This story, Ghost-Town Grizzly, appeared in the February 1949 issue of Outdoor Life.
We don’t often have a grizzly in New Mexico. One that I remember was in the Jemez Mountains in 1938. The next was last season. This silvertip not only was unexpected in our mountains — he actually lived in a town.
Don’t picture this monarch in a zoo or a circus, for he was as wild as they come, and when he came to bay he fought with all the snarling fury of a demon of hell. But he did live in a town.
Cass Goodner and I had visited the ghost town of Albemarle several times before. In the days of Teddy Roosevelt, some 2,000 miners had made this rugged canyon reverberate as they followed the veins of silver that ran through the mountainside. Prospect holes and shaft openings scarred the rough canyon walls at all levels. Below, the hardy miners had built a town.
Of course, there was little left of the place that day when Cass and I sat our horses for a moment and looked down into Albemarle. Most of the houses along the main street in the bottom of the canyon had collapsed long ago and slithered into nondescript piles of weathered boards in the floor of the wash. The false front of a saloon still stood, with an alder tree growing through its warped timbers.
We jogged our horses up what had been the main street, pausing occasionally to stoop from the saddle and peer into the darkened window of some miner’s cabin. The hoofs of our. mounts clinked against the litter of bottles, purpled into “desert glass” since forgotten miners had thrown them into the streets of Albemarle. Everywhere there was the litter of dirty men an’d vanished hopes.
At the upper end of the street we stopped for a moment to look down into a rough pit that had formed part of the foundation of the cyanide mill. “Look!” Cass said, pointing past me toward the edge of the pit. “Some horse has skidded down that bank yonder.” Wild horses were rare in this part of the Jemez, but a line of large, round prints marked the place where a heavy animal had walked down the edge of the pit and into a tangle of alders.
We had ridden only a few yards farther when we saw the tracks again, this time in front of a tumble-down wooden building. Cass was out of the saddle as though a hornet had stung him. There was something queer about those tracks. Certainly no wild horse had made the round imprints that led through the sagging door of that old building. Cass grinned up at me as I slid to the ground beside him. He parted a few blades of grass with his hand so we could see the track better.
Long ago some mountain torrent had washed down the steep canyon walls and burst through the back of this old building, carrying a flood of sand and mud which had covered the floor and flowed out in a fan through the old doorway where we stood. Deep in this soft stuff was the print of a bear’s paw — and he was a monster. “He’d weigh 600 or 700 pounds,” Cass was saying, as he outlined with his finger the mark of the front paw. “And look at those claw marks out in front of the toes!” There were indeed the marks of long, arched claws that made a deep imprint in front of each flattened toe.
“Cass, it’s a grizzly!” I said with rising excitement as I stepped past him inside the old building.
“Can’t be,” he commented with little conviction. “We haven’t had a grizzly in the Jemez Mountains for years.” Both of us knew, however, that black bears do not show claw marks in front of their toes, and never attain this size
As we explored the inside of the old mining building, Cass insisted repeatedly that it couldn’t be a grizzly. I noticed, however, that he had slipped his short-barreled .30/30 from the scabbard beneath his saddle fender and now used the gun barrel to point at the tracks or to gesticulate in defense of his weak arguments. After my first burst of enthusiasm, I too had become dubious. Perhaps it was some colossal black bear who hadn’t trimmed his toenails.
While our horses grazed the sparse grass of the street, Cass and I found the tracks of the huge bear in several places. The lumbering animal had wandered aimlessly around the old mill and through several of the old mining shacks. In one place he had torn open a rotten timber with one sweep of a mighty paw and had licked the ants and bugs from the inside. At another spot he had garnered several mouthfuls of lush grass that grew in a dampish corner among the fallen houses. Evidently the ghost town of Albemarle was not quite uninhabited.
Cass Goodner and I were looking for mountain lions when we found traces of the inhabitant of Albemarle. With the lions we had had no luck, but we had found a good place to come for dusky black-bear sign — both of which promised good hunting with a hound pack when the season rolled around.
In the short weeks that passed before September 15, we talked much of the gigantic bear tracks with the claw marks. At a distance, however, and away from the bewitching atmosphere of the deserted town, the thought of a grizzly seemed fantastic, and we became as incredulous as the friends to whom we told the story.
It was with mixed feelings that we led our dog pack, in the briskness of a September morning, up over the ridge out of Bland Canyon, heading for Albemarle. We followed an old mining road that wound precariously up the face of the cliff. Now it was overgrown and broken away in places, all but impassable even to horses.
A Dependable Lot of Hounds
Cass’s hunting hounds were a tried and dependable lot. The lead dog, Drive, had more than eighty mountain lions and bears to his credit. Sissy, a red bitch, was a veteran of many a chase. Pancho, a heavy-bodied Airedale, whimpered and rubbed against my leg with the expectation of excitement to come. None of us realized just what that excitement was to be.
A two-hour ride up over the divide would take us to the old ghost town, where our dogs could pick up the track. We had not ridden for half an hour before there was a cry ahead. Drive, the tan-and-white veteran with the vacuumcleaner nose, had caught a scent beneath a clump of oaks. From the tone of his long-drawn bark, it must be bear. Even as we listened, Sissy gave tongue, then some of the younger dogs joined in. The track was burning fresh.
We urged our sweating horses into a hacking gallop up the steep grade. Even with a flapping of legs and the application of the end of the bridle reins, the horses’ pace seemed inadequate. Above the roar of the dogs I could hear the labored breathing of my own animal as he sturdily breasted the slope to get us to the dogs in time.
Cass was ahead as we topped out on the ridge above Bland Canyon. The dogs, too, sounded far away as though they had already dropped into Coya Canyon on the far side. Cass was sitting his heaving horse on the rim of the canyon, looking down at some sprays of fresh dirt on the ground below him. I trotted my horse alongside.
“It’s a black bear. He was down to water this morning at Bland Creek, and we must have bumped right into him. Listen to that.” Cass cocked his head to one side, like a pheasant looking at a hawk.
The roaring cry of the dogs had taken on an insistent note. I could distinguish the voice of old Drive, barking in ecstatic yelps. From the sound I knew that the dogs were looking up at the bear, which had climbed a tree. There was little cause for hurry. The lip of the canyon gave way to a gently dropping swale of lush grass, aspens, and large oak trees.
As we rode more slowly, we looked around us and saw that the oaks had been freshly torn and broken, as though by a high wind. A few yards farther, the devastation increased. Whole trees, the size of a man’s leg, had been bent and splintered to the ground. Limbs and twigs dangled by threads of bark, or were scattered underneath, completeIv broken away. Most of the leaves of these broken oaks were hardly wilted, though the night had been frosty. This was fresh work, and the devastation had been caused by no wind or hail.
We did not need to look at the bear sign which was everywhere beneath the oaks, to tell who were the authors of this impressive business. Acorns had been scarce in the Jemez that year, and it looked as though every bear in the whole mountain range had been feeding on Bland Ridge. With their heavy bodies, the rascals had ridden down the oak trees to crop the luscious acorns from the tree tips. These bears were laying up fat for their winter’s hibernation, and there must have been a dozen or so of them.
We could see the bear now, several limbs up in a big Douglas fir. The beast was as black as the ace of spades, and of no great size. It looked like a female as we rode beneath the tree, and she panted and looked down at us with her little eyes. A red tongue flicked out and licked the brown-colored muzzle. We had a bear, and in the excitement of the moment we forgot that we had been heading for Albemarle Canyon beyond.
At this bear tree the story was the same as many times before. First a few pictures, then the crack of a single rifle shot echoed from the canyon walls in the morning stillness. The black bear slumped headfirst down and out of the tree and hit limply among the snarling dogs. It was just a quarter to 8 when Cass and I shook hands across the black carcass of the first victim.
With the bear draped across the saddle, we started down the mining road back into Bland Canyon and our camp. “Do you know anybody that wants to catch a quick bear?” Cass was saying. “I’ll bet there’s a dozen of them up there in that oak patch. Drive could catch one an hour.”
“I sure do,” I replied. “Bill Burk, my architect friend, is crazy to get a bear. Say,” I said with sudden inspiration, “there’s a Forest Service telephone at Bland. I can call him and get him out here before noon.” Of such sudden whims are later regrets born.
A Bear to Be Had for the Taking
The mining town of Bland was a ghost town too, but the venerable postmaster of the place had stayed on these many years to act as caretaker. His link with the outside world was the thin telephone wire that swung from tree to tree down the Bland Canyon road. Over this same wire that morning went my enthusiastic greeting to Bill Burle “Get in your jeep and get up here quick. We have a bear, guaranteed and all tied up.”
Cass and I breakfasted again at about the same time that most people in town were just getting up and going about their business. We already had one black bear stretched by the heels. in the shed across the road from the postmaster’s house.
My friend Burk arrived just before noon, and we started out immediately. Bill had brought along a friend, a fellow from the East who had never hunted a bear or anything else. It promised to be high excitement for both of them. Inasmuch as we were short of horses, the two newcomers rode the jeep up the side of the canyon, following the old mining road. Cass and I, on our horses, were hard put to it to keep up and reach the oak grove where the bears were feeding at the same time as the jeep.
I was just suffering my first misgivings of overenthusiasm when the dogs opened up in the brush at the side of the overgrown road. Again there was the barking of hound voices as they circled for the track. Then a concerted chorus of barks and yelps burst out as they found it together and started off through the trees. We were on a chase again, and this track was as hot as the last one.
It was an actual advantage to be on foot among those awful oaks. They leaned at all angles from the ground, and the ironlike twigs interlaced in a pattern which seemed to refuse admittance to man or horse. It was sheer punishment to gallop through that awful stuff. The dogs running underneath or a man crouching low could get through the oaks as easily as a bear. Cass and I fell far behind
Suddenly the noise of the dogs ahead died away as the chase dropped over the edge of a rocky rim into Coya Canyon. But this bruin had laid up too much of his winter’s fat already. The chase was short and furious. As the dogs dropped down the slopes of the canyon, the bear was in sight and they closed on him rapidly., When we slipped from our saddles to look down that slope, the chase was done. We could see the dark form of the bear in a large tree that jutted from a rock slide. The dogs danced excitedly beneath, and their howls and yelps reverberated up to us from the volcanic pinnacles that rose from the slope. Cass grinned at Bill Burk in an offhand manner; he didn’t really need to add, “There’s your bear.”
We Forgot About the Grizzly
The four of us slipped and slid together down the almost straight slope toward the tree below. Bill kept his rifle ready in case the bear should jump and run. But the animal sat still, close to the bole of the tree, and dripped saliva from distended jaws. This was a brownish-colored bear, with a wash of yellow across the shoulders — a really beautiful skin. It was no monster; I doubt if it weighed 300 pounds, although it was full grown.
Even at the crack of Bill’s long-barreled rifle, I thought of the big bear of Albemarle ghost town — the one we had really come to get. From where we held ourselves with difficulty on the steep slope, I could see the mouth of Albemarle Canyon and almost imagine that I could make out in the hazy distance some of the weathered buildings of the old town. But Bill Burk’s yellow bear tumbled limp and lifeless almost at my feet and for the next few minutes there was excited talk and the cleaning of the animal to offer distraction. At 1:30 we had already carried the yellow bear to the bottom of the canyon and Cass had gone for the horses.
I walked ahead and Drive snuffled the bushes in a satisfied manner a few yards to one side. All the other dogs had gone back with Cass to the horses on the top of the ridge. Two bears in one day wasn’t a record, but it would do.
Bill Burk’s Eastern friend accompanied me, but he walked over the rough ground on the side of the canyon with considerable difficulty. He was a well-built fellow with the shoulders of a fullback and the legs of a soccer player. But the breath whistled through his distended lips with an asthmatic vibration. We had not had much of a chase after the yellow bear. Perhaps jt was the excitement that made the man puff so. I motioned to him to keep up and slowed my own pace even more. It would not do to lose this stranger in those rough canyons.
After Cass and Bill had lugged the beautiful yellow bear back to the jeep, Cass was to rejoin me with the horses to follow out our original plan. Meanwhile the Easterner and I would drop down the slope of Coya Canyon and . head for Albemarle on foot. We didn’t get far.
Drive displayed the same self-satisfied air as myself. He circled lazily through the sparse vegetation, momentarily pricking up his drooping ears as a herd of big, gray mule deer bounded off among the frostbitten oaks with a crashing of dead limbs. Suddenly he thrust his nose into the air and waved it against the gentle breeze that came up the canyon wall. When this veteran of a hundred hunts handled his nostrils in that manner it meant game.
Usually when a hunting dog smells the wind it means he has scented a kill. Sometimes a less reliable dog will smell in this manner the hot body scent of venison as a trembling doe crouches close in the brush upwind. Could Drive be scenting the forbidden smell of the deer we had just seen? This valuable dog had been deerbroken since he was a puppy, but I would keep close to the old rascal just the same.
I turned once and flailed my arm to get the Easterner up abreast of me in case we had to turn quickly in a new direction. Drive was trotting ahead with his nose still in the air as though that sensitive organ were leading him on an invisible string directly to the origin of some exciting smell. The old hound’s tail had stiffened in an upward curve and he had the attitude of a dog pointing at something we could not see. Unconsciously I broke into a trot and then a dead run over the rough ground. But without effort Drive pulled ahead and disappeared in the mountain-mahogany brush of a small ravine on the side of the canyon.
For a moment I stopped, panting, and looked around for Talbot, my Eastern friend. Cass would never forgive me 1f I lost this new addition to our hunting party. Turning, I retraced my steps to the point of a small rise. There was Talbot, across the slope below me, practically where I had seen him last, and . he was sitting down. I cupped my hands for a mighty shout that would echo on those Eastern ears like a clap of New Jersey thunder. But the noise never came.
A Fight Was On in the Ravine
Even as I filled my lungs for an angry bellow, there was another noise instead. It was a snarl and a bark all blended together. The savageness of the noise whirled me half around. Drive had attacked something in that brushy ravine — or something had attacked him. There was a furious swirl of vicious sound. I thought I could distinguish the mouthed growls of some other animal. The yelps and shrieks of Drive seemed smothered as though his mouth was full of fur.
I waved the rifle in a wide arc toward my fellow hunter on the rock below and yelled, with all the force I could muster, the two words “Keep up!” then whirled to join the excitement in the little ravine.
The noise of the fighting was moving upward, but the combatants were still hidden from view. I galloped through branches with rifle and gloved hand. By sheer weight and desperation I forced my way through the thickets and down the slope toward the roar of sound of the battling animals. But it was no use.
The noise moved away and above me. As I stopped for a second to spit out some broken twigs and gulp in a lungful of unadulterated air, I could hear Drive’s bark above me. It was the long, rolling howl of a hound hot on the trail. Whatever the dog’s antagonist was, it was running now and Drive was close behind. If I was ever to be in any part of this chase I would have to mount that awful slope — and fast. But my Eastern friend? After all, if we did catch another bear, this was the guy who was supposed to shoot it. I had already killed one. “Well,” I thought, “I must get the guy up here, even if I have to carry him on my back.”
The Easterner Was Pooped
It was only a few hundred yards back to where I found him, but every one was a yard in the wrong direction. The poor fell ow was panting like a bereaved porpoise and holding both hands over his heart. For the first time I had a touch of apprehension.
“Something wrong?” I asked.
“No. Going fine,” he wheezed. He had spunk, that one. I looked back up the slope toward the now faint sound of Drive’s insistent barking. At the same time I had a rare inspiration. “Do you see that ridge over there, Talbot?” I asked, pointing toward a spur which descended the canyon perhaps a mile distant. “The main trail into Albemarle goes down that ridge. Cass is coming down there with the horses. Meet him, then find me. I’ll see what Drive is after.”
The poor fellow said “Glug” or something equally unintelligible, which I did not stop to hear. I was already slanting toward those very distant dog sounds.
About halfway up, I crossed the trail of Drive and his adversary. The prints in the rock and dirt looked like those of a horse or of an animal just as heavy. “Could it be?” I asked myself. No, we were three or four miles from Albemarle. It must be just another black bear. This country was crawling with them. But no! There were the claw marks out ahead of the toes. The outlines of the pads of those mighty feet told of a body far larger than that of any black that the Jemez supports.
My heart was already pounding from the awful climb, but there was a sudden thrill and exhilaration. Drive had jumped the monarch of Albemarle Canyon. That wily hound must have smelled the bear as he passed in, the brush. But Drive was alone. “‘That grizzly will kill him,” I said aloud, although there was no one to hear. I started up the slope again with redoubled energy.
The side of Coya Canyon was as rugged as any in this wild country. Patches of oak brush and mountain mahogany gave way to higher slopes so steep that there was no vegetation on them at all. I thought, too, as I clawed my way over one of these treacherous stretches, of what Cass had often said: “It all looks level to a bear.”
We climbed for half an hour, I think, although in the excitement I had scarcely noticed the passing of minutes. The fleeing bear apparently had come to the foot of one of those vertical lava cliffs that make the walls of these canyons straight-sided and impassable in places. It was not that this venerable bear was lost or confused. He seemed to know every gully, every crack in these interlaced canyons. But now he began to slant along the foot of the cliff and actually drop down toward the head of the canyon.
In a few more minutes I was parallel with the sound of Drive’s barking and then, by climbing on a jutting spur of rock at the foot of the lava escarpment, I was actually above the noise. As I raised my head level with the top, there was a burst of noise from the far side. Drive was fighting the bear again. The beast had come to bay.
I squirmed quickly through the resinous branches of a piñon and stuck my head over the edge of the lava spur. There they were, some 200 or 300 yards from me and slightly below. I could pick out easily the brown-and-white spotted body of Drive as he circled and darted at his antagonist.
In an almost level spot at the foot of the cliff was a gnarled fir that had found a pocket of rich volcanic soil in that austere place. Backed against its bole, and as dark as the bark itself, was a bear. Even at that distance I was struck by his size and ferocity, by the mighty sweeps of his paws as he lunged at the dancing dog before him. I could catch the flash of red from his jaws as he surged forward to try to sweep the wary hound into the arc of those gleaming teeth. Each time, as the dog snarled and jumped backward, the bear would rear again with his back against the tree trunk, swinging his mighty paws in front of him as though daring Drive to come within reach.
Fortunately our lead dog was imbued with a caution which is not always found in his kind. The hound leaped in with lightning swiftness to snap within inches of the soft belly of the bear at bay. As quickly he jumped away each time as the swinging sledge hammer of the bear’s paws swept down from above. Drive leaped to the right and left, trying to come in behind the bear’s quarter.
It Was the Ghost of Albemarle!
As the bear turned to meet these onslaughts from the side and back, he dropped to all fours for a moment and bit savagely at the dog that sought to close with him. I could see then that the sides of this monster were streaked with gray that showed lightly against the dark bark of the tree behind. The animal had a hump over his shoulders where the gray color showed the lightest, and its nose and snout were long and tapering.
“It’s a grizzly!” I said aloud, slapping my knee. “It’s a grizzly!” I raised the rifle and even half pulled back the hammer. When the bear again reared up against the bole of the tree I could hit him in the chest. But wait! The Easterner was to shoot this bear — and besides, at that distance with a short saddle gun, I might hit Drive just when he leaped in at the bear’s middle.
The Easterner! For a moment I had forgotten. I looked back for the first time since I had left my friend. “Frank! Frank!” drifted to me faintly from the depths of the canyon. It was Cass with the horses.
“Cass! Up here! Bring more dogs!” I heard in answer the exultant whoop below that meant that Cass had understood. I turned to watch the grizzly again. He was gone. There was only the dark trunk of a giant fir that jutted from the slope at the foot of the cliff.
Would We Lose Him?
Moments later I had a glimpse of the grizzly and the white dot that was Drive, close behind. The dark form of the bear was rounding the ridges and gullies, appearing and disappearing among the brush in the direction of the head of the canyon. We were going to lose him. Again I turned to bawl in the direction of the trail. “Cass, for God’s sake hurry!”
“Yeah!” he called, his voice now much nearer. I slid with reckless abandon off the side of the pinnacle on which I had been perched. To one side was a rockslide of the loose and treacherous stuff that we usually a voided. Down this declivity I climbed recklessly toward Cass and the several horses below. He undoubtedly thought I had a bad case of mountain madness or something equally serious. The horses started and reared as I slid toward them in a shower of rocks.
“Whoa! Hold on there!” Cass growled. Then turning to me: “You’ve got a bear treed, so what?”
“Yeah, we’ve got a bear, but we haven’t got him,” I explained in my most lucid manner. “It’s a grizzly, Cass! A great, big gray grizzly with a black belly! It’s the same one we saw the track of!” At the word “grizzly” Cass’s eyes gleamed. Then he too thought of the inevitable. “Where’s Talbot?”
“He’s on the Albemarle trail.” Cass slipped off his horse and flipped the reins in my face. “Take these horses and get Talbot. I’ll get the rest of the dogs up to help Drive.” And then he added: “Bring the horses along the Albemarle ridge. I’ll meet you someplace there.” He was gone, running along the canyon slope, urging the hounds ahead of him.
I slowly mounted one of the horses, cursing my luck. As an afterthought I turned and yelled after Cass: “If you get to him again, you’d better shoot him.” Then I turned to the uninspiring task of working the horses back along the lower slopes of the canyon to the Albemarle trail.
I raised my head to look again and a form hurtled end over end out of the welter of sounds and shapes ahead. It was a dog that crashed into the brush at one side; a dog’s body that had been tossed through the air as lightly as though it were a leaf on some willful air current.
My Eastern friend was sitting down when I found him. My explanations were short and to the point. “Get on a horse,” I said, flinging the reins at him. “We’ve got a grizzly chase up the canyon, and you’re supposed to shoot the bear.” I must not have sounded particularly inviting, but the word “grizzly” seemed to infuse the breath of life into him. Now that we were mounted, my only thought was to get back in the chase again. If we could work our way back toward the head of Coya Canyon we might yet be in on the excitement. I had hit upon the brilliant plan of putting Talbot on his horse ahead of me and leading Cass’s horse behind. Thus I could drag one and drive the other.
The bottom of Coya Canyon is not a race track. As a matter of fact, along this awesome stretch, a sober man would walk and lead a horse — or, better yet, not take a horse at all. But we trotted in places and in others urged our reluctant horses to a fast walk. We splashed through pools of water surrounded by almost impenetrable clumps of willows. We pranced and lunged over jumbled piles of boulders where any slight mischance would mean a broken horse’s leg and a nasty fall. But on we went. Talbot hung low to one side of the saddle, and I have no doubt he prayed. It was a terrifying ride, but I soon could hear the sound of dogs barking up the canyon.
We Might be in Time
I paused for a moment where the canyon made a bend. Talbot’s horse ahead stopped automatically when the urging from behind ceased. The muscles on the haunches of the poor animal quivered and jerked from the exertion. The roar of the dogs was quite close. I could distinguish the high, insistent yap of the female, Sissy. There was the harsh bark of the Airedale, Pancho, and others in the hound chorus. Drive had help. By the noise, the chase had turned back from the head of Coya Canyon and had crossed to the ridge toward Albemarle. We might yet be in time.
I abandoned Cass’s horse and concentrated on whipping the other ahead of me to a greater burst of speed, turning up a rocky spur toward Albemarle Ridge. By circling and lunging around the basaltic columns that jutted from this slope, we could work our way upward. In ten minutes, with the sides of the animals heaving between our legs, we were high on the Albemarle slope amidst a riot of rocks, rockslides, and scattered trees.
I slipped off my mount to stand a few yards away so that his labored breathing would not balk my attempts to hear. The sound of the dogs was remarkably close. They were barking wildly in a clump of trees in a level space on the side of the slope. I ran to the horse and jerked the rifle from the scabbard.
“Come on!” I yelled, looking at my companion for the first time in several minutes. He was hanging from the saddle like a bag of wet mush. I helped him to the ground where he lay flat, white as a sheet. Then I ran toward the sound of the fighting dogs.
There was a riot of noise, the yaps and yelps of a hound pack fighting an animal on the ground. I knew that animal; I had seen that gray-sided monster not so long ago.
The ground was rough and my legs were shaking from the exertion in the saddle. I stumbled once and tore open my knee on a wicked fragment of lava. I brushed the triangular piece of flesh back into place with my hand and went on. I could hear the high-pitched voice of Cass among the dogs, shouting encouragement. The welter of sound rose to a crescendo and by the mouthed noises I could tell that some of the dogs had their teeth full of grizzly meat and fur.
Even before I could see the bear, I could imagine the downward flail of those awful paws, ripping among the unwary dogs. There were young hounds in that pack, unaccustomed to the deadly action of an enraged bear. There would be dog blood as well as grizzly blood on this mountainside.
Now I could see the bear’s head. It was a gigantic head with pinpoint eyes of fiery red and a mouth that flashed open and shut with a snap of jaws which I could hear plainly many yards away. I could see, too, the top of Cass’s hat as he darted among the dogs. His head reached no higher on the bear than the middle of that mighty chest as the animal stood erect.
I raised my head to look again and a form hurtled end over end out of the welter of sounds and shapes ahead. It was a dog that crashed into the brush at one side; a dog’s body that had been tossed through the air as lightly as though it were a leaf on some willful air current. I broke through the last mountain-mahogany brush to a small hollow on the canyon slope where the bear had come to bay again against the trunk of a tree.
I could see the white form of Drive, dancing as before under the arcs of the grizzly’s striking paws. One of the younger dogs was stretched on the dirt in front, apparently lifeless. Pancho, the faithful Airedale, had disappeared. As I rushed up breathless, Cass closed in for the coup de grace. He pulled the dogs aside and yelled loudly at Drive, who was leaping in the face of the bear. He thrust his short-barreled rifle almost within reach of the long, curved claws that struck from both sides so desperately. If the grizzly lunged forward he would gather Cass in and bite his head to a bloody pulp.
No Time for a Jammed Gun!
The rifle seemed to recoil against Cass’s shoulder and I waited for the report, but there was none. Cass pumped frantically at the lever action and raised the rifle again. Again nothing happened. There were only the mouthed growls of the grizzly. Cass jerked open the lever again and an unused shell arcked out and fell in the leaves beside the bleeding hound. I rushed forward, extending my own rifle toward him. But the grizzly had enough. Seeing two humans closing in with the dogs around them, he dropped to one side. With a final sweep of his paw at Drive, he was off among the trees and rocks as swiftly as before.
Cass threw his useless rifle in the dirt and picked up the limp form of the hound. “Get Pancho,” he barked at me, jerking his thumb toward the bushes at one side. Sure enough, there was the faithful Airedale, the veteran of a dozen fights such as this. The dog lay still, with his tongue out in the dirt and a trickle of blood over his white teeth. I carefully brought him back and laid him with the other casualty. Pancho had a broad brass collar, heavy with pointed studs, such as bulldogs wear. This brass was crushed in a flattened oval around the dog’s neck, as though it had been pounded with a hammer.
First Aid for Pancho
“Cass! Pancho’s still breathing,” I said quickly as I knelt over the dog’s limp form. “Help me fix this collar.” The heavy. brass showed indentations where the bear’s teeth had closed upon the metal. Between the two of us we pulled most of the crimp out of the collar. Even as we did so, the dog sucked in gulps of air and his eyes flickered open. His bloody lips rolled back into a snarl, and I thought for a moment he was going to bite our hands. Then he recognized us and his warm tongue licked out over his blood-stained teeth. The other hound, too, was living, and apparently only stunned by a chance sweep of the bear’s paw. A direct blow would have broken every bone in this foolish dog’s body.
We looked at Cass’s rifle. A bullet had been torn from its shell casing and lodged in the chamber. A new shell pumped into the breech hit this obstacle and would not seat completely. If a shell had been fired in the weapon, the rifle probably would have blown up and there would have been more than wounded dogs scattered on the rugged slope of the canyon that eventful day.
Cass felt better now. Whenever anything happened to his dogs, it hurt him as much as though it had happened to himself. With one good rifle, we encouraged the remaining hounds to follow. Sissy and Drive were already ahead. In a few minutes even Pancho had recovered enough from his near strangulation to join the others.
The Grizzly Headed for Home
It was but a short distance to the top of the ridge. The grizzly, with the dogs pursuing, had already toppled over. In a few minutes more a battered and bloody crew of men and dogs stood on the ridge above Albemarle. Drive and Sissy were already below us. The bear was heading straight for the old mining town in the canyon.
As we stood on the rim of the ridge, we caught a momentary glimpse of a comical drama below. The gray form of the grizzly was lumbering down the ridge, at the outermost buildings of the ghost town. Drive was walking parallel with the bear, a few yards to one side. Both of them apparently were so exhausted that they had declared an enforced truce for the moment, and from that distance it looked as though they were strolling along side by side, the best of friends. Only the long-drawn bark of the faithful hound gave evidence that it was still a case of hunter and hunted.
As the hulking form of the gray grizzly disappeared far below among the tumbled ruins of Albemarle, we knew he had reached his home. Would he come to bay again among those walls? Sissy was at this time far behind in the chase, and Drive was again alone in the pursuit of the monster. Could we hope to win? I turned to Cass for a decision.
“You’d better go get him,” he said, jerking his head backward. I felt a sudden wave of dejection and fatigue pass over me. M I went back now, I was definitely out of the chase. “You’d better drop back and bring him around by the trail,” Cass was saying. “You’ll never get the horses over this ridge.”
“And you?” I asked, as I looked in the direction of the ghost town below.
“I’m going to get that bear.” Cass said this with fierce determination, but he didn’t say when. Cass just started down the slope with giant strides, along the tracks that the grizzly had taken into the town of Albemarle.
That night, about 11 o’clock, I found Cass seven or eight miles on the other side of Albemarle, on a lonely ridge. It was a wonder I found him at all, for his voice was weak and he could scarcely talk above a whisper. I had left Talbot far behind by a fire and told him to stay there. Leading Cass’s horse I had gone up through the town and had searched the evening and most of the night for a trace of the combatants. Never again that day did I hear a dog bark. As it grew late, I lighted a fire on a high point. It was to this that Cass came, exhausted and almost speechless. The dogs with him were beaten warriors — scarred, tired, and voiceless. “We lost him in Peralta Canyon,” Cass croaked between his parched lips. “He just kept running and fighting, running and fighting.” His voice trailed off to a whisper. Never in my life have I seen a man so exhausted.
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“Well, Cass, we have got something,” I reminded him in a pleasant tone. “We have an Eastern fellow sitting back there waiting for us.” Cass raised himself on one elbow by the fire, as though he didn’t hear.
“I’m going to give up bear hunting or any kind of dog hunting,” he said with fierce finality. “But,” and he emphasized each word with his cracked voice, “I’m going to catch that grizzly first.”