One September morning he was digging roots along the edge of the woods. He had found something quite to his liking and was much absorbed, when suddenly a fresh puff of wind blew the strong body scent of a man full into his nostrils. He looked this way and that but could see no man. Then a twig snapped in the cover near at hand, and a squirrel hunter stepped into view, not fifty feet away. The hunter was probably much more astonished than was Black Bruin. The great shaggy brute was so close to him that he looked like a veritable monster.
With the hunter's instinct, that acts almost before the mind has time to think, the gun went to his shoulder and both barrels were discharged in such quick succession as to call for merely one echo.
The hunter was of course not in search of bears, so the two charges of number four shot did not have a mortal effect upon the quarry, but at such close range they penetrated quite deeply into his flesh and stung him with an excruciating pain. With a loud "Hoof," and an agonized grunt of pain, the bear fled precipitately in one direction, and the hunter, thinking that he had jeopardized his life by his rashness in attacking a bear with squirrel shot, fled in another.
The man did not stop running until he reached the nearest farmhouse, where he excitedly gasped out his adventure to wide-eyed listeners, while Black Bruin fled as far as he could into the deep woods, to nurse his many wounds.
There was little, however, that he could do. The wounds were not dangerous, but they burned and smarted as though a whole swarm of bees had penetrated his thick coat and found the skin beneath.
He spent the better part of the day lying in a cooling stream, waiting for the burning and smarting to cease.
He had now added one more to the list of his sad experiences in the wild. The man-scent was dangerous and henceforth he must flee at the slightest suspicion of the proximity of man. The rank sulphurous smell of gunpowder, too, and the roar, like thunder, that echoed away through the cavernous woods, were things that he would remember.
Man, who he had thought was quite harmless, was a terrible enemy who could sting him in a thousand places at once, and shake the forest with thunder and lightning.
Even while Black Bruin lay wallowing in the stream, trying to ease the burning shotgun wounds, there was being planned in the near-by village a bear-hunt that should bring about his destruction, for the excited hunter had described a monster as large as a cow.