would invade a camp with leisurely indifference, he would not enter
the stout oak-log traps constructed for his capture; and finally, that
it would be suicide to meet him on the trail with anything less
efficient than a Gatling gun.

Old Juan, the vaquero, who lived in a cabin on the flat below the
alkaline pool called Castac Lake, was filled with a fear of Pinto that
was akin to superstition. He told how the bear had followed him home
and besieged him all night in the cabin, and he would walk five miles
to catch a horse to ride two miles in the hills. To him old Pinto was
"mucho diablo," and a shivering terror made his eyes roll and his voice
break in trembling whispers when he talked of the bear while riding
along the cattle trails.

Once upon a time an ambitious sportsman of San Francisco, who wanted to
kill something bigger than a duck and more ferocious than a jackrabbit,
read about Pinto and persuaded himself that he was bear-hunter enough
to tackle the old fellow. He went to Fort Tejon, hired a guide and
made an expedition to the Castac. The guide took the hunter to
Spike-buck Spring, which is at the head of a ravine under the limestone
ridge, and showed to him the footprints of a big bear in the mud and
along the bear trail that crosses the spring. One glance at the track
of Pinto's foot was sufficient to dispel all the dime-novel day dreams
of the sportsman and start a readjustment of his plan of campaign.
After gazing at that foot-print, the slaying of a Grizzly by "one
well-directed shot" from the "unerring rifle" was a feat that lost its
beautiful simplicity and assumed heroic proportions. The man from San
Francisco had intended to find the bear's trail, follow it on foot,
overtake or meet the Grizzly and kill him in his tracks, after the
manner of the intrepid hunters that he had read about, but he sat down
on a log and debated the matter with the guide. That old-timer would
not volunteer advice, but when it was asked he gave it, and he told the
man from San Francisco that if he wanted to tackle a Grizzly all by his
lonely self, his best plan would be to stake out a calf, climb a tree
and wait for the bear to come along in the night.

So the man built a platform in the tree, about ten feet from the
ground, staked out a calf, climbed up to the platform and waited. The
bear came along and killed the calf, and the man in the tree saw the
lethal blow, heard the bones crack and changed his plan again.