waiting for him to show sufficiently for a chance. Then we
took a shot at about four hundred yards, and hit him somewhere so he
angled down the hill furiously. We left the Tenderfoot to watch that
he did not come out of the big thicket of the river bottom where last
we had seen him, while we scrambled upstream nearly a mile looking for
a way across. Then we trailed him by the blood, each step one of
suspense, until we fairly had to crawl in after him; and shot him five
times more, three in the head, before he gave up not six feet from us;
and shouted gloriously and skinned that bear. But the meat was badly
bloodshot, for there were three bullets in the head, two in the chest
and shoulders, one through the paunch, and one in the hind quarters.

Since we were much in want of meat, this grieved us. But that noon
while we ate, the horses ran down toward us, and wheeled, as though in
cavalry formation, looking toward the hill and snorting. So I put down
my tin plate gently, and took up my rifle, and without rising shot that
bear through the back of the neck. We took his skin, and also his hind
quarters, and went on.

By the third day from Granite Basin we reached the end of the long
narrow canon with the high cliffs and the dark pine-trees and the very
blue sky. Therefore we turned sharp to the left and climbed laboriously
until we had come up into the land of big boulders, strange spare
twisted little trees, and the singing of the great wind.

The country here was mainly of granite. It out-cropped in dikes, it
slid down the slopes in aprons, it strewed the prospect in boulders and
blocks, it seamed the hollows with knife-ridges. Soil gave the
impression of having been laid on top; you divined the granite beneath
it, and not so very far beneath it, either. A fine hair-grass grew
close to this soil, as though to produce as many blades as possible in
the limited area.

But strangest of all were the little thick twisted trees with the rich
shaded umber color of their trunks. They occurred rarely, but still in
sufficient regularity to lend the impression of a scattered
grove-cohesiveness. Their limbs were sturdy and reaching fantastically.
On each trunk the colors ran in streaks, patches, and gradations from a
sulphur yellow, through browns and red-orange, to a rich red-umber.
They were like the earth-dwarfs of German legend, come out to view the
roof of their workshop in the interior of the hill; or, more subtly,