ough the brush, I touched my companion gently to attract
his attention. He had fallen into a doze, and, awakening with a start
at my touch he dropped his shotgun from the platform. The stock was
broken, one of the hammers struck upon a log and a load of buckshot
went whistling through the leaves of our tree. Then we went home. It
was an accident; the man meant well, and he was very sorry, and I held
my tongue.

The next afternoon I was one of a small party on a drive over the roads
at the lower end of the valley, and of course had no gun, A bear broke
out of the brush, crossed the road fifty yards ahead of the team, and
went down to the meadow. It was not expedient to say all that occurred
to me before comparative strangers; so I jumped from the buckboard,
picked up a cudgel and lit out after that bear on a lope. He had a
good start and when he discovered that he was being followed he clawed
dirt to increase his lead and beat me out to the bank of the Merced.
For a moment he hesitated about going into the swift water, but he
decided that he would rather swim than listen to offensive
personalities, and over the bank he plunged.

It was a relief to sit there, watching him swim the rapids, and feel
free to say all the things I hadn't said to the man who dropped the
gun, with a few general observations on the perversity of bears and
bear-hunters' luck thrown in for good measure.

Bears were all over the place that year. They blundered into the roads
at night and scared teams, broke into the cabin in Mariposa Grove and
ate up all the grub and a sack of sugar pine seed worth a dollar a
pound, and Captain Wood and I never got a shot in three weeks' of
diligent hunting. The only man who had any luck was Lieutenant Davis;
that is, not counting Private McNamara, who had bigger luck than a man
who wounds a big Grizzly and runs really has coming to him. McNamara's
luck will be seen later.

Davis killed two bears on the Perigord Meadows and one on Rush Creek,
and wounded a large Grizzly in Devil's Gulch. It was a lucky shot that
he made in the dark on Rush Creek. A troop horse had died about a
quarter of a mile below the cavalry camp, on the edge of the National
Park, and the men had seen bear tracks around the carcass. Davis and
an Illinois preacher, who was roughing it for his health with the
troopers, took their blankets one night and camped about thirty yards
from the dead horse to await the coming of the bear.