em and thus permit the hunter to creep upon him.
But the minute he realizes, as he speedily does, that the man is his
real foe, he pays no further heed whatever to the little dogs, who can
then neither bring him to bay nor hinder his flight. Ordinary hounds, of
the kinds used in the south for fox, deer, wild-cat, and black bear, are
but little better. I have known one or two men who at different times
tried to hunt the grisly with a pack of hounds and fice-dogs wonted to
the chase of the black bear, but they never met with success. This
was probably largely owing to the nature of the country in which they
hunted, a vast tangled mass of forest and craggy mountain; but it was
also due to the utter inability of the dogs to stop the quarry from
breaking bay when it wished. Several times a grisly was bayed, but
always in some inaccessible spot which it took hard climbing to reach,
and the dogs were never able to hold the beast until the hunters came
up.

Still a well-trained pack of large hounds which were both bold and
cunning could doubtless bay even a grisly. Such dogs are the big
half-breed hounds sometimes used in the Alleghanies of West Virginia,
which are trained not merely to nip a bear, but to grip him by the hock
as he runs and either throw him or twirl him round. A grisly could not
disregard a wary and powerful hound capable of performing this trick,
even though he paid small heed to mere barking and occasional nipping.
Nor do I doubt that it would be possible to get together a pack of many
large, fierce dogs, trained to dash straight at the head and hold on
like a vise, which could fairly master a grisly and, though unable, of
course, to kill him, would worry him breathless and hold him down so
that he could be slain with ease. There have been instances in
which five or six of the big so-called blood-hounds of the southern
States--not pure blood-hounds at all, but huge, fierce, ban-dogs, with
a cross of the ferocious Cuban blood-hound, to give them good scenting
powers--have by themselves mastered the cougar and the black bear. Such
instances occurred in the hunting history of my own forefathers on my
mother's side, who during the last half of the eighteenth, and the first
half of the present, century lived in Georgia and over the border in
what are now Alabama and Florida. These big dogs can only overcome such
foes by rushing in in a body and grappling all together; if they hang
back, lunging and snapping, a cou