CHAPTER XII.
WELL HEELED.
"Curious how some men will lose their grip on the truth when they talk about bears," said Mr. Jack Waddell, of Ventura. "There's old Ari Hopper, for example, a man whose word is good in a hoss trade, but when he tells about his bear fights he puts your confidence in him to an awful strain. I don't say that Ari would tell lies, but he puts a whole lot of fancy frills on his stories and fixes 'em up gorgeous. I reckon I've run across most as many bears as anybody, but I never had no such adventures as I read about.
"The most curious bear scrape I ever had was over on the Piru last spring, and just the plain facts of the case beat anything you ever heard. There was an old white-headed Grizzly in that part of the country that did a heap of damage, but nobody had been able to do him up. They set spring guns for him on the mountain and put out poison all around, but he'd beat the game every time. Taylor, of the Mutaw ranch, fixed a spring gun that he thought would fix the old fellow for sure. It was a big muzzle-loading musket, with a bore as big as an eight-gauge shotgun, and Taylor loaded it with a double handful of powder, thirty buckshot and a wagon bolt six inches long. It was set right in the trail and baited with a chunk of pork tied to the muzzle and connected with the trigger by a string.
"The gun was about a mile from the house, and the very first night after it was set, Taylor was awakened by a roar that made the windows rattle and seemed to shake the very hills. Taylor knew the old gun had gone off, and he chuckled as he thought of the wreck it made of the old Grizzly. In the morning he started out to take a look at his dead bear, and found his tracks leading from the meadow right up the trail. He knew the sign, because the Grizzly put only the heel of his off forefoot to the ground and there was a round mark in the track that looked as though it were made by the end of a bone.
"As I was saying, Taylor recognized the tracks and was sure he had got old Whitehead, but he was sort of puzzled when he noticed a hog's track in the same trail and saw that those were sometimes wiped out by the bear's tracks. When he got near the spring gun he saw bits of meat hanging in the brush, but no fur anywhere. He kept on, and pretty soon he saw a dark mass lying on the ground in front of the wreck of the old musket. He stepped up to look at it and saw that it was the mangled corpse of the biggest hog on the ranch. One of the hams was gone, and apparently it had been cut away with a knife. The head and all the fore part of the hog had been blown to flinders, and the brush was just festooned with pork.
"Taylor thought somebody had happened along and cut a ham out of the dead hog, but there were no man tracks anywhere; nothing but hog and bear tracks. It was plain that the cunning old bear had driven the hog ahead of him up the trail to spring the gun, but that missing ham could not be accounted for.
"Another curious thing was noticed about all the cattle that the Grizzly killed. Ordinarily, you know, the Grizzly strikes a blow that breaks a steer's neck or shoulder, and then pulls him down and finishes him. In the Piru country a great many cattle were found with their throats neatly cut, and old Whitehead's tracks were invariably found near the carcasses. The only man that the Grizzly ever killed, so far as is known, was a Mexican sheepherder, and he was found with a slash in the side of the head that looked like the work of a hatchet or other sharp tool. Some people didn't believe that the Mexican was killed by a bear, but there were no other tracks where his body was found, and I know for a fact that old Whitehead did kill him.
"I was pirooting around in the brush on a hill pretty well up toward the head of Piru Creek one afternoon, when I caught sight of a bear about twenty yards ahead of me. I could see only a part of his fur, and couldn't tell how he was lying or what part of him was in sight. I figured around a few minutes, but couldn't get a better sight, and so I just took chances and let drive for luck at what I could see. It was a fool thing to do, of course, but I just happened to feel careless and confident. There was a snort and a crash, and old Whitehead loomed up madder than a hornet. I had shot him in the haunch and he felt insulted. He made a rush at me, and I skipped aside and jumped for a small tree standing on the brink of a little ravine. My rifle dropped into the ravine, and I went up the tree like a monkey up a pole, and by the time the old bear had put his helm down and swung around to take a whack at me I was out of his reach and felt safe.
"The bear sat down and deliberately sized up the situation, and then he walked up to the tree and began striking at the trunk with his right paw. That made me laugh at first, but I was just paralyzed with amazement when I saw clean-cut chips flying at every stroke and caught a metallic gleam as his paw swung in the air. I didn't have much time to investigate the matter because the old Grizzly was a boss chopper and my tree began to totter very soon. I had sense enough to see that if I came down with the tree on the upper side the bear would nail me with one jump, and I threw my weight on the other side so as to fall the tree into the ravine. I thought I might have the luck to land without breaking any bones, and then I'd have quite a start of the bear and perhaps be able to pick up my rifle.
"As the tree toppled over the edge of the ravine and began to fall I swung around to the upper side and braced myself for the crash. During the fall I managed to throw my legs out over a branch, and when the tree struck bottom I shot out feet foremost, sliding down through the brushy top and landing with a pretty solid jar right side up and no damage except a few bruises and scratches. The first thing I looked for was my rifle, and, luckily, it wasn't two yards away. I grabbed it and ran up the other side of the ravine to a rocky ledge, while the Grizzly was crashing down through the brush on his side, expecting to find me under the fallen tree. Before he knew what had happened I was shooting him full of holes and he was dead in a minute.
"When I examined the dead Grizzly I found the most singular thing I ever came across. In the sole of his right forepaw was an ivory-handled bowie-knife, firmly imbedded and partly surrounded by calloused gristle as hard as bone. The handle was out of sight, but the butt of it made a knob in the heel of the bear's foot and left a mark on the ground. Evidently he walked on that heel to keep the blade from striking stones and getting dulled. That knife accounted for all the mysteries about the white-headed Grizzly.
"What's that? Mystery about how the knife got into his foot? Not at all; that's simple enough. He swallowed the knife during some fight or other, and it worked around in his system and down into his foot just as a needle does in a man."