[BEAR-CHASING IN THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS]
Mr. Montague Stevens is an Englishman who for the most part attends to the rounding-up of his cattle, which are scattered over the northwestern quarter of New Mexico; but he does not let that interfere with the time which all Englishmen set duly apart to be devoted to sport. His door-yard is some hundreds of miles of mountain wilderness and desolate mesa—a more gorgeous preserve than any king ever dreamed of possessing for his pleasure—with its plains dotted with antelope, and its mountains filled with cougar, deer, bear, and wild turkeys. The white race has given up the contest with nature in those parts, and it has reverted to the bear, the Navajo, and Mr. Stevens—land-grants, corrals, cabins, brands, and all else.
General Miles was conducting a military observation of the country, which is bound to be the scene of any war which the Apaches or Navajos may make; and after a very long day’s march, during which we had found but one water, and that was a pool of rain-water, stirred into mud and full of alkali, where we had to let our horses into the muddy stuff at the ends of our lariats, we had at last found a little rivulet and some green grass. The coffee-pot bubbled and the frying-pan hissed, while I smoked and listened to a big escort-wagon driver, who was repairing his lash, and saying, softly, “Been drivin’ a bloody lot of burros for thirty years, and don’t know enough to keep a whip out of a wheel; guess I’ll go to jack-punchin’, ’nen I kin use a dry club.”
WATERING HORSES
Far down the valley a little cloud of dust gleamed up against the gray of the mountains, and presently the tireless stride of a pony shone darkly in its luminous midst. Nearer and nearer it grew—the flying tail, the regular beating of the hoofs, the swaying figure of the rider, and the left sleeve of the horseman’s coat flapping purposelessly about. He crossed the brook with a splash, trotted, and, with a jerk, pulled up in our midst. Mr. Stevens is a tall, thin young man, very much bronzed, and with the set, serious face of an Englishman. He wore corduroy clothes, and let himself out of his saddle with one hand, which he also presented in greeting, the other having been sacrificed to his own shot-gun on some previous occasion. Mr. Stevens brought with him an enthusiasm for bear which speedily enveloped the senses of our party, and even crowded out from the mind of General Miles the nobler game which he had affected for thirty years.
The steady cultivation of one subject for some days is bound to develop a great deal of information, and it is with difficulty that I refrain from herein setting down facts which can doubtless be found in any good encyclopædia of natural history; but the men in the mountains never depart from the consideration of that and one other subject, which is brands, and have reached some strange conclusions—the strangest being that the true Rocky Mountain grizzly is only seen once in a man’s lifetime, and that the biggest one they ever heard of leaves his tracks in this district, and costs Mr. Stevens, roughly estimating, about $416 a year to support, since that about covers the cattle he kills.
At break of day the officers, cavalrymen, escort-wagons, and pack-train toiled up the Cañon Largo to Mr. Stevens’s camp, which was reached in good time, and consisted of a regular ranchman’s grub-wagon, a great many more dogs of more varieties than I could possibly count, a big Texan, who was cook, and a professional bear-hunter by the name of Cooper, who had recently departed from his wonted game for a larger kind, with the result that, after the final deal, a companion had passed a .45 through Mr. Cooper’s face and filled it with powder, and brought him nigh unto death, so that even now Mr. Cooper’s head was swathed in bandages, and his mind piled with regrets that he had on at the time an overcoat, which prevented him from drawing his gun with his usual precision. Our introduction to the outfit was ushered in by a most magnificent free-for-all dog-fight; and when we had carefully torn the snarling, yelling, biting mass apart by the hind-legs and staked them out to surrounding trees, we had time to watch Mr. Cooper draw diagrams of bear-paws in the dust with a stick. These tracks he had just discovered up the Cañon Largo, and he averred that the bear was a grizzly, and weighed 1800 pounds, and that he had been there two years, and that all the boys had hunted him, but that he was a sad old rascal.