“I’d like to get one of those cubs and tame it,” said Ralph.
“What for? He’d get so savage when you raised him that you couldn’t do much with him ’cept shoot him. Puts me in mind of a fellow that used to live back of Bear Mountain long time ago, and trained a grizzly so that he could ride him. Like to hear the yarn?”
There was a twinkle in Mountain Jim’s eye as he spoke that warned Ralph to prepare for a wonderful tale of some sort; but anything would serve to pass the time, so as Jim drew out his old brier and lighted up, the boy nodded.
“Well, this here fellow, Abe Brown his name was, Abe J. Brown, caught this grizzly young and trained him so as he was most as good as a saddle horse. Abe and his bear was known all over the country thereabouts, and was accounted no common wonder.”
“I should think not. Do you mean to say that this fellow actually rode his bear just like a horse?”
“The very same identical way—Wow, what a flash!—Well, as I was sayin, Abe, he’d ride this bear all about, huntin’, fishin’, and all. Well, sir, one day Abe goes up on the mountain after a deer. The mountain was a famous place for grizzlies in them days, and what does Abe do but ride plumbbango right into the middle of a convention of sixteen of them that was discussing bear business.
“Well, Abe and his bear got mixed up right away, and Abe’s bear got killed in the scrap, being sort of soft from having been raised a pet.”
“But what happened to Abe?” asked Ralph.
“He wasn’t no ways what you might call communicative about what happened in that canyon on the mountain, Abe wasn’t,” went on Mountain Jim, fixing Ralph with his eye as if to challenge any doubt in his story, “but the next day Abe come into Baxter’s cross-roads riding one of them wild bears, and with sixteen skins, includin’ that of his tame beast, tied on behind. He was some hunter, Abe was.”