f the thicket to await developments,
thereby involving themselves in difficulties, but these old
professionals promptly shinned up tall trees when the dogs struck the
trail. The dogs roused the bear in less than two minutes, and there
was tumult in the scrub oak. Whenever the men in the trees caught a
glimpse of the Grizzly they fired at him, and the thud of a bullet
usually was followed by yells and fierce growlings, for the hear is a
natural sort of a beast and always bawls when he is hurt very badly.
There is no affectation about a Grizzly, and he never represses the
instinctive expression of his feelings. Probably that is why Bret
Harte calls him "coward of heroic size," but Bret never was very
intimately acquainted with a marauding old ruffian of the range.

The hunters in the trees made body shots mostly. Twice during the
imbroglio in the brush the bear sat up and exposed his head and the men
fired at it, but as he kept wrangling with the dogs, they thought they
missed. This is the strange part of the story, for some of the bullets
passed through the bear's head and did not knock him out. One
Winchester bullet entered an eye-socket and traversed the skull
diagonally, passing through the forward part of the brain. A Grizzly's
brain-pan is long and narrow, and a bullet entering the eye from
directly in front will not touch it. Wherefore it is not good policy
to shoot at the eye of a charging Grizzly. Usually it is equally
futile to attempt to reach his brain with a shot between the eyes,
unless the head be in such a position that the bullet will strike the
skull at a right angle, for the bone protecting the brain in front is
from two and a half to three inches thick, and will turn the ordinary
soft bullet. One of the men did get a square shot from his perch at
Pinto's forehead, and the 45-70-450 bullet smashed his skull.

The shot that ended the row struck at the "butt" of the Grizzly's ear
and passed through the base of the brain, snuffing out the light of his
marvelous vitality like a candle.

Then the hunters came down from their roosts, cut their way into the
thicket and examined the dead giant. Counting the two shots fired the
night before, one of which had nearly destroyed a lung, there were
eleven bullet holes in the bear, and his skull was so shattered that
the head could not be saved for mounting. Only two or three bullets
bad lodged in the body, the others having passed through, making large,