s he held himself it appeared certain he did not
want to be left behind.

We rode all day along the old Crook road where the year before we had
encountered so many obstacles. I remembered most of the road, but how
strange it seemed to me, and what a proof of my mental condition on that
memorable trip, that I did not remember all. Usually forest or desert
ground I have traveled over I never forget. This ride, in the middle of
October, when all the colors of autumn vied with the sunlight to make
the forest a region of golden enchantment, was one of particular delight
to me. I had begun to work and wear out the pain in my back. Every night
I had suffered a little less and slept a little better, and every
morning I had less and less of a struggle to get up and straighten out.
Many a groan had I smothered. But now, when I got warmed up from riding
or walking or sawing wood, the pain left me altogether and I forgot it.
I had given myself heroic treatment, but my reward was in sight. My
theory that the outdoor life would cure almost any ill of body or mind
seemed to have earned another proof added to the long list.

At sunset we had covered about sixteen miles of rough road, and had
arrived at a point where we were to turn away from the rim, down into a
canyon named Barber Shop Canyon, where we were to camp.

[Illustration: Z.G.'S CINNAMON BEAR]

[Illustration: R.C.'S BIG BROWN BEAR]

Before turning aside I rode out to the rim for a look down at the
section of country we were to hunt. What a pleasure to recognize the
point from which Romer-boy had seen his first wild bear! It was a
wonderful section of rim-rock country. I appeared to be at the extreme
point of a vast ten-league promontory, rising high over the basin, where
the rim was cut into canyons as thick as teeth of a saw. They were
notched and v-shaped. Craggy russet-lichened cliffs, yellow and
gold-stained rocks, old crumbling ruins of pinnacles crowned by pine
thickets, ravines and gullies and canyons, choked with trees and brush
all green-gold, purple-red, scarlet-fire--these indeed were the heights
and depths, the wild, lonely ruggedness, the color and beauty of
Arizona land. There were long, steep slopes of oak thickets, where the
bears lived, long gray slides of weathered rocks, long slanting ridges
of pine, descending for miles out and down into the green basin, yet
always seeming to stand high above that rolling wilderness. The sun
stood crossed by thin clo