XIII
A BEAR HUNT
Bob McCord had that quick, sympathetic appreciation of brute impulses which is the mark of a great hunter. Given a bear or a deer in a certain place, at a certain hour of the day, and Bob would conjecture, without much chance of missing, in which direction he would go and what he would be about. In a two-hours' beating-up the ravine he found no traces of bears. He then faced almost about and bent his course to where the illimitable western prairie set into the woods in a kind of bay. Why he thought that on a hot day like this a bear might be taking a sunning in the open grass I cannot tell; he probably suspected Bruin of an excursion to the corn-fields for "roas'in' ears." At any rate his conjecture was correct. Pup, beating forward in great leaps, with his head above the grass, caught sight of a female bear making her way to a point of timber farther down the run known as Horseshoe Neck. When the bear saw the dogs she quickened her leisurely pace into a lumbering gallop. Pup's long legs were stretched to their utmost in eager leaps which presently brought him in front of her; Joe, when he came up, annoyed her at the side; and stout little Seizer, watching the chance whenever she was making an angry lunge at Pup, would bravely nip her heels and so make her turn about. Before she could get her head fairly around the fiste would turn tail and run for his life. Bob tried to get within range before the bear should disappear in the forest, but as soon as she saw herself near the timber she charged straight for it, refusing to strike at Pup, and wholly disregarding the barking of bob-tail Joe, or the proximity to her heels of Seizer. She quickly disappeared from sight in the underbrush, and the embarrassed dogs came near losing her. A few moments too late to get a shot, McCord came running to the woods at the point of her entrance. He examined the brush and listened a moment.
"She's gone up stream," he said, "bound to make her hole at Coon's Den, 'f I don't git there fust."
He returned to the prairie and ran breathlessly along the edge of the woods for the better part of a mile; then he dashed into the timber, and pushing through the brush until he reached a cliff, he clambered down and stood with his back to the head of a ravine tributary to the valley in which Broad Run flowed. He was breathless, and his flimsy lower garments had been almost torn off him by the violence of his exertion and the resistance of underbrush and rocks; in fact, raiment never seemed just in place on him; the vigorous form burst through it now on this side, and now on that. Hearing the dogs still below him, he knew that he had come in time to intercept the progress of the bear toward the heap of rocky débris at the head of the ravine. Once in these fastnesses, no skill of hunter or perseverance of dogs would have been sufficient to get her out.
The bear was soon in sight, and Bob saw that the nearly exhausted dogs were taking greater risks than ever. Little Seizer was particularly venturesome, and was so much overcome with heat and fatigue, and so breathless with barking, that it was hard for him to get out of the way of the bear's retorts. "She'll smash that leetle ijiot the very nex' time, shore," muttered Bob with alarm; and though he knew the range to be a long one, he took aim and fired. Unluckily the infuriated Seizer gave the bear's heel a particularly savage bite, and at the very instant of Bob's pulling the trigger she turned on the little dog, and thus caused the ball to lodge in her right shoulder just as she was striking out with her left paw. She barely reached the dog, and failed to crush him with the full weight of her arm, but she lacerated his side and sent him howling out of the fray. Now, wounded and enraged, she recognized in the hunter her chief enemy; and, neglecting the dogs, she rushed up the ravine toward McCord. Bob poured a large charge of powder into his gun, and, taking a bullet from his pouch, he felt in his pocket for the patching. A moment he looked blankly at the oncoming bear and muttered "Gosh!" between his set teeth. There was not a patch in his pocket. He had put some pieces of patching there in the darkness of the morning before leaving home, without remembering that his pocket was bottomless. He stood between a wounded bear and her cubs, and there was no time for deliberation. He might evade the attack if he could succeed in getting up the cliff where he had come down, but in that case she would reach her hole and he would lose the battle. He promptly tore a piece from the ragged leg of his trousers, and, wrapping his ball in it, rammed it home. Then he took a cap from a hole in the stock of his gun and got it fixed just in time to shoot when the bear was within a dozen feet of him. Uncultivated man that he was, he had the same refined pleasure in the death-throes of his victim that gentlemen and ladies of the highest breeding find in seeing a frightened and exhausted fox torn to pieces by hounds with bloody lips.
Bob's first care was to look after Seizer, who was badly wounded, but whose bones were whole. The afternoon had passed its middle when he shot the bear, and by the time he had cared for the dog and dressed his game the sun was low and McCord was troubled lest he should have delayed too long the execution of his stratagem for the confusion of Jake Hogan.
Another man might have been considerably embarrassed to dispose of the bear. But Bob proceeded first to divest it of every part that was of little value. Then he hoisted the carcass to his shoulder and tossed the bear-skin on top. Taking up his rifle and balancing his burden carefully before starting, he went swaying to and fro down the ravine, choosing with care the securest places among the rocks to set his feet in. It was thus that Samson went off with the great gates of Gaza. McCord was a primitive, Pelasgic sort of man, accustomed to overmatch the ferocities of Nature with a superior strength and cunning. Lacking the refinement and complexity of the typical modern, this antique human is more simple and statuesque; even the craft of such a man has little involution. There was joy in his bloody victory over the most formidable beast in his reach that was virile and unalloyed by ruth or scruple—a joy like that which vibrates in the verses of Homer.
It was a good mile to Lazar Brown's, where Bob hoped to find a horse to take his bear home. When at length he stopped to unshoulder his burden on a salient corner of old Lazar's rail fence, sunset had begun to bless the overheated earth.
"Got a b'ar, did n' choo?" said Old Lazar, who was in wait for Bob.