Chapter XIII.
“The Skin Is Yours.”
A regular war-dance was performed about the slain marauder by the young Sinclairs and Dol Farrar, when these laggards in the chase reached the spot where he fell. The firebrands had all died out before the enemy turned; but in the white moon-radiance the bear was seen to be a big one, with an uncommonly fine skin.
Neal took no part in the triumphal capers. He still leaned upon his rifle, his breath coming in gusty puffs through his nostrils and mouth. Not alone the desperate sensations of those moments when he had faced the gnashing, mumbling brute, but the unexpected success of his first shot at big game, had unhinged him. By his endurance in the chase, by the pluck with which he stood up to the bear, above all, by his being able, as Joe phrased it, to “take a sure pull on the beast at a paralyzing moment,” he had eternally justified his right to the title of sportsman in the eyes of the natives. The guides, Joe and Eb, were not slow in telling him that he had behaved from start to finish like no “greenhorn,” but a regular “old sport.”
“My cracky! ’twas lucky for me that you had game blood in you, which showed up,” exclaimed Joe, catching the boy’s arm in a friendly grip, with an odd respect in his touch, which marked the admission of young Farrar into the brotherhood of hunters. “I hadn’t a charge left, an’ not even my hunting-knife. Lots o’ city swells ’u’d have been plumb scared before a growler like that,”—touching Bruin’s carcass with his foot,—“even if they had a small arsenal to back ’em up. They’d have dropped rifle and cartridges, and hugged the nearest trunk. I’ve seen fellers do it scores o’ times, bless ye! after they came out here rigged up in sporting-book style, talking fire about hunting bears and moose. But that was all the fire there was to ’em.”
Yet Neal’s triumph over the poor brute, which had raced well for its life, was not without a faint twinge of pain; and he was too manly to look on this as a weakness. A sportsman he might be, of the sort who can shoot straight when necessity demands it, but never of that class who prowl through the forests with fingers tingling to pull the trigger, dreading to lose a chance of “letting blood” from any slim-legged moose or velvet-nosed buck which may run their way. It needed Doc’s praise to make him feel fully satisfied with his deed.
“It was a crack shot, boy,” said the doctor proudly. “And I guess the farmer at the next settlement will feel like giving you a medal for it. Old Bruin has only got what he gave to every creature he could master.”
There being no tree conveniently near to which they could string up the dead bear, the guides decided to leave the ugly matter of skinning and dissecting him for morning light. The excited party returned to camp, but not to sleep. They built up their scattered fire, squatted round it, and discoursed of the night’s adventure until a clear dawn-gleam brightened the eastern sky. Then Uncle Eb and Joe started out again across the brûlée. They reappeared before breakfast-time, bringing Bruin’s skin and a goodly portion of his meat.
Joe laid the hide at Neal’s feet.
“There, boy,” he said, “the skin is yours. It belongs rightly to the man who killed the bear; and I guess the brute wasn’t mortally hurt at all till your bullet nipped him in the neck.”