The Strength of the Pines

by Edison Marshall

They were a worthy breed! It is doubtful if any other section of the United States offered an environment so favorable to them. Game was in abundance, they could venture down into the valleys at the approach of winter and thus miss the rigors of the snow, and at first there were no human enemies. Unfortunately, stories are likely to grow and become sadly addled after many tellings; but if the words of certain old men could be believed, the Southern Oregon grizzly occasionally, in the bountiful fall days, attained a weight of two thousand pounds. No doubt whatever remains that thousand-pound bears were fairly numerous. They trailed up and down the brown hillsides; they hunted and honey-grubbed and mated in the fall; they had their young and fought their battles and died, and once in a long while the skeleton of a frontiersman would be found with his skull battered perfectly flat where one of the great beasts had taken a short-arm pat at him.

But unlike the little black bears, the grizzlies developed displeasing habits. They were much more carnivorous in character than the blacks, and their great bodily strength and power enabled them to master all of the myriad forms of game in the Oregon woods. By the same token, they could take a full-grown steer and carry it off as a woman carries her baby.

It couldn't be endured. The cattlemen had begun to settle the valleys, and it was either a case of killing the grizzlies or yielding the valleys to them. In the relentless war that followed, the breed had been practically wiped out. A few of them, perhaps, fled farther and farther up the Cascades, finding refuges in the Canadian mountains. Others traveled east, locating at last in the Rocky Mountains, and countless numbers of them died. At last, as far as the frontiersmen knew, only one great specimen remained. This was a famous bear that men called Slewfoot,—a magnificent animal that ranged far and hunted relentlessly, and no one ever knew just when they were going to run across him. It made traveling in the mountains a rather ticklish business. He was apt suddenly to loom up, like a gray cliff, at any turn in the trail, and his disposition grew querulous with age. In fact, instead of fleeing as most wild creatures have learned to do, he was rather likely to make sudden and unexpected charges.

He was killed at last; and seemingly the Southern Oregon grizzlies were wiped out. But it is rather easy to believe that in some of his wanderings he encountered—lost and far in the deepest heart of the land called Trail's End—a female of his own breed. There must have been cubs who, in their turn, mated and fought and died, and perhaps two generations after them. And out of the last brood had emerged a single great male, a worthy descendant of his famous ancestor. This was the Killer, who in a few months since he had left his fastnesses, was beginning to ruin the cattle business in Trail's End.

As he came growling from his bed this September evening he was not a creature to speak of lightly. He was down on all fours, his vast head was lowered, his huge fangs gleamed in the dark red mouth. The eyes were small, and curious little red lights glowed in each of them. The Killer was cross; and he didn't care who knew it. He was hungry too; but hunger is an emotion for the beasts of prey to keep carefully to themselves. He walked slowly across the little glen, carelessly at first, for he was too cross and out of temper to have the patience to stalk. He stopped, turning his head this way and that, marking the flight of the wild creatures. He saw a pair of blacktail bucks spring up from a covert and dash away; but he only made one short, angry lunge toward them. He knew that it would only cost him his dignity to try to chase them. A grizzly bear can move astonishingly fast considering his weight—for a short distance he can keep pace with a running horse—but a deer is light itself. He uttered one short, low growl, then headed over toward a great wall of buckbush at the base of the hill.

But now his hunting cunning had begun to return to him. The sun was setting, the pines were growing dusky, and he began to feel the first excitement and fever that the fall of night always brings to the beasts of prey. It is a feeling that his insignificant cousins, the black bears, could not possibly have,—for the sole reason that they are berry-eaters, not hunters. But the cougar, stealing down a deer trail on the ridge above, and a lean old male wolf—stalking a herd of deer on the other side of the thicket—understood it very well. His blood began to roll faster through his great veins. The sullen glare grew in his eyes.

It was the beginning of the hunting hour of the larger creatures. All the forest world knew it. The air seemed to throb and tingle, the shadowing thickets began to pulse and stir with life. The Fear—the age-old heritage of all the hunted creatures—returned to the deer.

The Killer moved quite softly now. One would have marveled how silently his great feet fell upon the dry earth and with what slight sound his heavy form moved through the thickets. Once he halted, gazing with reddening eyes. But the coyote—the gray figure that had broken a twig on the trail beside him—slipped quickly away.

He skirted the thicket, knowing that no successful stalk could be made where he had to force his way through dry brush. He moved slowly, cautiously—all the time mounting farther up the little hill that rose from the banks of the stream. He came to an opening in the thicket, a little brown pathway that vanished quickly into the shadows of the coverts.

The Killer slipped softly into the heavy brush just at its mouth. It was his ambush. Soon, he knew, some of the creatures that had bowers in the heart of the thicket would be coming along that trail toward the feeding grounds on the ridge. He only had to wait.