gent-smelling fur on the rubbed and clawed bark of a tree,
memory would rush back upon him fiercely. His ears would flatten
down, his eyes would gleam green, his tail would twitch, and crouching
to earth he would glare into every near-by thicket for a sight of his
mortal foe. He had not yet learned to discriminate perfectly between
an old scent and a new.

About this time a hunter from the East, who had his camp a little
farther down the valley, was climbing White Face on the trail of a
large grizzly. He was lithe of frame, with a lean, dark, eager face,
and he followed the perilous trail with a lack of prudence which
showed a very inadequate appreciation of grizzlies. The trail ran
along a narrow ledge cresting an abrupt but bushy steep. At the foot
of the steep, crouched along a massive branch and watching for game of
some sort to pass by, lay the big puma. Attracted by a noise above his
head he glanced up, and saw the hunter. It was certainly not Tomaso,
but it looked like him; and the puma's piercing eyes grew almost
benevolent. He had no ill-feeling to any man but the Swede.

Other ears than those of the puma had heard the unwary hunter's
footsteps. The grizzly had caught them and stopped to listen. Yes, he
was being followed. In a rage he wheeled about and ran back
noiselessly to see who it was that could dare such presumption.
Turning a shoulder of rock, he came face to face with the hunter, and
at once, with a deep, throaty grunt, he charged.

The hunter had not even time to get his heavy rifle to his shoulder.
He fired once, point blank, from the hip. The shot took effect
somewhere, but in no vital spot evidently, for it failed to check,
even for one second, that terrific charge. To meet the charge was to
be blasted out of being instantly. There was but one way open. The
hunter sprang straight out from the ledge with a lightning vision of
thick, soft-looking bushes far below him. The slope was steep, but by
no means perpendicular, and he struck in a thicket which broke the
full shock of the fall. His rifle flew far out of his hands. He
rebounded, clutching at the bushes; but he could not check himself.
Rolling over and over, his eyes and mouth choked with dust and leaves,
he bumped on down the slope, and brought up at last, dazed but
conscious, in a swampy hole under the roots of a huge over-leaning
tree.

[Illustration: "Almost over his head, on a limb not six feet distant,
crouched, ready to spring, the