er baron, and has sublime confidence in his own
strength, courage and agility. He has killed bulls in single combat,
evaded the charge of the cow whose calf he has caught, stampeded sheep
and their herders. He is almost exclusively carnivorous and
consequently fierce. Such a bear yields the trail to nothing that
lives. That is why Old Pinto was a bad bear.

So long as Pinto remained in his dominions and confined his maraudings
to the cattle ranges, he was reasonably safe from the hunters and
perfectly safe from the settler and his strychnine bottle, but for some
reasons of his own he changed his habits and his diet and strayed over
to San Emigdio for mutton. Perhaps, as he advanced in years, the bear
found it more difficult to catch cattle, and having discovered a band
of sheep and found it not only easy to kill what he needed, but great
fun to charge about in the band and slay right and left in pure wanton
ferocity, he took up the trade of sheep butcher. For two or three
years he followed the flocks in their summer grazing over the vast,
spraddling mesas of Pine Mountain, and made a general nuisance of
himself in the camps. There have been other bears on Pine Mountain,
and the San Emigdio flocks have been harassed there regularly, but no
such bold marauder as Old Pinto ever struck the range. Other bears
made their forays in the night and hid in the ravines during the day,
but Pinto strolled into the camps at all hours, charged the flocks when
they were grazing and stampeded Haggin and Carr's merinos all over the
mountains.

The herders, mostly Mexicans, Basques and Portuguese, found it
heart-breaking to gather the sheep after Pinto had scattered them, and
moreover they were mortally afraid of the big Grizzly and took to
roosting on platforms in the trees instead of sleeping in their tents
at night. Worse than all else, the bear killed their dogs. The men
were instructed by the boss of the camp to let the bear alone and keep
out of his way, as they were hired to herd sheep and not to fight
bears, but the dogs could not be made to understand such instructions
and persisted in trying to protect their woolly wards.

The owners were accustomed to losing a few hundred sheep on Pine
Mountain every summer, and figured the loss in the fixed charges, but
when Pinto joined the ursine band that followed the flocks for a
living, the loss became serious and worried the majordomo at the home
camp. So another reward was