“Thar’s your bar, you keerless fellers,” said Dick. “If you don’t let these yere varmints alone, you’ll git yourselves in a bad scrape, one of these days, now, I tell you. A grizzly don’t wait fur a feller to walk up an’ shake his fist in his face, an’ say, ‘Do ye want to fight?’ He b’lieves in makin’ war on every one he sees.”
“We know that!” replied Archie. “This fellow made at us before we got near enough to shoot at him.”
“Then you did mean to fight him, did you?” asked the trapper, as he and old Bob began to skin the bear. “Wal, it aint every feller that would keer ’bout meddlin’ with a grizzly so long as the critter let him alone. I’ve seed trappers—an’ brave ones, too—that would shoulder their we’pons an’ walk off if they happened to come acrost a bar. It aint allers fun to hang a grizzly, neither; fur if your hoss falls down, or your lasso breaks, you’re a’most sartin to go under. I’ve seed more ’n one poor chap pawed up ’cause his hoss warn’t quick enough to git out of the varmint’s reach.”
In this way the trapper talked to the boys until the skin of the grizzly was taken off, when the travelers returned to their camp. As Archie remarked, it had been “a great day for bears,” and the evening was appropriately passed in listening to the stories the trappers related of their adventures with these animals.
[CHAPTER XI.]
A Buffalo Hunt.
THE next morning, after breakfast, the boys seated themselves by the fire, and while Frank mended his bridle, which Pete had broken the day before, Archie was endeavoring to conjure up some plan for the day’s amusement. Even in that country, which abounded with game, the boys were at a loss how to pass the time, for the grizzlies had interfered with their arrangements considerably. If they went hunting in the mountains, they might come across another bear; and their recent experience with those animals had shown them that the hunters were sometimes the hunted. They had no desire for further adventures with the monsters, and they had at last decided that they would take a gallop over the prairie, when they were startled by the clatter of horses’ hoofs in the creek, and old Bob—who, at daylight, had started out on a “prospecting” expedition—galloped into camp, breathless and excited. The boys very naturally cast their eyes toward the prairie, to see if he were not followed by a grizzly; but the sight of one of those animals never affected the old trapper in that manner. He had seen what he considered larger and more profitable game.