good horses and
burros to let to bear hunters. He, Old Bill, had killed many bears in
the canyon, but had left enough to provide entertainment for other
hunters. His last bear killing was heaps of fun. He ran across three
in a bunch, shot one, drowned another in the creek, and jumped upon the
third, and "just stomped him to death." As for the man up the creek,
who pretended to have found a den of bears, he had been telling that
story for so many years that he probably believed it, but nobody else
did. The man up the creek had the nerve to pretend that his favorite
pastime was fighting Grizzlies with a butcher knife, and anybody
acquainted with bears ought to size up that sort of a man easy enough,
said Old Bill.

The man up the creek, the original locator of the denful of Grizzlies,
had his opinion of Old Bill as a slayer of bears. It was notorious in
the canyon that the only bear Old Bill ever saw was a fifty-pound cub
that stole a string of trout from under Bill's nose, waded the creek
and went away while Old Bill was throwing his gun into the brush and
hitching frantically along a fallen spruce under the impression that he
was climbing a tree. As for himself, he was getting too old and
rheumatic to hunt, but he had had a little sport with bears in his
time. He recalled with especial glee a little incident of ten or a
dozen years ago. He had been over on the Iron Fork hunting for a stray
mule, and he was coming back through the canyon after dark. It was
darker than a stack of black cats in the canyon, and when he bumped up
against a bear in the trail he couldn't see to get in his favorite
knife play--a slash to the left and a back-handed cut to the right,
severing the tendons of both front paws--and so he made a lunge for
general results, and then shinned up a sycamore tree. To his great
surprise he heard the bear scrambling up the tree behind him, and he
crawled around to the other side of the trunk and straddled a big
branch in the fork, where he could get a firm seat and have the free
use of his right arm. He could just make out the dark bulk of the bear
as the beast crawled clumsily up the slanting trunk in front of him,
and as the bear's left arm came around and clasped the trunk, he
chopped at it with his heavy knife. The bear roared with pain.
Instantly he lunged furiously at the bear's body just under the arm
pit, driving the knife to the hilt two or three times, and with a moan
the beast let go