We find Roosevelt one day setting out from his ranch on a hunt for grizzly on the Big Horn Range. His eagerness to come in close contact with the grizzly was in no way dampened by the fact that a neighbor of his, while prospecting with two other men near the headwaters of the Little Missouri in the Black Hills country, had had a terrible experience with one.
The neighbor and two other men were walking along the river. Two of them followed the edge of the stream. The third followed a game trail some distance away from them. Suddenly the second heard an agonized shout from the third man, intermingled with the growling of the bear. They rushed to the scene just in time to see their companion in close contact with a grizzly. The bear was so close to the man that he had no time to fire his rifle, but merely held it up as a guard to his head. The immensely muscular forearm of the grizzly, with nails as strong as steel hooks, descended upon the man, striking aside the rifle and crushing the man’s skull like an eggshell.
Still another of the Colonel’s friends, while hunting in the Big Horn Mountains, had pursued a large bear and wounded him. The animal turned and rushed at the man, who fired at him and missed. The bear closed with him and passed on, striking only a single blow, yet that blow tore the man’s collarbone and snapped three or four ribs. The shock was so great that he died that night.
With his interest stimulated by such accounts of grizzly hunting, Roosevelt set out. It was early in September. The weather was cool and frosty and the flurries of snow made it easy to track the bears. There were plenty of blacktail deer in the woods, as well as bands of cow and calf elk, or of young bull. There were no signs of grizzly however.
One day Roosevelt and Merrifield separated, but at last Roosevelt heard the familiar long-drawn shout of a cattleman and dashed toward him on his small, wiry cow pony. Merrifield announced that he had seen signs of bears about ten miles distant. They shifted camp at once and rode to the spot where the bear tracks were so plentiful.
As Roosevelt came home toward nightfall from a vain hunt, walking through a reach of burned forest, he came across the huge half-human footprints of a great grizzly which had evidently passed a short time before. He followed the tracks in the fading twilight until it became too dark to see them, and had to give up the pursuit as darkness closed in about him. The next day, toward nightfall, as the two men were again returning home without having caught sight of the grizzly, they heard the sound of the breaking of a dead stick. It was the grizzly whose tracks they had seen around the remains of a black deer that Merrifield had shot. Again they had to postpone pursuit of him on account of darkness, but they made up their minds that they would get him the next morning.
Merrifield was a skilful tracker, and the next day he took up the trail at once where it had been left off. After a few hundred yards the tracks turned off on a well-beaten path made by the elk. The beast’s footprints were plain in the dust. The trail turned off into the tangled thicket, within which it was almost certain that the quarry could be found.
Still they followed the tracks, advancing with noiseless caution, climbing over dead tree trunks and upturned stumps and taking care that no branches rustled or caught on their clothes. Suddenly Merrifield sank on one knee, his face ablaze with excitement. Roosevelt strode past him with his rifle at the ready. There, not ten steps off, the great bear rose slowly from his bed among young spruces. He had heard his hunters, but did not know their exact location, for he reared up on his haunches and was sidewise to them. Then suddenly he caught sight of them and dropped on his fores, the hair on his neck and shoulders seeming to bristle as he turned toward them.
Roosevelt raised his rifle. The bear’s head was bent slightly down, and when Roosevelt looked squarely into the small, glittering, evil eyes he pulled his trigger. The bear half rose, then toppled over in the death throes. The bullet had gone into his brain. He was the first grizzly Roosevelt had ever seen, and a huge one at that. Naturally, he felt proud that within twenty seconds from the time he had caught sight of the game he had killed it.
Merrifield’s chief feeling was one of disappointment, not that he had not killed the game, but that Roosevelt had shot and killed him before the bear had had a chance to fight. Merrifield was reckless. He did not fear a grizzly any more than he did a jackrabbit. He wanted to see the bear come toward them in a typical grizzly charge and to bring him down in the rush. However, Roosevelt, not so much a veteran at bear-hunting, was quite contented in looking at the monstrous fellow to have brought him down before his charge commenced.