reast. "Fine bear. About four hundred pounds. Maybe not so
heavy. But he'll take some packin' up to the rim!"

Then I became aware of the other men. Takahashi had arrived on the
scene first, finding the bear dead. Edd came next, and after him Pyle.

I sat down for a much needed rest. Copple interested himself in
examining the bear, finding that my first shot had hit him in the flank,
and my second had gone through the middle of his body. Next Copple
amused himself by taking pictures of bear and hounds. Old Dan came to me
and lay beside me, and looked as if to say: "Well, we got him!"

Yells from both sides of the canyon were answered by Edd. R.C. was
rolling the rocks on his side at a great rate. But Nielsen on the other
side beat him to us. The Norwegian crashed the brush, sent the
avalanches roaring, and eventually reached us, all dirty, ragged,
bloody, with fire in his eye. He had come all the way from the rim in
short order. What a performance that must have been! He said he thought
he might be needed. R.C. guided by Edd's yells, came cracking the brush
down to us. Pale he was and wet with sweat, and there were black brush
marks across his face. His eyes were keen and sharp. He had started down
for the same reason as Nielsen's. But he had to descend a slope so steep
that he had to hold on to keep from sliding down. And he had jumped a
big bear out of a bed of leaves. The bed was still warm. R.C. said he
had smelled bear, and that his toboggan slide down that slope, with
bears all around for all he knew, had started the cold sweat on him.

Presently George Haught joined us, having come down the bed of the
canyon.

"We knew you'd got a bear," said George. "Father heard the first two
bullets hit meat. An' I heard him rollin' down the slope."

"Well!" exclaimed R.C. "That's what made those first two shots sound so
strange to me. Different from the last two. Sounded like soft dead pats!
And it was lead hitting flesh. I heard it half a mile away!"

This matter of the sound of bullets hitting flesh and being heard at a
great distance seemed to me the most remarkable feature of our hunt.
Later I asked Haught. He said he heard my first two bullets strike and
believed from the peculiar sound that I had my bear. And his stand was
fully a mile away. But the morning was unusually still and sound carried
far.

The men hung my bear from the forks of a maple. Then they decided to
give us time to climb up to our stands befor