In a moment Snap was on his legs again, and, dodging behind the first tree he came to, he scrambled up it.
'Hurry, Snap, hurry!' shrieked Towzer in a voice of agony, and just as our hero drew up his foot he heard a snort almost against his heel, and a tearing sound as a great flake of bark was torn from the stem of the pine by the claws of the bear.
It was a sight to make any man's flesh creep which met the boy's eyes when he looked down from a point of safety some twenty feet up the pine. Reared on end, his huge claws stretching upwards, his red jaws open, muttering and moaning after the prey which had escaped him, one of the bears leaned against the pine to which Snap clung. Two others, growling from time to time, prowled round and round the foot of the tree, and in the middle of the little plateau the wounded bear kept up a succession of moans and growls as it struggled to its feet and fell back again time after time, dying, but bent on vengeance still.
Towzer was safe in his tree. Snap's rifle lay broken on the ground, and Towzer's with a dozen undischarged cartridges in it lay not far from the wounded bear. 'Ah!' Snap thought, 'if I only had that here!' Towzer, of course, in his desperate flight had thrown away his arms. Even had he had a sling to his rifle it would hardly have been possible to climb with it, and without a sling, and with a grizzly's teeth and claws behind, Towzer did well to drop his weapon and trust to speed and Snap's self-devotion.
'Snap,' Towzer called from his tree, 'I don't think much of this. I can't hold on very long. Are those brutes likely to wait long?'
'All night, I should think,' replied Snap.
This seemed too much for Winthrop, and a silence ensued; the boys clinging desperately to their uncomfortable perches, and the bears prowling up and down like sentries on their beat.
This went on for nearly an hour, and there was no change, and seemed likely to be none. The sun's last red glow was on the forest floor; the uncertain light made the great grey forms which went so silently backwards and forwards look even more horrible and monstrous to the eyes of their hapless victims, but two at any rate of the three were still on guard.
'Let's try a shout for help,' said Towzer; 'all together, Snap!'
'Coo-èy! coo-èy!' cried the boys, and as they cried the great grey forms paused in their silent walk, and sent a chorus of hollow growls to swell the sound. Other growls from the forest shadows, too, told the boys that, though they could only see the wounded bear and another, the others were not far off.