My eyes gradually grew accustomed to the gloom and density, and I now saw the red mouth of the bear amid the green foliage high overhead. The bear had already pulled off one of Ed’s boots and was about making a bootjack of his big red mouth for the other.
“Why don’t you come on, I say, and help me catch him?”
He kicked at the bear, and at the same time hitched himself a little further along up the leaning trunk, and in doing so kicked his remaining boot into the bear’s mouth.
“Oh, Moses, Moses! Why don’t you come? I’ve got a bear, I tell you.”
“Where is it, Ed?” shouted my brother on the other side.
But Ed did not tell him, for he had not yet got his foot from the bear’s mouth, and was now too busy to do anything else but yell and cry “Oh, Moses!”
Then my brother and I shouted out to Ed at the same time. This gave him great courage. He said something like “Confound you!” to the bear, and getting his foot loose without losing the boot he kicked the bear right on the nose. This brought things to a standstill. Ed hitched along a little higher up, and as the leaning trunk of the tree was already bending under his own and the bear’s weight, the infuriated brute did not seem disposed to go further. Besides, as he had been mortally wounded, he was probably growing too weak to do much now.
My brother got to the bottom of the canyon and brought Ed’s gun to where I stood. But, as we had no powder or bullets, and as Ed could not get them to us, even if he would have been willing to risk our shooting at the bear, it was hard to decide what to do. It was already dusk and we could not stay there all night.
“Boys,” shouted Ed, at last, as he steadied himself in the forks of a leaning and overhanging bough, “I’m going to come down on my laz rope. There, take that end of it, tie your laz ropes to it and scramble up the hill.”