The Boy With the U. S. Survey

by Francis Rolt-Wheeler

"Bringing the rifle to his shoulder with a single motion, he pumped three steel-jacketed bullets into her at point-blank distance, then, throwing his rifle up, he caught it by the barrel, prepared to club the bear over the head with an aim to catch her in the eyes and blind her, so that he could make a get-away."

"That was plucky," said the boy, "to face a mad bear with a clubbed gun."

"Plucky enough, but foolish. He knew nothing of the strength of a bear, and even as he brought down the clubbed rifle with all his force, she rose suddenly upon her hind legs and swept away the descending gun with her paw. I found it later, bent almost double with the force of that blow. The hunter jumped aside, but as the bear rushed past she threw out her other paw with claws outstretched, which, catching him on the neck, laid open his right arm from shoulder to wrist.

"Dazed and incapacitated, he was an easy mark for the bear, who turning, with a growl at the pain of her wounds from the three bullets, seized him in her teeth. Then, apparently suffering acutely herself, she dropped him to give a vicious bite at the blood dripping from her side, where one of the bullets had entered.

"The hunter, who had been thrown several feet when the bear dropped him, was still game. He staggered up with some vague idea of finding and using the rifle, when, with an angry snort, she rushed at him again. But one of the steel-coated messengers of death had found a vital part and her eyes were growing dim, so that though her claws lacerated his thigh, her jaws came together a foot from him, and in her overreaching rush she knocked him down without further injury.

"There, then, crouched bear and man, almost within striking distance of each other, and yet both too weak to get up. Prudence bade the hunter lie still, but seeing that the eyes of the bear were glazing fast, he thought he might make shift to defend himself in the event of a final rush, and he reached out his hand for his hunting knife, which had fallen a few feet away. But the brute was still conscious of danger, and she reared with a roar of pain and thundered down upon the man, who struck with the knife as she fell upon him, the blade striking the snout, the tenderest part of the whole body. She buried her teeth in his shoulder, but relaxed the pressure almost instantly from her own pain and rolled over him leaving him free.

"Once more she lurched heavily to her feet, and the man lying on the ground in a frenzy of pain, closed his eyes, only hoping that the end might come quickly. Once he opened them, and there, not three feet away, stood the bear, apparently blind from the approach of death, rocking and sawing unsteadily on her feet, and then toppled over, dying. Three or four times, even then, she tried to rise, but fell back each time with a low growl, her bloody jaws snapping with fury scarcely a yard from the hunter's face, but the bullets had not failed to do their work, and with a last roar she fell back, dead.

"The hunter declared, but is not sure whether he was conscious or no, that hardly had the she-bear fallen dead, than out from the woods stepped another immense bear, almost twice the size of the female. Quietly he walked to the cub, and smelt it with a growl, next smelt the body of the she-bear with another growl, and with his hair bristling, walked to where the hunter was lying. The man was paralyzed by fear and pain and did not move, whereon the bear, showing no hurry, shambled into the woods again and was gone.

"The whole affair, from the first shooting of the cub to the appearance and disappearance of the parent bear, had not taken five minutes, and when the half-breed, who had heard the shooting and the growls, reached the place, it was all over. The hunter, dazed and scarcely conscious, was lying beside a stone with the dead cub a few feet behind him and the dead mother a few feet in front of him. Apparently the man had not moved since the bear died, and probably was not aware of his escape, but was lying there, awaiting death in a most horrible form, not realizing that his foe had passed beyond revenge."

"But how did he get to you?" asked the boy.