The Mynns' Mystery

by George Manville Fenn

And now his opportunity had come, and he seized it with the coolness of the hardened villain, free from all remorse.

“Dead or not quite dead, he can’t feel,” he muttered, as the point of his knife pierced George Harrington’s scalp, and then the poor fellow’s head dropped with a heavy thud upon the rocks, while, bending down, the ruffian seemed as if turned to stone, and gazed before him at the animal which had silently approached to within half-a-dozen yards, and then uttered a low sound like a heavy sigh.

They had seen sign of bear up above: here was the bear himself—a huge brute of the variety known to hunters as the cinnamon, at home here in his native wilds, glaring red-eyed and savage at the intruder upon his domains, and ready to make him pay dearly for his audacity.

Portway held his keen knife in his hand, but he could not stir; his rifle, ready charged, was almost within reach of his hand, but he did not try to seize it, and for fully a minute the huge beast and the hunter remained perfectly motionless.

Then the paralysis of mind and muscle passed away, and Portway stretched out his hand slowly towards where he had placed his rifle but without moving his eyes from the bear. On his right was the steep rocky wall that he had descended, on his left the terrible precipice, behind him a narrow shelf, and, in front the bear, with George Harrington between.

“If I can get the rifle?” thought Portway; and his hand searched for it, but in his heart he felt that it would be better to try and retreat slowly, while the bear would stop and wreak his anger upon the fallen man. Dan Portway knew better as regards the nature of the beast, but he could not think coolly and clearly then—he could not recall in the least that the grizzly and his relatives preferred to attack an active enemy when brought face to face with him, and that, at such a time, the recumbent body was no more to it than the rocks around—till he saw it rear up on its hind legs, a monster fully seven feet in height, its little eyes red with rage, its fangs bared, and its huge paws raised with the great claws spread.

There was a tremendous roar, full-throated, from the creature’s jaws, a rush as it leaped over George Harrington; the rifle was falling down the gulch, crashing from stone to stone; and, knife in hand, and uttering a hoarse shriek of horror, Dan Portway was bounding from rock to rock, striving to mount the steep side of the rugged place, and with the bear in full pursuit.

They were moments of agony, such as add years to a man’s life, and, listening to the panting breath of his pursuer, and his low snuffling snarl, Portway climbed on, expecting, moment by moment, to feel the monster’s huge claws upon his shoulder, and his half-inanimate body snatched back into the creature’s grasp. There was no chance of escape, for there, in its natural haunts, the bear could shuffle along at double the rate of a man, but still, for what seemed like an eternity of horror—really, but a fraction of a minute—Portway climbed on, till in struggling round a projecting rock, he slipped, and fell some twenty feet, to be caught up by a gnarled and distorted pine-trunk, which, with its roots in a crevice of the mountain side, projected almost at right angles over the gulch.

Half maddened by fear, the wretched man instinctively clung to the boughs, and saved himself from falling farther, and then, with his eyes fixed and staring up at his enemy steadily descending in pursuit, he crept along the bending stem, seating himself astride the tree, and getting farther and farther from the side of the gulch, till a warning crack told him of danger, while the swaying motion of the little trunk showed that he had reached the farthest point which the tree would bear.

“Grizzlies can’t climb trees,” he thought, and he watched his enemy as it came on, deliberately and cautiously, until it reached the spot from whence the fir-tree sprang. Here it paused, snuffed the ground, and stretched out its neck toward the trembling man, who shifted his position a little, so as to be ready to use his knife with effect.