keen lookout for a bear. Every stone and
tree trunk resembled a bear. I decided if I met a grizzly that I would
not annoy him on that slope. I would say: "Nice bear, I won't hurt you!"
Still the situation had some kind of charm. But to claim I was not
frightened would not be strictly truthful. I slid over the trail of that
bear into the trail of another one, and under the last big spruce on
that part of the slope I found a hollow nest of pine needles and leaves,
and if that bed was not still warm then my imagination lent considerable
to the moment.

Beyond this began the edge of the thicket. It was small pine at first,
so close together that I had to squeeze through, and as dark as
twilight. The ground was a slant of brown pine needles, so slippery,
that if I could not have held on to trees and branches I never would
have kept my feet. In this dark strip I had more than apprehensions.
What a comfortable place to encounter an outraged or wounded grizzly
bear! The manzanita thicket was preferable. But as Providence would have
it I did not encounter one.

Soon I worked or wormed out of the pines into the thicket of scrub oaks,
maples and aspens. The change was welcome. Not only did the slope
lengthen out, but the light changed from gloom to gold. There was half a
foot of scarlet, gold, bronze, red and purple leaves on the ground, and
every step I made I kicked acorns about to rustle and roll. Bear sign
was everywhere, tracks and trails and beds and scratches. I kept going
down, and the farther down I got the lighter it grew, and more
approaching a level. One glade was strangely luminous and beautiful with
a blending of gold and purple light made by the sun shining through the
leaves overhead down upon the carpet of leaves on the ground. Then I
came into a glade that reminded me of Kipling's moonlight dance of the
wild elephants. Here the leaves and fern were rolled and matted flat,
smooth as if done by a huge roller. Bears and bears had lolled and slept
and played there. A little below this glade was a place, shady and cool,
where a seep of water came from under a bank. It looked like a herd of
cattle had stamped the earth, only the tracks were bear tracks. Little
ones no longer than a child's hand, and larger, up to huge tracks a foot
long and almost as wide. Many were old, but some were fresh. This little
spot smelled of bear so strongly that it reminded me of the bear pen in
the Bronx Park Zoological Garden. I had bee