
Adirondacks; is almost or quite extinct in Pennsylvania; lingers here
and there in the mountains from West Virginia to east Tennessee, and
is found in Florida; but is everywhere less abundant than the bear. It
is possible that this destruction of the wolves is due to some disease
among them, perhaps to hydrophobia, a terrible malady from which it is
known that they suffer greatly at times. Perhaps the bear is helped by
its habit of hibernating, which frees it from most dangers during
winter; but this cannot be the complete explanation, for in the South
it does not hibernate, and yet holds its own as well as in the North.
What makes it all the more curious that the American wolf should
disappear sooner than the bear is that the reverse is the case with
the allied species of Europe, where the bear is much sooner killed out
of the land.

Indeed the differences of this sort between nearly related animals are
literally inexplicable. Much of the difference in temperament between
such closely allied species as the American and European bears and
wolves is doubtless due to their surroundings and to the instincts
they have inherited through many generations; but for much of the
variation it is not possible to offer any explanation. In the same way
there are certain physical differences for which it is very hard to
account, as the same conditions seem to operate in directly reverse
ways with different animals. No one can explain the process of natural
selection which has resulted in the otter of America being larger than
the otter of Europe, while the badger is smaller; in the mink being
with us a much stouter animal than its Scandinavian and Russian
kinsman, while the reverse is true of our sable or pine marten. No one
can say why the European red deer should be a pigmy compared to its
giant brother, the American wapiti; why the Old World elk should
average smaller in size than the almost indistinguishable New World
moose; and yet the bison of Lithuania and the Caucasus be on the whole
larger and more formidable than its American cousin. In the same way
no one can tell why under like conditions some game, such as the white
goat and the spruce grouse, should be tamer than other closely allied
species, like the mountain sheep and ruffled grouse. No one can say
why on the whole the wolf of Scandinavia and northern Russia should be
larger and more dangerous than the average wolf of the Rocky
Mountains, while between the bears of the same regions the comparison
must be exactly reversed.

The difference even among the wolves of different sections of our own
country is very notable. It may be true that the species as a whole is
rather weaker and less ferocious than the European wolf; but it is
certainly not true of the wolves of certain localities. The great
timber wolf of the central and northern chains of the Rockies and
coast ranges is in every way a more formidable creature than the
buffalo wolf of the plains, although they intergrade. The skins and
skulls of the wolves of north-western Montana and Washington which I
have seen were quite as large and showed quite as stout claws and
teeth as the skins and skulls of Russian and Scandinavian wolves, and
I believe that these great timber wolves are in every way as
formidable as their Old World kinsfolk. However, they live where they
come in contact with a population of rifle-bearing frontier hunters,
who are very different from European peasants or Asiatic tribesmen;
and they have, even when most hungry, a wholesome dread of human
beings. Yet I doubt if an unarmed man would be entirely safe should
he, while alone in the forest in mid-winter encounter a fair-sized
pack of ravenously hungry timber wolves.

A full-grown dog-wolf of the northern Rockies, in exceptional
instances, reaches a height of thirty-two inches and a weight of 130
pounds; a big buffalo wolf of the upper Missouri stands thirty or
thirty-one inches at the shoulder and weighs about 110 pounds. A Texas
wolf may not reach over eighty pounds. The bitch-wolves are smaller;
and moreover there is often great variation even in the wolves of
closely neighboring localities.

The wolves of the southern plains were not often formidable to large
animals, even in the days when they most abounded. They rarely
attacked the horses of the hunter, and indeed were but little regarded
by these experienced animals. They were much more likely to gnaw off
the lariat with which the horse was tied, than to try to molest the
steed himself. They preferred to prey on young animals, or on the weak
and disabled. They rarely molested a full-grown cow or steer, still
less a full-grown buffalo, and, if they did attack such an animal, it
was only when emboldened by numbers. In the plains of the upper
Missouri and Saskatchewan the wolf was, and is, more dangerous, while
in the northern Rockies his courage and ferocity attain their highest
pitch. Near my own ranch the wolves have sometimes committed great
depredations on cattle, but they seem to have queer freaks of
slaughter. Usually they prey only upon calves and sickly animals; but
in midwinter I have known one single-handed to attack and kill a well-
grown steer or cow disabling its quarry by rapid snaps at the hams or
flanks. Only rarely have I known it to seize by the throat. Colts are
likewise a favorite prey, but with us wolves rarely attack full-grown
horses. They are sometimes very bold in their assaults, falling on the
stock while immediately around the ranch houses. They even venture
into the hamlet of Medora itself at night--as the coyotes sometimes do
by day. In the spring of '92 we put on some eastern two-year-old
steers; they arrived, and were turned loose from the stock-yards, in a
snowstorm, though it was in early May. Next morning we found that one
had been seized, slain, and partially devoured by a big wolf at the
very gate of the stockyard; probably the beast had seen it standing
near the yard after nightfall feeling miserable after its journey, in
the storm and its unaccustomed surroundings, and had been emboldened
to make the assault so near town by the evident helplessness of the
prey.

The big timber wolves of the northern Rocky Mountains attack every
four-footed beast to be found where they live. They are far from
contenting themselves with hunting deer and snapping up the pigs and
sheep of the farm. When the weather gets cold and food scarce they
band together in small parties, perhaps of four or five individuals,
and then assail anything, even a bear or a panther. A bull elk or bull
moose, when on its guard, makes a most dangerous fight; but a single
wolf will frequently master the cow of either animal, as well as
domestic cattle and horses. In attacking such large game, however, the
wolves like to act in concert, one springing at the animal's head, and
attracting its attention, while the other hamstrings it. Nevertheless,
one such big wolf will kill an ordinary horse. A man I knew, who was
engaged in packing into the Coeur d'Alenes, once witnessed such a feat
on the part of a wolf. He was taking his pack train down into a valley
when he saw a horse grazing therein; it had been turned loose by
another packing outfit, because it became exhausted. He lost sight of
it as the trail went down a zigzag, and while it was thus out of sight
he suddenly heard it utter the appalling scream, unlike and more
dreadful than any other sound, which a horse only utters in extreme
fright or agony. The scream was repeated, and as he came in sight
again he saw that a great wolf had attacked the horse. The poor animal
had been bitten terribly in its haunches and was cowering upon them,
while the wolf stood and looked at it a few paces off. In a moment or
two the horse partially recovered and made a desperate bound forward,
starting at full gallop. Immediately the wolf was after it, overhauled
it in three or four jumps, and then seized it by the hock, while its
legs were extended, with such violence as to bring it completely back
on its haunches. It again screamed piteously; and this time with a few
savage snaps the wolf hamstrung and partially disembowelled it, and it
fell over, having made no attempt to defend itself. I have heard of
more than once incident of this kind. If a horse is a good fighter,
however, as occasionally, though not often, happens, it is a more
difficult prey for any wild beast, and some veteran horses have no
fear of wolves whatsoever, well knowing that they can either strike
them down with their forefeet or repulse them by lashing out behind.

Wolves are cunning beasts and will often try to lull their prey into
unsuspicion by playing round and cutting capers. I once saw a young
deer and a wolf-cub together near the hut of the settler who had
captured both. The wolf was just old enough to begin to feel vicious
and bloodthirsty, and to show symptoms of attacking the deer. On the
occasion in question he got loose and ran towards it, but it turned,
and began to hit him with its forefeet, seemingly in sport; whereat he
rolled over on his back before it, and acted like a puppy at play.
Soon it turned and walked off; immediately the wolf, with bristling
hair, crawled after, and with a pounce seized it by the haunch, and
would doubtless have murdered the bleating, struggling creature, had
not the bystanders interfered.

Where there are no domestic animals, wolves feed on almost anything
from a mouse to an elk. They are redoubted enemies of foxes. They are
easily able to overtake them in fair chase, and kill numbers. If the
fox can get into the underbrush, however, he can dodge around much
faster than the wolf, and so escape pursuit. Sometimes one wolf will
try to put a fox out of a cover while another waits outside to snap
him up. Moreover, the wolf kills even closer kinsfolk than the fox.
When pressed by hunger it will undoubtedly sometimes seize a coyote,
tear it in pieces and devour it, although during most of the year the
two animals live in perfect harmony. I once myself, while out in the
deep snow, came across the remains of a coyote that had been killed in
this manner. Wolves are also very fond of the flesh of dogs, and if
they get a chance promptly kill and eat any dog they can master--and
there are but few that they cannot. Nevertheless, I have been told of
one instance in which a wolf struck up an extraordinary friendship
with a strayed dog, and the two lived and hunted together for many
months, being frequently seen by the settlers of the locality. This
occurred near Thompson's Falls, Montana.

Usually wolves are found singly, in pairs, or in family parties, each
having a large beat over which it regularly hunts, and also at times
shifting its ground and travelling immense distances in order to take
up a temporary abode in some new locality--for they are great
wanderers. It is only under stress of severe weather that they band
together in packs. They prefer to creep on their prey and seize it by
a sudden pounce, but, unlike the cougar, they also run it down in fair
chase. Their slouching, tireless gallop enables them often to overtake
deer, antelope, or other quarry; though under favorable circumstances,
especially if near a lake, the latter frequently escape. Whether
wolves run cunning I do not know; but I think they must, for coyotes
certainly do. A coyote cannot run down a jack-rabbit; but two or three
working together will often catch one. Once I saw three start a jack,
which ran right away from them; but they spread out, and followed.
Pretty soon the jack turned slightly, and ran near one of the outside
ones, saw it, became much frightened, and turned at right angles, so
as soon to nearly run into the other outside one, which had kept
straight on. This happened several times, and then the confused jack
lay down under a sage-bush and was seized. So I have seen two coyotes
attempting to get at a newly dropped antelope kid. One would make a
feint of attack, and lure the dam into a rush at him, while the other
stole round to get at the kid. The dam, as always with these spirited
little prong-bucks, made a good fight, and kept the assailants at bay;
yet I think they would have succeeded in the end, had I not
interfered. Coyotes are bold and cunning in raiding the settler's
barn-yards for lambs and hens; and they have an especial liking for
tame cats. If there are coyotes in the neighborhood a cat which gets
into the habit of wandering from home is surely lost.

Though, I have never known wolves to attack a man, yet in the wilder
portion of the far Northwest I have heard them come around camp very
close, growling so savagely as to make one almost reluctant to leave
the camp fire and go out into the darkness unarmed. Once I was camped
in the fall near a lonely little lake in the mountains, by the edge of
quite a broad stream. Soon after nightfall three or four wolves came
around camp and kept me awake by their sinister and dismal howling.
Two or three times they came so close to the fire that I could hear
them snap their jaws and growl, and at one time I positively thought
that they intended to try to get into camp, so excited were they by
the smell of the fresh meat. After a while they stopped howling; and
then all was silent for an hour or so. I let the fire go out and was
turning into bed when I suddenly heard some animal of considerable
size come down to the stream nearly opposite me and begin to splash
across, first wading, then swimming. It was pitch dark and I could not
possibly see, but I felt sure it was a wolf. However after coming
half-way over it changed its mind and swam back to the opposite bank;
nor did I see or hear anything more of the night marauders.

Five or six times on the plains or on my ranch I have had shots at
wolves, always obtained by accident and always, I regret to say,
missed. Often the wolf when seen was running at full speed for cover,
or else was so far off that though motionless my shots went wide of
it. But once have I with my own rifle killed a wolf, and this was
while travelling with a pack train in the mountains. We had been
making considerable noise, and I never understood how an animal so
wary permitted our near approach. He did, nevertheless, and just as we
came to a little stream which we were to ford I saw him get on a dead
log some thirty yards distant and walk slowly off with his eyes turned
toward us. The first shot smashed his shoulders and brought him down.

The wolf is one of the animals which can only be hunted successfully
with dogs. Most dogs however do not take at all kindly to the pursuit.
A wolf is a terrible fighter. He will decimate a pack of hounds by
rabid snaps with his giant jaws while suffering little damage himself;
nor are the ordinary big dogs, supposed to be fighting dogs, able to
tackle him without special training. I have known one wolf to kill a
bulldog which had rushed at it with a single snap, while another which
had entered the yard of a Montana ranch house slew in quick succession
both of the large mastiffs by which it was assailed. The immense
agility and ferocity of the wild beast, the terrible snap of his long-
toothed jaws, and the admirable training in which he always is, give
him a great advantage over fat, small-toothed, smooth-skinned dogs,
even though they are nominally supposed to belong to the fighting
classes. In the way that bench competitions are arranged nowadays this
is but natural, as there is no temptation to produce a worthy class of
fighting dog when the rewards are given upon technical points wholly
unconnected with the dog's usefulness. A prize-winning mastiff or
bulldog may be almost useless for the only purposes for which his kind
is ever useful at all. A mastiff, if properly trained and of
sufficient size, might possibly be able to meet a young or undersized
Texas wolf; but I have never seen a dog of this variety which I would
esteem a match single-handed for one of the huge timber wolves of
western Montana. Even if the dog was the heavier of the two, his teeth
and claws would be very much smaller and weaker and his hide less
tough. Indeed I have known of but one dog which single-handed
encountered and slew a wolf; this was the large vicious mongrel whose
feats are recorded in my /Hunting Trips of a Ranchman/.

General Marcy of the United States Army informed me that he once
chased a huge wolf which had gotten away with a small trap on its
foot. It was, I believe, in Wisconsin, and he had twenty or thirty
hounds with him, but they were entirely untrained in wolf-hunting, and
proved unable to stop the crippled beast. Few of them would attack it
at all, and those that did went at it singly and with a certain
hesitation, and so each in turn was disabled by a single terrible
snap, and left bleeding on the snow. General Wade Hampton tells me
that in the course of his fifty years' hunting with horse and hound in
Mississippi, he has on several occasions tried his pack of fox-hounds
(southern deer-hounds) after a wolf. He found that it was with the
greatest difficulty, however, that he could persuade them to so much
as follow the trail. Usually, as soon as they came across it, they
would growl, bristle up, and then retreat with their tails between
their legs. But one of his dogs ever really tried to master a wolf by
itself, and this one paid for its temerity with its life; for while
running a wolf in a canebrake the beast turned and tore it to pieces.
Finally General Hampton succeeded in getting a number of his hounds so
they would at any rate follow the trail in full cry, and thus drive
the wolf out of the thicket, and give a chance to the hunter to get a
shot. In this way he killed two or three.

The true way to kill wolves, however, is to hunt them with greyhounds
on the great plains. Nothing more exciting than this sport can
possibly be imagined. It is not always necessary that the greyhounds
should be of absolutely pure blood. Prize-winning dogs of high
pedigree often prove useless for the purposes. If by careful choice,
however, a ranchman can get together a pack composed both of the
smooth-haired greyhound and the rough-haired Scotch deer-hound, he can
have excellent sport. The greyhounds sometimes do best if they have a
slight cross of bulldog in their veins; but this is not necessary. If
once a greyhound can be fairly entered to the sport and acquires
confidence, then its wonderful agility, its sinewy strength and speed,
and the terrible snap with which its jaws come together, render it a
most formidable assailant. Nothing can possibly exceed the gallantry
with which good greyhounds, when their blood is up, fling themselves
on a wolf or any other foe. There does not exist, and there never has
existed on the wide earth, a more perfect type of dauntless courage
than such a hound. Not Cushing when he steered his little launch
through the black night against the great ram Albemarle, not Custer
dashing into the valley of the Rosebud to die with all his men, not
Farragut himself lashed in the rigging of the Hartford as she forged
past the forts to encounter her iron-clad foe, can stand as a more
perfect type of dauntless valor.

Once I had the good fortune to witness a very exciting hunt of this
character among the foot-hills of the northern Rockies. I was staying
at the house of a friendly cowman, whom I will call Judge Yancy Stump.
Judge Yancy Stump was a Democrat who, as he phrased it, had fought for
his Democracy; that is, he had been in the Confederate Army. He was at
daggers drawn with his nearest neighbor, a cross-grained mountain
farmer, who may be known as old man Prindle. Old man Prindle had been
in the Union Army, and his Republicanism was of the blackest and most
uncompromising type. There was one point, however, on which the two
came together. They were exceedingly fond of hunting with hounds. The
Judge had three or four track-hounds, and four of which he called
swift-hounds, the latter including one pure-bred greyhound bitch of
wonderful speed and temper, a dun-colored yelping animal which was a
cross between a greyhound and a fox-hound, and two others that were
crosses between a greyhound and a wire-haired Scotch deer-hound. Old
man Prindle's contribution to the pack consisted of two immense
brindled mongrels of great strength and ferocious temper. They were
unlike any dogs I have ever seen in this country. Their mother herself
was a cross between a bull mastiff and a Newfoundland, while the
father was descried as being a big dog that belonged to a "Dutch
Count." The "Dutch Count" was an outcast German noble, who had drifted
to the West, and, after failing in the mines and failing in the cattle
country, had died in a squalid log shanty while striving to eke out an
existence as a hunter among the foot-hills. His dog, I presume, from
the description given me, must have been a boar-hound or Ulm dog.

As I was very anxious to see a wolf-hunt the Judge volunteered to get
one up, and asked old man Prindle to assist, for the sake of his two
big fighting dogs; though the very names of the latter, General Grant
and Old Abe, were gall and wormwood to the unreconstructed soul of the
Judge. Still they were the only dogs anywhere around capable of
tackling a savage timber wolf, and without their aid the judge's own
high-spirited animals ran a serious risk of injury, for they were
altogether too game to let any beast escape without a struggle.

Luck favored us. Two wolves had killed a calf and dragged it into a
long patch of dense brush where there was a little spring, the whole
furnishing admirable cover for any wild beast. Early in the morning we
started on horseback for this bit of cover, which was some three miles
off. The party consisted of the Judge, old man Prindle, a cowboy,
myself, and the dogs. The judge and I carried our rifles and the
cowboy his revolver, but old man Prindle had nothing but a heavy whip,
for he swore, with many oaths, that no one should interfere with his
big dogs, for by themselves they would surely "make the wolf feel
sicker than a stuck hog." Our shaggy ponies racked along at a five-
mile gait over the dewy prairie grass. The two big dogs trotted behind
their master, grim and ferocious. The track-hounds were tied in
couples, and the beautiful greyhounds loped lightly and gracefully
alongside the horses. The country was fine. A mile to our right a
small plains river wound in long curves between banks fringed with
cottonwoods. Two or three miles to our left the foot-hills rose sheer
and bare, with clumps of black pine and cedar in their gorges. We rode
over gently rolling prairie, with here and there patches of brush in
the bottoms of the slopes around the dry watercourses.

At last we reached a somewhat deeper valley in which the wolves were
harbored. Wolves lie close in the daytime and will not leave cover if
they can help it; and as they had both food and water within we knew
it was most unlikely that this couple would be gone. The valley was a
couple of hundred yards broad and three or four times as long, filled
with a growth of ash and dwarf elm and cedar, thorny underbrush
choking the spaces between. Posting the cowboy, to whom he gave his
rifle, with two greyhounds on one side of the upper end, and old man
Prindle with two others on the opposite side, while I was left at the
lower end to guard against the possibility of the wolves breaking
back, the Judge himself rode into the thicket near me and loosened the
track-hounds to let them find the wolves' trail. The big dogs also
were uncoupled and allowed to go in with the hounds. Their power of
scent was very poor, but they were sure to be guided aright by the
baying of the hounds, and their presence would give confidence to the
latter and make them ready to rout the wolves out of the thicket,
which they would probably have shrunk from doing alone. There was a
moment's pause of expectation after the Judge entered the thicket with
his hounds. We sat motionless on our horses, eagerly looking through
the keen fresh morning air. Then a clamorous baying from the thicket
in which both the horseman and dogs had disappeared showed that the
hounds had struck the trail of their quarry and were running on a hot
scent. For a couple of minutes we could not be quite certain which way
the game was going to break. The hounds ran zigzag through the brush,
as we could tell by their baying, and once some yelping and a great
row showed that they had come rather closer than they had expected
upon at least one of the wolves.

In another minute, however, the latter found it too hot for them and
bolted from the thicket. My first notice of this was seeing the
cowboy, who was standing by the side of his horse, suddenly throw up
his rifle and fire, while the greyhounds who had been springing high
in the air, half maddened by the clamor in the thicket below, for a
moment dashed off the wrong way, confused by the report of the gun. I
rode for all I was worth to where the cowboy stood, and instantly
caught a glimpse of two wolves, grizzled-gray and brown, which having
been turned by his shot had started straight over the hill across the
plain toward the mountains three miles away. As soon as I saw them I
saw also that the rearmost of the couple had been hit somewhere in the
body and was lagging behind, the blood running from its flanks, while
the two greyhounds were racing after it; and at the same moment the
track-hounds and the big dogs burst out of the thicket, yelling
savagely as they struck the bloody trail. The wolf was hard hit, and
staggered as he ran. He did not have a hundred yards' start of the
dogs, and in less than a minute one of the greyhounds ranged up and
passed him with a savage snap that brought him too; and before he
could recover the whole pack rushed at him. Weakened as he was he
could make no effective fight against so many foes, and indeed had a
chance for but one or two rapid snaps before he was thrown down and
completely covered by the bodies of his enemies. Yet with one of these
snaps he did damage, as a shrill yell told, and in a second an over-
rash track-hound came out of the struggle with a deep gash across his
shoulders. The worrying, growling, and snarling were terrific, but in
a minute the heaving mass grew motionless and the dogs drew off, save
one or two that still continued to worry the dead wolf as it lay stark
and stiff with glazed eyes and rumpled fur.

No sooner were we satisfied that it was dead than the Judge, with
cheers and oaths and crackings of his whip, urged the dogs after the
other wolf. The two greyhounds that had been with old man Prindle had
fortunately not been able to see the wolves when they first broke from
the cover, and never saw the wounded wolf at all, starting off at full
speed after the unwounded one the instant he topped the crest of the
hill. He had taken advantage of a slight hollow and turned, and now
the chase was crossing us half a mile away. With whip and spur we flew
towards them, our two greyhounds stretching out in front and leaving
us as if we were standing still, the track-hounds and big dogs running
after them just ahead of the horses. Fortunately the wolf plunged for
a moment into a little brushy hollow and again doubled back, and this
gave us a chance to see the end of the chase from nearby. The two
greyhounds which had first taken up the pursuit were then but a short
distance behind. Nearer they crept until they were within ten yards,
and then with a tremendous race the little bitch ran past him and
inflicted a vicious bite in the big beast's ham. He whirled around
like a top and his jaws clashed like those of a sprung bear-trap, but
quick though he was she was quicker and just cleared his savage rush.
In another moment he resumed his flight at full speed, a speed which
only that of the greyhounds exceeded; but almost immediately the
second greyhound ranged alongside, and though he was not able to bite,
because the wolf kept running with its head turned around threatening
him, yet by his feints he delayed the beast's flight so that in a
moment or two the remaining couple of swift hounds arrived on the
scene. For a moment the wolf and all four dogs galloped along in a
bunch; then one of the greyhounds, watching his chance, pinned the
beast cleverly by the hock and threw him completely over. The others
jumped on it in an instant; but rising by main strength the wolf shook
himself free, catching one dog by the ear and tearing it half off.
Then he sat down on his haunches and the greyhounds ranged themselves
around him some twenty yards off, forming a ring which forbade his
retreat, though they themselves did not dare touch him. However the
end was at hand. In another moment Old Abe and General Grant came
running up at headlong speed and smashed into the wolf like a couple
of battering-rams. He rose on his hind-legs like a wrestler as they
came at him, the greyhounds also rising and bouncing up and down like
rubber balls. I could just see the wolf and the first big dog locked
together, as the second one made good his throat-hold. In another
moment over all three tumbled, while the greyhounds and one or two of
the track-hounds jumped in to take part in the killing. The big dogs
more than occupied the wolf's attention and took all the punishing,
while in a trice one of the greyhounds, having seized him by the hind-
leg, stretched him out, and the others were biting his undefended
belly. The snarling and yelling of the worry made a noise so fiendish
that it was fairly bloodcurdling; then it gradually died down, and the
second wolf lay limp on the plains, killed by the dogs, unassisted.
This wolf was rather heavier and decidedly taller than either of the
big dogs, with more sinewy feet and longer fangs.

I have several times seen wolves run down and stopped by greyhounds
after a break-neck gallop and a wildly exciting finish, but this was
the only occasion on which I ever saw the dogs kill a big, full-grown
he-wolf unaided. Nevertheless various friends of mine own packs that
have performed the feat again and again. One pack, formerly kept at
Fort Benton, until wolves in that neighborhood became scarce, had
nearly seventy-five to its credit, most of them killed without any
assistance from the hunter; killed moreover by the greyhounds alone,
there being no other dogs with the pack. These greyhounds were trained
to the throat-hold, and did their own killing in fine style; usually
six or eight were slipped together. General Miles informs me that he
once had great fun in the Indian Territory hunting wolves with a pack
of greyhounds. They had with the pack a large stub-tailed mongrel, of
doubtful ancestry but most undoubted fighting capacity. When the wolf
was started the greyhounds were sure to overtake it in a mile or two;
they would then bring it to a halt and stand around it in a ring until
the fighting dog came up. The latter promptly tumbled on the wolf,
grabbing him anywhere, and often getting a terrific wound himself at
the same time. As soon as he had seized the wolf and was rolling over
with him in the grapple the other dogs joined in the fray and
dispatched the quarry without much danger to themselves.

During the last decade many ranchmen in Colorado, Wyoming, and
Montana, have developed packs of greyhounds able to kill a wolf
unassisted. Greyhounds trained for this purpose always seize by the
throat; and the light dogs used for coursing jack-rabbits are not of
much service, smooth or rough-haired greyhounds and deer-hounds
standing over thirty inches at the shoulder and weighing over ninety
pounds being the only ones that, together with speed, courage, and
endurance, possess the requisite power.

One of the most famous packs in the West was that of the Sun River
Round Club, in Montana, started by the stockmen of Sun River to get
rid of the curse of wolves which infested the neighborhood and worked
very serious damage to the herds and flocks. The pack was composed of
both greyhounds and deer-hounds, the best being from the kennels of
Colonel Williams and of Mr. Van Hummel, of Denver; they were handled
by an old plainsman and veteran wolf-hunter named Porter. In the
season of '86 the astonishing number of 146 wolves were killed with
these dogs. Ordinarily, as soon as the dogs seized a wolf, and threw
or held it, Porter rushed in and stabbed it with his hunting-knife;
one day, when out with six hounds, he thus killed no less than twelve
out of the fifteen wolves started, though one of the greyhounds was
killed, and all the others were cut and exhausted. But often the
wolves were killed without his aid. The first time the two biggest
hounds--deer-hounds or wire-haired greyhounds--were tried, when they
had been at the ranch only three days, they performed such a feat. A
large wolf had killed and partially eaten a sheep in a corral close to
the ranch house, and Porter started on the trail, and followed him at
a jog-trot nearly ten miles before the hounds sighted him. Running but
a few rods, he turned viciously to bay, and the two great greyhounds
struck him like stones hurled from a catapult, throwing him as they
fastened on his throat; they held him down and strangled him before he
could rise, two other hounds getting up just in time to help at the
end of the worry.

Ordinarily, however, no two greyhounds or deer-hounds are a match for
a gray wolf, but I have known of several instances in Colorado,
Wyoming, and Montana, in which three strong veterans have killed one.
The feat can only be performed by big dogs of the highest courage, who
all act together, rush in at top speed, and seize by the throat; for
the strength of the quarry is such that otherwise he will shake off
the dogs, and then speedily kill them by rabid snaps with his terribly
armed jaws. Where possible, half a dozen dogs should be slipped at
once, to minimize the risk of injury to the pack; unless this is done,
and unless the hunter helps the dogs in the worry, accidents will be
frequent, and an occasional wolf will be found able to beat off,
maiming or killing, a lesser number of assailants. Some hunters prefer
the smooth greyhound, because of its great speed, and others the wire-
coated animal, the rough deer-hound, because of its superior strength;
both, if of the right kind, are dauntless fighters.

Colonel Williams' greyhounds have performed many noble feats in wolf-
hunting. He spent the winter of 1875 in the Black Hills, which at that
time did not contain a single settler, and fairly swarmed with game.
Wolves were especially numerous and very bold and fierce, so that the
dogs of the party were continually in jeopardy of their lives. On the
other hand they took an ample vengeance, for many wolves were caught
by the pack. Whenever possible, the horsemen kept close enough to take
an immediate hand in the fight, if the quarry was a full-grown wolf,
and thus save the dogs from the terrible punishment they were
otherwise certain to receive. The dogs invariably throttled, rushing
straight at the throat, but the wounds they themselves received were
generally in the flank or belly; in several instances these wounds
resulted fatally. Once or twice a wolf was caught, and held by two
greyhounds until the horsemen came up but it took at least five dogs
to overcome and slay unaided a big timber wolf. Several times the feat
was performed by a party of five, consisting of two greyhounds, one
rough-coated deer-hound, and two cross-bloods; and once by a litter
of seven young greyhounds, not yet come to their full strength.

Once or twice the so-called Russian wolf-hounds or silky coated
greyhounds, the "borzois," have been imported and tried in wolf-
hunting on the western plains; but hitherto they have not shown
themselves equal, at either running or fighting, to the big American-
bred greyhounds of the type produced by Colonel Williams and certain
others of our best western breeders. Indeed I have never known any
foreign greyhounds, whether Scotch, English, or from continental
Europe, to perform such feats of courage, endurance, and strength, in
chasing and killing dangerous game, as the homebred greyhounds of
Colonel Williams.



                             CHAPTER IX.

                           IN COWBOY LAND.

Out on the frontier, and generally among those who spend their lives
in, or on the borders of, the wilderness, life is reduced to its
elemental conditions. The passions and emotions of these grim hunters
of the mountains, and wild rough-riders of the plains, are simpler and
stranger than those of people dwelling in more complicated states of
society. As soon as the communities become settled and begin to grow
with any rapidity, the American instinct for law asserts itself; but
in the earlier stages each individual is obliged to be a law to
himself and to guard his rights with a strong hand. Of course the
transition periods are full of incongruities. Men have not yet
adjusted their relations to morality and law with any niceness. They
hold strongly by certain rude virtues, and on the other hand they
quite fail to recognize even as shortcomings not a few traits that
obtain scant mercy in older communities. Many of the desperadoes, the
man-killers, and road-agents have good sides to their characters.
Often they are people, who, in certain stages of civilization, do, or
have done, good work, but who, when these stages have passed, find
themselves surrounded by conditions which accentuate their worst
qualities, and make their best qualities useless. The average
desperado, for instance, has, after all, much the same standard of
morals that the Norman nobles had in the days of the battle of
Hastings, and, ethically and morally, he is decidedly in advance of
the vikings, who were the ancestors of these same nobles--and to whom,
by the way, he himself could doubtless trace a portion of his blood.
If the transition from the wild lawlessness of life in the wilderness
or on the border to a higher civilization were stretched out over a
term of centuries, he and his descendants would doubtless accommodate
themselves by degrees to the changing circumstances. But unfortunately
in the far West the transition takes place with marvellous abruptness,
and at an altogether unheard-of speed, and many a man's nature is
unable to change with sufficient rapidity to allow him to harmonize
with his environment. In consequence, unless he leaves for still
wilder lands, he ends by getting hung instead of founding a family
which would revere his name as that of a very capable, although not in
all respects a conventionally moral, ancestor.

Most of the men with whom I was intimately thrown during my life on
the frontier and in the wilderness were good fellows, hard-working,
brave, resolute, and truthful. At times, of course, they were forced
of necessity to do deeds which would seem startling to dwellers in
cities and in old settled places; and though they waged a very stern
and relentless warfare upon evil-doers whose misdeeds had immediate
and tangible bad results, they showed a wide toleration of all save
the most extreme classes of wrong, and were not given to inquiring too
curiously into a strong man's past, or to criticizing him over-harshly
for a failure to discriminate in finer ethical questions. Moreover,
not a few of the men with whom I came in contact--with some of whom my
relations were very close and friendly--had at different times led
rather tough careers. This fact was accepted by them and by their
companions as a fact, and nothing more. There were certain offences,
such as rape, the robbery of a friend, or murder under circumstances
of cowardice and treachery, which were never forgiven; but the fact
that when the country was wild a young fellow had gone on the road--
that is, become a highwayman, or had been chief of a gang of
desperadoes, horse-thieves, and cattle-killers, was scarcely held to
weigh against him, being treated as a regrettable, but certainly not
shameful, trait of youth. He was regarded by his neighbors with the
same kindly tolerance which respectable mediaeval Scotch borderers
doubtless extended to their wilder young men who would persist in
raiding English cattle even in time of peace.

Of course if these men were asked outright as to their stories they
would have refused to tell them or else would have lied about them;
but when they had grown to regard a man as a friend and companion they
would often recount various incidents of their past lives with perfect
frankness, and as they combined in a very curious degree both a
decided sense of humor, and a failure to appreciate that there was
anything especially remarkable in what they related, their tales were
always entertaining.

Early one spring, now nearly ten years ago, I was out hunting some
lost horses. They had strayed from the range three months before, and
we had in a roundabout way heard that they were ranging near some
broken country, where a man named Brophy had a ranch, nearly fifty
miles from my own. When I started thither the weather was warm, but
the second day out it grew colder and a heavy snowstorm came on.
Fortunately I was able to reach the ranch all right, finding there one
of the sons of a Little Beaver ranchman, and a young cowpuncher
belonging to a Texas outfit, whom I knew very well. After putting my
horse into the corral and throwing him down some hay I strode into the
low hut, made partly of turf and partly of cottonwood logs, and
speedily warmed myself before the fire. We had a good warm supper, of
bread, potatoes, fried venison, and tea. My two companions grew very
sociable and began to talk freely over their pipes. There were two
bunks one above the other. I climbed into the upper, leaving my
friends, who occupied the lower, sitting together on a bench
recounting different incidents in the careers of themselves and their
cronies during the winter that had just passed. Soon one of them asked
the other what had become of a certain horse, a noted cutting pony,
which I had myself noticed the preceding fall. The question aroused
the other to the memory of a wrong which still rankled, and he began
(I alter one or two of the proper names):

"Why, that was the pony that got stole. I had been workin' him on
rough ground when I was out with the Three Bar outfit and he went
tender forward, so I turned him loose by the Lazy B ranch, and when I
came back to git him there wasn't anybody at the ranch and I couldn't
find him. The sheep-man who lives about two miles west, under Red Clay
butte, told me he seen a fellow in a wolfskin coat, ridin' a pinto
bronco, with white eyes, leadin' that pony of mine just two days
before; and I hunted round till I hit his trail and then I followed to
where I'd reckoned he was headin' for--the Short Pine Hills. When I
got there a rancher told me he had seen the man pass on towards
Cedartown, and sure enough when I struck Cedartown I found he lived
there in a 'dobe house, just outside the town. There was a boom on the
town and it looked pretty slick. There was two hotels and I went into
the first, and I says, 'Where's the justice of the peace?' says I to
the bartender.

" 'There ain't no justice of the peace,' says he, 'the justice of the
peace got shot.'

" 'Well, where's the constable?' says I.

" 'Why, it was him that shot the justice of the peace!' says he; 'he's
skipped the country with a bunch of horses.'

" 'Well, ain't there no officer of the law left in this town?' says I.

" 'Why, of course,' says he, 'there's a probate judge; he is over
tendin' bar at the Last Chance Hotel.'

"So I went over to the Last Chance Hotel and I walked in there.
'Mornin',' says I.

" 'Morning',' says he.

" 'You be the probate judge?' says I.

" 'That's what I am,' says he. 'What do you want?' says he.

" 'I want justice,' says I.

" 'What kind of justice do you want?' says he. 'What's it for?'

" 'It's for stealin' a horse,' says I.

" 'Then by God you'll git it,' says he. 'Who stole the horse?' says
he.

" 'It is a man that lives in a 'dobe house, just outside the town
there,' says I.

" 'Well, where do you come from yourself?' said he.

" 'From Medory,' said I.

"With that he lost interest and settled kind o' back, and says he,
'There won't no Cedartown jury hang a Cedartown man for stealin' a
Medory man's horse,' said he.

" 'Well, what am I to do about my horse?' says I.

" 'Do?' says he; 'well, you know where the man lives, don't you?' says
he; 'then sit up outside his house, to-night and shoot him when he
comes in,' says he, 'and skip out with the horse.'

" 'All right,' says I, 'that is what I'll do,' and I walked off.

"So I went off to his house and I laid down behind some sage-brushes
to wait for him. He was not at home, but I could see his wife movin'
about inside now and then, and I waited and waited, and it growed
darker, and I begun to say to myself, 'Now here you are lyin' out to
shoot this man when he comes home; and it's getting' dark, and you
don't know him, and if you do shoot the next man that comes into that
house, like as not it won't be the fellow you're after at all, but
some perfectly innocent man a-comin' there after the other man's
wife!'

"So I up and saddled the bronc' and lit out for home," concluded the
narrator with the air of one justly proud of his own self-abnegating
virtue.

The "town" where the judge above-mentioned dwelt was one of those
squalid pretentiously named little clusters of make-shift dwellings
which on the edge of the wild country spring up with the rapid growth
of mushrooms, and are often no longer lived. In their earlier stages
these towns are frequently built entirely of canvas, and are subject
to grotesque calamities. When the territory purchased from the Sioux,
in the Dakotas, a couple of years ago was thrown open to settlement,
there was a furious inrush of men on horseback and in wagons, and
various ambitious cities sprang up overnight. The new settlers were
all under the influence of that curious craze which causes every true
westerner to put unlimited faith in the unknown and untried; many had
left all they had in a far better farming country, because they were
true to their immemorial belief that, wherever they were, their luck
would be better if they went somewhere else. They were always on the
move, and headed for the vague beyond. As miners see visions of all
the famous mines of history in each new camp, so these would-be city
founders saw future St. Pauls and Omahas in every forlorn group of
tents pitched by some muddy stream in a desert of gumbo and sage-
brush; and they named both the towns and the canvas buildings in
accordance with their bright hopes for the morrow, rather than with
reference to the mean facts of the day. One of these towns, which when
twenty-four hours old boasted of six saloons, a "court-house," and an
"opera house," was overwhelmed by early disaster. The third day of its
life a whirlwind came along and took off the opera house and half the
saloons; and the following evening lawless men nearly finished the
work of the elements. The riders of a huge trail-outfit from Texas, to
their glad surprise discovered the town and abandoned themselves to a
night of roaring and lethal carousal. Next morning the city
authorities were lamenting, with oaths of bitter rage, that "them
hell-and-twenty Flying A cowpunchers had cut the court-house up into
parts." It was true. The cowboys were in need of chaps, and with an
admirable mixture of adventurousness, frugality, and ready
adaptability to circumstances, had made substitutes therefore in the
shape of canvas overalls, cut from the roof and walls of the shaky
temple of justice.

One of my valued friends in the mountains, and one of the best hunters
with whom I ever travelled, was a man who had a peculiarly light-
hearted way of looking at conventional social obligations. Though in
some ways a true backwoods Donatello, he was a man of much shrewdness
and of great courage and resolution. Moreover, he possessed what only
a few men do possess, the capacity to tell the truth. He saw facts as
they were, and could tell them as they were, and he never told an
untruth unless for very weighty reasons. He was pre-eminently a
philosopher, of a happy, sceptical turn of mind. He had no prejudices.
He never looked down, as so many hard characters do, upon a person
possessing a different code of ethics. His attitude was one of broad,
genial tolerance. He saw nothing out of the way in the fact that he
had himself been a road-agent, a professional gambler, and a desperado
at different stages of his career. On the other hand, he did not in
the least hold it against any one that he had always acted within the
law. At the time that I knew him he had become a man of some
substance, and naturally a staunch upholder of the existing order of
things. But while he never boasted of his past deeds, he never
apologized for them, and evidently would have been quite as incapable
of understanding that they needed an apology as he would have been
incapable of being guilty of mere vulgar boastfulness. He did not
often allude to his past career at all. When he did, he recited its
incidents perfectly naturally and simply, as events, without any
reference to or regard for their ethical significance. It was this
quality which made him at times a specially pleasant companion, and
always an agreeable narrator. The point of his story, or what seemed
to him the point, was rarely that which struck me. It was the
incidental sidelights the story threw upon his own nature and the
somewhat lurid surroundings amid which he had moved.

On one occasion when we were out together we killed a bear, and after
skinning it, took a bath in a lake. I noticed he had a scar on the
side of his foot and asked him how he got it, to which he responded
with indifference:

"Oh, that? Why, a man shootin' at me to make me dance, that was all."

I expressed some curiosity in that matter, and he went on:

"Well, the way of it was this: It was when I was keeping a saloon in
New Mexico, and there was a man there by the name of Fowler, and there
was a reward on him of three thousand dollars----"

"Put on him by the State?"

"No, put on by his wife," said my friend; "and there was this--"

"Hold on," I interrupted; "put on by his wife did you say?"

"Yes, by his wife. Him an her had been keepin' a faro bank, you see,
and they quarreled about it, so she just put a reward on him, and
so--"

"Excuse me," I said, "but do you mean to say that this reward was put
on publicly?" to which my friend answered, with an air of gentlemanly
boredom at being interrupted to gratify my thirst for irrelevant
detail:

"Oh, no, not publicly. She just mentioned it to six or eight intimate
personal friends."

"Go on," I responded, somewhat overcome by this instance of the
primitive simplicity with which New Mexico matrimonial disputes were
managed, and he continued:

"Well, two men come ridin' in to see me to borrow my guns. My guns was
Colt's self-cockers. It was a new thing then, an they was the only
ones in town. These come to me, and 'Simpson,' says they, 'we want to
borrow your guns; we are goin' to kill Fowler.'

" 'Hold on for a moment,' said I, 'I am willin' to lend you them guns,
but I ain't goin' to know what you 'r' goin' to do with them, no sir;
but of course you can have the guns.' " Here my friend's face
lightened pleasantly, and he continued:

"Well, you may easily believe I felt surprised next day when Fowler
come ridin' in, and, says he, 'Simpson, here's your guns!' He had shot
them two men! 'Well, Fowler,' says I, 'if I had known them men was
after you, I'd never have let them have them guns nohow,' says I. That
wasn't true, for I did know it, but there was no cause to tell him
that." I murmured my approval of such prudence, and Simpson continued,
his eyes gradually brightening with the light of agreeable
reminiscence:

"Well, they up and they took Fowler before the justice of the peace.
The justice of the peace was a Turk."

"Now, Simpson, what do you mean by that?" I interrupted:

"Well, he come from Turkey," said Simpson, and I again sank back,
wondering briefly what particular variety of Mediterranean outcast had
drifted down to New Mexico to be made a justice of the peace. Simpson
laughed and continued:

"That Fowler was a funny fellow. The Turk, he committed Fowler, and
Fowler, he riz up and knocked him down and tromped all over him and
made him let him go!"

"That was an appeal to a higher law," I observed. Simpson assented
cheerily, and continued:

"Well, that Turk, he got nervous for fear Fowler he was goin' to kill
him, and so he comes to me and offers me twenty-five dollars a day to
protect him from Fowler; and I went to Fowler, and 'Fowler,' says I,
'that Turk's offered me twenty-five dollars a day to protect him from
you. Now, I ain't goin' to get shot for no twenty-five dollars a day,
and if you are goin' to kill the Turk, just say so and go and do it;
but if you ain't goin' to kill the Turk, there's no reason why I
shouldn't earn that twenty-five dollars a day!' and Fowler, says he,
'I ain't goin' to touch the Turk; you just go right ahead and protect
him.' "

So Simpson "protected" the Turk from the imaginary danger of Fowler,
for about a week, at twenty-five dollars a day. Then one evening he
happened to go out and met Fowler, "and," said he, "the moment I saw
him I knowed he felt mean, for he begun to shoot at my feet," which
certainly did seem to offer presumptive evidence of meanness. Simpson
continued:

"I didn't have no gun, so I just had to stand there and take it util
something distracted his attention, and I went off home to get my gun
and kill him, but I wanted to do it perfectly lawful; so I went up to
the mayor (he was playin' poker with one of the judges), and says I to
him, 'Mr. Mayor,' says I, 'I am goin' to shoot Fowler. And the mayor
he riz out of his chair and he took me by the hand, and says he, 'Mr.
Simpson, if you do I will stand by you;' and the judge, he says, 'I'll
go on your bond.' "

Fortified by this cordial approval of the executive and judicial
branches of the government, Mr. Simpson started on his quest.
Meanwhile, however, Fowler had cut up another prominent citizen, and
they already had him in jail. The friends of law and order feeling
some little distrust as to the permanency of their own zeal for
righteousness, thought it best to settle the matter before there was
time for cooling, and accordingly, headed by Simpson, the mayor, the
judge, the Turk, and other prominent citizens of the town, they broke
into the jail and hanged Fowler. The point in the hanging which
especially tickled my friend's fancy, as he lingered over the
reminiscence, was one that was rather too ghastly to appeal to our own
sense of humor. In the Turk's mind there still rankled the memory of
Fowler's very unprofessional conduct while figuring before him as a
criminal. Said Simpson, with a merry twinkle of the eye: "Do you know
that Turk, he was a right funny fellow too after all. Just as the boys
were going to string up Fowler, says he, 'Boys, stop; one moment,
gentlemen,--Mr. Fowler, good-by,' and he blew a kiss to him!"

In the cow-country, and elsewhere on the wild borderland between
savagery and civilization, men go quite as often by nicknames as by
those to which they are lawfully entitled. Half the cowboys and
hunters of my acquaintance are known by names entirely unconnected
with those they inherited or received when they were christened.
Occasionally some would-be desperado or make-believe mighty hunter
tries to adopt what he deems a title suitable to his prowess; but such
an effort is never attempted in really wild places, where it would be
greeted with huge derision; for all of these names that are genuine
are bestowed by outsiders, with small regard to the wishes of the
person named. Ordinarily the name refers to some easily recognizable
accident of origin, occupation, or aspect; as witness the innumerable
Dutcheys, Frencheys, Kentucks, Texas Jacks, Bronco Bills, Bear Joes,
Buckskins, Red Jims, and the like. Sometimes it is apparently
meaningless; one of my own cowpuncher friends is always called
"Sliver" or "Splinter"--why, I have no idea. At other times some
particular incident may give rise to the title; a clean-looking cowboy
formerly in my employ was always known as "Muddy Bill," because he had
once been bucked off his horse into a mud hole.

The grewsome genesis of one such name is given in the following letter
which I have just received from an old hunting-friend in the Rockies,
who took a kindly interest in a frontier cabin which the Boone and
Crockett Club was putting up at the Chicago World's Fair.

 "Feb 16th 1893; Der Sir: I see in the newspapers that your club the
  Daniel Boon and Davey Crockit you intend to erect a fruntier Cabin
  at the world's Far at Chicago to represent the erley Pianears of
  our country I would like to see you maik a success I have all my
  life been a fruntiersman and feel interested in your undrtaking
  and I hoap you wile get a good assortment of relicks I want to
  maik one suggestion to you that is in regard to getting a good man
  and a genuine Mauntanner to take charg of your haus at Chicago I
  want to recommend a man for you to get it is Liver-eating Johnson
  that is the naim he is generally called he is an old mauntneer and
  large and fine looking and one of the Best Story Tellers in the
  country and Very Polight genteel to every one he meets I wil tel
  you how he got that naim Liver-eating in a hard Fight with the
  Black Feet Indians thay Faught all day Johnson and a few Whites
  Faught a large Body of Indians all day after the fight Johnson cam
  in contact with a wounded Indian and Johnson was aut of ammunition
  and thay faught it out with thar Knives and Johnson got away with
  the Indian and in the fight cut the livver out of the Indian and
  said to the Boys did thay want any Liver to eat that is the way he
  got the naim of Liver-eating Johnson

                                        "Yours truly" etc., etc.

Frontiersmen are often as original as their names; and the originality
may take the form of wild savagery, of mere uncouthness, or of an odd
combination of genuine humor with simple acceptance of facts as they
are. On one occasion I expressed some surprise in learning that a
certain Mrs. P. had suddenly married, though her husband was alive and
in jail in a neighboring town; and received for answer: "Well, you
see, old man Pete he skipped the country, and left his widow behind
him, and so Bob Evans he up and married her!"--which was evidently
felt to be a proceeding requiring no explanation whatever.

In the cow-country there is nothing more refreshing than the light-
hearted belief entertained by the average man to the effect that any
animal which by main force has been saddled and ridden, or harnessed
and driven a couple of times, is a "broke horse." My present foreman
is firmly wedded to this idea, as well as to its complement, the
belief that any animal with hoofs, before any vehicle with wheels, can
be driven across any country. One summer on reaching the ranch I was
entertained with the usual accounts of the adventures and
misadventures which had befallen my own men and my neighbors since I
had been out last. In the course of the conversation my foreman
remarked: "We had a great time out here about six weeks ago. There was
a professor from Ann Arbor come out with his wife to see the Bad
Lands, and they asked if we could rig them up a team, and we said we
guessed we could, and Foley's boy and I did; but it ran away with him
and broke his leg! He was here for a month. I guess he didn't mind it
though." Of this I was less certain, forlorn little Medora being a
"busted" cow-town, concerning which I once heard another of my men
remark, in reply to an inquisitive commercial traveller: "How many
people lives here? Eleven--counting the chickens--when they're all in
town!"

My foreman continued: "By George, there was something that professor
said afterwards that made me feel hot. I sent word up to him by
Foley's boy that seein' as how it had come out we wouldn't charge him
nothin' for the rig; and that professor he answered that he was glad
we were showing him some sign of consideration, for he'd begun to
believe he'd fallen into a den of sharks, and that we gave him a
runaway team a purpose. That made me hot, calling that a runaway team.
Why, there was one of them horses never /could/ have run away before;
it hadn't never been druv but twice! And the other horse maybe had run
away a few times, but there was lots of times he /hadn't/ run away. I
esteemed that team full as liable not to run away as it was to run
away," concluded my foreman, evidently deeming this as good a warranty
of gentleness as the most exacting could require.

The definition of good behavior on the frontier is even more elastic
for a saddle-horse than for a team. Last spring one of the Three-Seven
riders, a magnificent horseman was killed on the round-up near
Belfield, his horse bucking and falling on him. "It was accounted a
plumb gentle horse too," said my informant, "only it sometimes sulked
and acted a little mean when it was cinched up behind." The
unfortunate rider did not know of this failing of the "plumb gentle
horse," and as soon as he was in the saddle it threw itself over
sideways with a great bound, and he fell on his head, and never spoke
again.

Such accidents are too common in the wild country to attract very much
attention; the men accept them with grim quiet, as inevitable in such
lives as theirs--lives that are harsh and narrow in their toil and
their pleasure alike, and that are ever-bounded by an iron horizon of
hazard and hardship. During the last year and a half three other men
from the ranches in my immediate neighborhood have met their deaths in
the course of their work. One, a trail boss of the O X, was drowned
while swimming his herd across a swollen river. Another, one of the
fancy ropers of the W Bar, was killed while roping cattle in a corral;
his saddle turned, the rope twisted round him, he was pulled off, and
trampled to death by his own horse.

The fourth man, a cowpuncher named Hamilton, lost his life during the
last week of October, 1891, in the first heavy snowstorm of the
season. Yet he was a skilled plainsman, on ground he knew well, and
just before straying himself, he successfully instructed two men who
did not know the country how to get to camp. They were all three with
the round-up, and were making a circle through the Bad Lands; the
wagons had camped on the eastern edge of these Bad Lands, where they
merged into the prairie, at the head of an old disused road, which led
about due east from the Little Missouri. It was a gray, lowering day,
and as darkness came on Hamilton's horse played out, and he told his
two companions not to wait, as it had begun to snow, but to keep on
towards the north, skirting some particularly rough buttes, and as
soon as they struck the road to turn to the right and follow it out to
the prairie, where they would find camp; he particularly warned them
to keep a sharp look-out, so as not to pass over the dim trail
unawares in the dusk and the storm. They followed his advice, and
reached camp safely; and after they had left him nobody ever again saw
him alive. Evidently he himself, plodding northwards, passed over the
road without seeing it in the gathering gloom; probably he struck it
at some point where the ground was bad, and the dim trail in
consequence disappeared entirely, as is the way with these prairie
roads--making them landmarks to be used with caution. He must then
have walked on and on, over rugged hills and across deep ravines,
until his horse came to a standstill; he took off its saddle and
picketed it to a dwarfed ash. Its frozen carcass was found with the
saddle near by, two months later. He now evidently recognized some
landmark, and realized that he had passed the road, and was far to the
north of the round-up wagons; but he was a resolute, self-confident
man, and he determined to strike out for a line camp, which he knew
lay about due east of him, two or three miles out on the prairie, on
one of the head branches of Knife River. Night must have fallen by
this time, and he missed the camp, probably passing it within less
than a mile; but he did pass it, and with it all hopes of life, and
walked wearily on to his doom, through the thick darkness and the
driving snow. At last his strength failed, and he lay down in the tall
grass of a little hollow. Five months later, in the early spring, the
riders from the line camp found his body, resting, face downwards,
with the forehead on the folded arms.

Accidents of less degree are common. Men break their collar-bones,
arms, or legs by falling when riding at speed over dangerous ground,
when cutting cattle or trying to control a stampeded herd, or by being
thrown or rolled on by bucking or rearing horses; or their horses, and
on rare occasion even they themselves, are gored by fighting steers.
Death by storm or in flood, death in striving to master a wild and
vicious horse, or in handling maddened cattle, and too often death in
brutal conflict with one of his own fellows--any one of these is the
not unnatural end of the life of the dweller on the plains or in the
mountains.

But a few years ago other risks had to be run from savage beasts, and
from the Indians. Since I have been ranching on the Little Missouri,
two men have been killed by bears in the neighborhood of my range; and
in the early years of my residence there, several men living or
travelling in the country were slain by small war-parties of young
braves. All the old-time trappers and hunters could tell stirring
tales of their encounters with Indians.

My friend, Tazewell Woody, was among the chief actors in one of the
most noteworthy adventures of this kind. He was a very quiet man, and
it was exceedingly difficult to get him to talk over any of his past
experiences; but one day, when he was in high good-humor with me for
having made three consecutive straight shots at elk, he became quite
communicative, and I was able to get him to tell me one story which I
had long wished to hear from his lips, having already heard of it
through one of the other survivors of the incident. When he found that
I already knew a good deal old Woody told me the rest.

It was in the spring of 1875, and Woody and two friends were trapping
on the Yellowstone. The Sioux were very bad at the time and had killed
many prospectors, hunters, cowboys, and settlers; the whites
retaliated whenever they got a chance, but, as always in Indian
warfare, the sly, lurking, bloodthirsty savages inflicted much more
loss than they suffered.

The three men, having a dozen horses with them, were camped by the
river-side in a triangular patch of brush, shaped a good deal like a
common flat-iron. On reaching camp they started to put out their
traps; and when he came back in the evening Woody informed his
companions that he had seen a great deal of Indian sign, and that he
believed there were Sioux in the neighborhood. His companions both
laughed at him, assuring him that they were not Sioux at all but
friendly Crows, and that they would be in camp next morning; "and sure
enough," said Woody, meditatively, "they /were/ in camp next morning."
By dawn one of the men went down the river to look at some of the
traps, while Woody started out to where the horses were, the third man
remaining in camp to get breakfast. Suddenly two shots were heard down
the river, and in another moment a mounted Indian swept towards the
horses. Woody fired, but missed him, and he drove off five while
Woody, running forward, succeeded in herding the other seven into
camp. Hardly had this been accomplished before the man who had gone
down the river appeared, out of breath with his desperate run, having
been surprised by several Indians, and just succeeding in making his
escape by dodging from bush to bush, threatening his pursuers with his
rifle.

These proved to be but the forerunners of a great war party, for when
the sun rose the hills around seemed black with Sioux. Had they chosen
to dash right in on the camp, running the risk of losing several of
their men in the charge, they could of course have eaten up the three
hunters in a minute; but such a charge is rarely practised by Indians,
who, although they are admirable in defensive warfare, and even in
certain kinds of offensive movements, and although from their skill in
hiding they usually inflict much more loss than they suffer when
matched against white troops, are yet very reluctant to make any
movement where the advantage gained must be offset by considerable
loss of life. The three men thought they were surely doomed, but being
veteran frontiersmen and long inured to every kind of hardship and
danger, they set to work with cool resolution to make as effective a
defence as possible, to beat off their antagonists if they might, and
if this proved impracticable, to sell their lives as dearly as they
could. Having tethered the horses in a slight hollow, the only one
which offered any protection, each man crept out to a point of the
triangular brush patch and lay down to await events.

In a very short while the Indians began closing in on them, taking
every advantage of cover, and then, both from their side of the river
and from the opposite bank, opened a perfect fusillade, wasting their
cartridges with a recklessness which Indians are apt to show when
excited. The hunters could hear the hoarse commands of the chiefs, the
war-whoops and the taunts in broken English which some of the warriors
hurled at them. Very soon all of their horses were killed, and the
brush was fairly riddled by the incessant volleys; but the three men
themselves, lying flat on the ground and well concealed, were not
harmed. The more daring young warriors then began to creep toward the
hunters, going stealthily from one piece of cover to the next; and now
the whites in turn opened fire. They did not shoot recklessly, as did
their foes, but coolly and quietly, endeavoring to make each shot
tell. Said Woody: "I only fired seven times all day; I reckoned on
getting meat every time I pulled trigger." They had an immense
advantage over their enemies, in that whereas they lay still and
entirely concealed, the Indians of course had to move from cover to
cover in order to approach, and so had at times to expose themselves.
When the whites fired at all they fired at a man, whether moving, or
motionless, whom they could clearly see, while the Indians could only
shoot at the smoke, which imperfectly marked the position of their
unseen foes. In consequence the assailants speedily found that it was
a task of hopeless danger to try in such a manner to close in on three
plains veterans, men of iron nerve and skilled in the use of the
rifle. Yet some of the more daring crept up very close to the patch of
brush, and one actually got inside it, and was killed among the
bedding that lay by the smouldering camp-fire. The wounded and such of
the dead as did not lie in too exposed positions were promptly taken
away by their comrades; but seven bodies fell into the hands of the
three hunters. I asked Woody how many he himself had killed. He said
he could only be sure of two that he got; one he shot in the head as
he peeped over a bush, and the other he shot through the smoke as he
attempted to rush in. "My, how that Indian did yell," said Woody,
retrospectively, "/he/ was no great of a Stoic." After two or three
hours of this deadly skirmishing, which resulted in nothing more
serious to the whites than in two of them being slightly wounded, the
Sioux became disheartened by the loss they were suffering and
withdrew, confining themselves thereafter to a long range and harmless
fusillade. When it was dark the three men crept out to the river bed,
and taking advantage of the pitchy night broke through the circle of
their foes; they managed to reach the settlements without further
molestation, having lost everything except their rifles.

For many years one of the most important of the wilderness dwellers
was the West Point officer, and no man has played a greater part than
he in the wild warfare which opened the regions beyond the Mississippi
to white settlement. Since 1879, there has been but little regular
Indian fighting in the North, though there have been one or two very
tedious and wearisome campaigns waged against the Apaches in the
South. Even in the North, however, there have been occasional
uprisings which had to be quelled by the regular troops.

After my elk hunt in September, 1891, I came out through the
Yellowstone Park, as I have elsewhere related, riding in company with
a surveyor of the Burlington and Quincy railroad, who was just coming
in from his summer's work. It was the first of October. There had been
a heavy snow-storm and the snow was still falling. Riding a stout pony
each, and leading another packed with our bedding, etc., we broke our
way from the upper to the middle geyser basin. Here we found a troop
of the 1st Cavalry camped, under the command of old friends of mine,
Captain Frank Edwards and Lieutenant (now Captain) John Pitcher. They
gave us hay for our horses and insisted upon our stopping to lunch,
with the ready hospitality always shown by army officers. After lunch
we began exchanging stories. My travelling companion, the surveyor,
had that spring performed a feat of note, going through one of the
canyons of the Big Horn for the first time. He went with an old mining
inspector, the two of them dragging a cottonwood sledge over the ice.
The walls of the canyon are so sheer and the water so rough that it
can be descended only when the stream is frozen. However, after six
days' labor and hardship the descent was accomplished; and the
surveyor, in concluding, described his experience in going through the
Crow Reservation.

This turned the conversation upon Indians, and it appeared that both
of our hosts had been actors in Indian scrapes which had attracted my
attention at the time they occurred, as they took place among tribes
that I knew and in a country which I had sometime visited, either when
hunting or when purchasing horses for the ranch. The first, which
occurred to Captain Edwards, happened late in 1886, at the time when
the crow Medicine Chief, Sword-Bearer, announced himself as the
Messiah of the Indian race, during one of the usual epidemics of ghost
dancing. Sword-Bearer derived his name from always wearing a medicine
sword--that is, a sabre painted red. He claimed to possess magic
power, and, thanks to the performance of many dexterous feats of
juggling, and the lucky outcome of certain prophecies, he deeply
stirred the Indians, arousing the young warriors in particular to the
highest pitch of excitement. They became sullen, began to paint and
armed themselves; and the agent and the settlers nearby grew so
apprehensive that the troops were ordered to go to the reservation. A
body of cavalry, including Captain Edwards' troop, was accordingly
marched thither, and found the Crow warriors, mounted on their war
ponies and dressed in their striking battle-garb, waiting on a hill.

The position of troops at the beginning of such an affair is always
peculiarly difficult. The settlers round-about are sure to clamor
bitterly against them, no matter what they do, on the ground that they
are not thorough enough and are showing favor to the savages, while on
the other hand, even if they fight purely in self-defence, a large
number of worthy but weak-minded sentimentalists in the East are sure
to shriek about their having brutally attacked the Indians. The war
authorities always insist that they must not fire the first shot under
any circumstances, and such were the orders at this time. The Crows on
the hill-top showed a sullen and threatening front, and the troops
advanced slowly towards them and then halted for a parley. Meanwhile a
mass of black thunderclouds gathering on the horizon threatened one of
those cloudbursts of extreme severity and suddenness so characteristic
of the plains country. While still trying to make arrangements for a
parley, a horseman started out of the Crow ranks and galloped headlong
down towards the troops. It was the medicine chief, Sword-Bearer. He
was painted and in his battle-dress, wearing his war-bonnet of
floating, trailing eagle feathers, while the plumes of the same bird
were braided in the mane and tail of his fiery little horse. On he
came at a gallop almost up to the troops and then began to circle
around them, calling and singing and throwing his crimson sword into
the air, catching it by the hilt as it fell. Twice he rode completely
around the soldiers, who stood in uncertainty, not knowing what to
make of his performance, and expressly forbidden to shoot at him. Then
paying no further heed to them he rode back towards the Crows. It
appears that he had told them that he would ride twice around the
hostile force, and by his incantations would call down rain from
heaven, which would make the hearts of the white men like water, so
that they should go back to their homes. Sure enough, while the
arrangements for the parley were still going forward, down came the
cloudburst drenching the command and making the ground on the hills in
front nearly impassable; and before it dried a courier arrived with
orders to the troops to go back to camp.

This fulfilment of Sword-Bearer's prophecy of course raised his
reputation to the zenith and the young men of the tribe prepared for
war, while the older chiefs, who more fully realized the power of the
whites, still hung back. When the troops next appeared they came upon
the entire Crow force, the women and children with their tepees being
off to one side beyond a little stream while almost all the warriors
of the tribe were gathered in front. Sword-Bearer started to repeat
his former ride, to the intense irritation of the soldiers. Luckily,
however, this time some of his young men could not be restrained. They
too began to ride near the troops, and one of them was unable to
refrain from firing on Captain Edwards' troop, which was in the van.
This gave the soldiers their chance. They instantly responded with a
volley, and Captain Edwards' troop charged. The fight lasted but a
minute or two, for Sword-Bearer was struck by a bullet and fell, and
as he had boasted himself invulnerable, and promised that his warriors
should be invulnerable also if they would follow him, the hearts of
the latter became as water and they broke in every direction. One of
the amusing, though irritating, incidents of the affair was to see the
plumed and painted warriors race headlong for the camp, plunge into
the stream, wash off their war paint, and remove their feathers; in
another moment they would be stolidly sitting on the ground, with
their blankets over their shoulders, rising to greet the pursuing
cavalry with unmoved composure and calm assurance that they had always
been friendly and had much disapproved the conduct of the young bucks
who had just been scattered on the field outside. It was much to the
credit of the discipline of the army that no bloodshed followed the
fight proper. The loss to the whites was small.

The other incident, related by Lieutenant Pitcher, took place in 1890,
near Tongue River, in northern Wyoming. The command with which he was
serving was camped near the Cheyenne Reservation. One day two young
Cheyenne bucks, met one of the government herders, and promptly killed
him--in a sudden fit, half of ungovernable blood lust, half of mere
ferocious lightheartedness. They then dragged his body into the brush
and left it. The disappearance of the herder of course attracted
attention, and a search was organized by the cavalry. At first the
Indians stoutly denied all knowledge of the missing man; but when it
became evident that the search party would shortly find him, two or
three of the chiefs joined them, and piloted them to where the body
lay; and acknowledged that he had been murdered by two of their band,
though at first they refused to give their names. The commander of the
post demanded that the murderers be given up. The chiefs said that
they were very sorry, that this could not be done, but that they were
willing to pay over any reasonable number of ponies to make amends for
the death. This offer was of course promptly refused, and the
commander notified them that if they did not surrender the murderers
by a certain time he would hold the whole tribe responsible and would
promptly move out and attack them. Upon this the chiefs, after holding
full counsel with the tribe, told the commander that they had no power
to surrender the murderers, but that the latter had said that sooner
than see their tribe involved in a hopeless struggle they would of
their own accord come in and meet the troops anywhere the latter chose
to appoint, and die fighting. To this the commander responded: "All
right; let them come into the agency in half an hour." The chiefs
acquiesced, and withdrew.

Immediately the Indians sent mounted messengers at speed from camp to
camp, summoning all their people to witness the act of fierce self-
doom; and soon the entire tribe of Cheyennes, many of them having
their faces blackened in token of mourning, moved down and took up a
position on the hill-side close to the agency. At the appointed hour
both young men appeared in their handsome war dress, galloped to the
top of the hill near the encampment, and deliberately opened fire on
the troops. The latter merely fired a few shots to keep the young
desperadoes off, while Lieutenant Pitcher and a score of cavalrymen
left camp to make a circle and drive them in; they did not wish to
hurt them, but to capture and give them over to the Indians, so that
the latter might be forced themselves to inflict the punishment.
However, they were unable to accomplish their purpose; one of the
young braves went straight at them, firing his rifle and wounding the
horse of one of the cavalrymen, so that, simply in self-defence, the
latter had to fire a volley, which laid low the assailant; the other,
his horse having been shot, was killed in the brush, fighting to the
last. All the while, from the moment the two doomed braves appeared
until they fell, the Cheyennes on the hill-side had been steadily
singing the death chant. When the young men had both died, and had
thus averted the fate which their misdeeds would else have brought
upon the tribe, the warriors took their bodies and bore them away for
burial honors, the soldiers looking on in silence. Where the slain men
were buried the whites never knew, but all that night they listened to
the dismal wailing of the dirges with which the tribesmen celebrated
their gloomy funeral rites.

Frontiersmen are not, as a rule, apt to be very superstitious. They
lead lives too hard and practical, and have too little imagination in
things spiritual and supernatural. I have heard but few ghost stories
while living on the frontier, and these few were of a perfectly
commonplace and conventional type.

But I once listened to a goblin story which rather impressed me. It
was told by a grisled, weather-beaten old mountain hunter, named
Bauman, who was born and had passed all his life on the frontier. He
must have believed what he said, for he could hardly repress a shudder
at certain points of the tale; but he was of German ancestry, and in
childhood had doubtless been saturated with all kinds of ghost and
goblin lore, so that many fearsome superstitions were latent in his
mind; besides, he knew well the stories told by the Indian medicine
men in their winter camps, of the snow-walkers, and the spectres, and
the formless evil beings that haunt the forest depths, and dog and
waylay the lonely wanderer who after nightfall passes through the
regions where they lurk; and it may be that when overcome by the
horror of the fate that befell his friend, and when oppressed by the
awful dread of the unknown, he grew to attribute, both at the time and
still more in remembrance, weird and elfin traits to what was merely
some abnormally wicked and cunning wild beast; but whether this was so
or not, no man can say.

When the event occurred Bauman was still a young man, and was trapping
with a partner among the mountains dividing the forks of the Salmon
from the head of Wisdom River. Not having had much luck, he and his
partner determined to go up into a particularly wild and lonely pass
through which ran a small stream said to contain many beaver. The pass
had an evil reputation because the year before a solitary hunter who
had wandered into it was there slain, seemingly by a wild beast, the
half-eaten remains being afterwards found by some mining prospectors
who had passed his camp only the night before.

The memory of this event, however, weighed very lightly with the two
trappers, who were as adventurous and hardy as others of their kind.
They took their two lean mountain ponies to the foot of the pass,
where they left them in an open beaver meadow, the rocky timber-clad
ground being from thence onwards impracticable for horses. They then
struck out on foot through the vast, gloomy forest, and in about four
hours reached a little open glade where they concluded to camp, as
signs of game were plenty.

There was still an hour or two of daylight left, and after building a
brush lean-to and throwing down and opening their packs, they started
up stream. The country was very dense and hard to travel through, as
there was much down timber, although here and there the sombre
woodland was broken by small glades of mountain grass.

At dusk they again reached camp. The glade in which it was pitched was
not many yards wide, the tall, close-set pines and firs rising round
it like a wall. On one side was a little stream, beyond which rose the
steep mountain-slopes, covered with the unbroken growth of the
evergreen forest.

They were surprised to find that during their short absence something,
apparently a bear, had visited camp, and had rummaged about among
their things, scattering the contents of their packs, and in sheer
wantonness destroying their lean-to. The footprints of the beast were
quite plain, but at first they paid no particular heed to them,
busying themselves with rebuilding the lean-to, laying out their beds
and stores, and lighting the fire.

While Bauman was making ready supper, it being already dark, his
companion began to examine the tracks more closely, and soon took a
brand from the fire to follow them up, where the intruder had walked
along a game trail after leaving the camp. When the brand flickered
out, he returned and took another, repeating his inspection of the
footprints very closely. Coming back to the fire, he stood by it a
minute or two, peering out into the darkness, and suddenly remarked:
"Bauman, that bear has been walking on two legs." Bauman laughed at
this, but his partner insisted that he was right, and upon again
examining the tracks with a torch, they certainly did seem to be made
by but two paws, or feet. However, it was too dark to make sure. After
discussing whether the footprints could possibly be those of a human
being, and coming to the conclusion that they could not be, the two
men rolled up in their blankets, and went to sleep under the lean-to.

At midnight Bauman was awakened by some noise, and sat up in his
blankets. As he did so his nostrils were struck by a strong, wild-
beast odor, and he caught the loom of a great body in the darkness at
the mouth of the lean-to. Grasping his rifle, he fired at the vague,
threatening shadow, but must have missed, for immediately afterwards
he heard the smashing of the underwood as the thing, whatever it was,
rushed off into the impenetrable blackness of the forest and the
night.

After this the two men slept but little, sitting up by the rekindled
fire, but they heard nothing more. In the morning they started out to
look at the few traps they had set the previous evening and to put out
new ones. By an unspoken agreement they kept together all day, and
returned to camp towards evening.

On nearing it they saw, hardly to their astonishment, that the lean-to
had been again torn down. The visitor of the preceding day had
returned, and in wanton malice had tossed about their camp kit and
bedding, and destroyed the shanty. The ground was marked up by its
tracks, and on leaving the camp it had gone along the soft earth by
the brook, where the footprints were as plain as if on snow, and,
after a careful scrutiny of the trail, it certainly did seem as if,
whatever the thing was, it had walked off on but two legs.

The men, thoroughly uneasy, gathered a great heap of dead logs, and
kept up a roaring fire throughout the night, one or the other sitting
on guard most of the time. About midnight the thing came down through
the forest opposite, across the brook, and stayed there on the hill-
side for nearly an hour. They could hear the branches crackle as it
moved about, and several times it uttered a harsh, grating, long-drawn
moan, a peculiarly sinister sound. Yet it did not venture near the
fire.

In the morning the two trappers, after discussing the strange events
of the last thirty-six hours, decided that they would shoulder their
packs and leave the valley that afternoon. They were the more ready to
do this because in spite of seeing a good deal of game sign they had
caught very little fur. However, it was necessary first to go along
the line of their traps and gather them, and this they started out to
do.

All the morning they kept together, picking up trap after trap, each
one empty. On first leaving camp they had the disagreeable sensation
of being followed. In the dense spruce thickets they occasionally
heard a branch snap after they had passed; and now and then there were
slight rustling noises among the small pines to one side of them.

At noon they were back within a couple of miles of camp. In the high,
bright sunlight their fears seemed absurd to the two armed men,
accustomed as they were, through long years of lonely wandering in the
wilderness to face every kind of danger from man, brute, or element.
There were still three beaver traps to collect from a little pond in a
wide ravine near by. Bauman volunteered to gather these and bring them
in, while his companion went ahead to camp and make ready the packs.

On reaching the pond Bauman found three beaver in the traps, one of
which had been pulled loose and carried into a beaver house. He took
several hours in securing and preparing the beaver, and when he
started homewards he marked with some uneasiness how low the sun was
getting. As he hurried towards camp, under the tall trees, the silence
and desolation of the forest weighed on him. His feet made no sound on
the pine needles, and the slanting sun rays, striking through among
the straight trunks, made a gray twilight in which objects at a
distance glimmered indistinctly. There was nothing to break the
ghostly stillness which, when there is no breeze, always broods over
these sombre primeval forests.

At last he came to the edge of the little glade where the camp lay,
and shouted as he approached it, but got no answer. The camp fire had
gone out, though the thin blue smoke was still curling upwards. Near
it lay the packs, wrapped and arranged. At first Bauman could see
nobody; nor did he receive an answer to his call. Stepping forward he
again shouted, and as he did so his eye fell on the body of his
friend, stretched beside the trunk of a great fallen spruce. Rushing
towards it the horrified trapper found that the body was still warm,
but that the neck was broken, while there were four great fang marks
in the throat.

The footprints of the unknown beast-creature, printed deep in the soft
soil, told the whole story.

The unfortunate man, having finished his packing, had sat down on the
spruce log with his face to the fire, and his back to the dense woods,
to wait for his companion. While thus waiting, his monstrous
assailant, which must have been lurking nearby in the woods, waiting
for a chance to catch one of the adventurers unprepared, came silently
up from behind, walking with long, noiseless steps, and seemingly
still on two legs. Evidently unheard, it reached the man, and broke
his neck while it buried its teeth in his throat. It had not eaten the
body, but apparently had romped and gambolled round it in uncouth,
ferocious glee, occasionally rolling over and over it; and had then
fled back into the soundless depths of the woods.

Bauman, utterly unnerved, and believing that the creature with which
he had to deal was something either half human or half devil, some
great goblin-beast, abandoned everything but his rifle and struck off
at speed down the pass, not halting until he reached the beaver
meadows where the hobbled ponies were still grazing. Mounting, he rode
onwards through the night, until far beyond the reach of pursuit.





End of Project Gutenberg Etext of Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches

