He pretended to be surprised, and raised his eyebrows as he remarked:
“Oh! is it possible that I forgot to mention to you that I’ve arranged to take you on a little shooting trip tomorrow, just to break the monotony of your existence here, and perhaps give you a chance to carry home a memento of life down in Arizona, that every time you scrape your feet upon it, will call up a few of the things that have happened here.”
“Please go on, and tell us more about it, Uncle; do we get a chance to snap off a picture of a bunch of antelopes this time; that wolf scene is going to turn out a jim-dandy, I reckon; and I’m anxious to try another,” Andy went on to say.
“Well, you boys have sure locoed the whole community with that wonder of an aeroplane, and perhaps, if the ranchers hope to get any decent work out of their punchers, we’d better give them a little rest along that line. But we’ve been troubled of late with losing some of our best heifers; and the boys declare they’ve found tracks of a grizzly that comes down out of the hills and gets his supper every once in so often. So Buckskin is going along to show us where he thinks the old fellow lives; and perhaps you can get a snapshot of him before we start in to puncture his tough old hide with our lead. How about that, boys; think you’d like to see how we rid the country of a pest that plays havoc with our herds?”
Frank smiled and nodded as if pleased, but Andy as usual broke out into a series of exclamations that told how delighted he would be at the chance.
“Then it’s a go,” remarked Mr. Witherspoon, carelessly, as though such things as bagging a ferocious grizzly bear were, after all of every day occurrence in the life of a cattle raiser; and to be looked up, as Andy, for instance might consider an ordinary flight over the level plain, “I’ll see to it that you both have guns, and we’ll start shortly after breakfast, so as to do most of our riding before it gets too hot. Then, if we want, after we’ve bagged our game we might hang round in the foothills and try to keep cool until near sunset, when we’ll start back,” and he went on talking of other things as though this were but a small matter.
CHAPTER XI—OUT FOR BEAR
“What do you think of this for a place to rout out a bear, eh, boys?” and as Mr. Witherspoon asked this question he drew in his sweating pony, and jumped to the ground.
The Bird Boys glanced around them. It was a wild prospect that greeted their gaze. They had left the level plains and entered among the rocky foothills that stretched out from the spur of the great Rockies reaching far down into Arizona.
In all probability this State has a greater range of extremes in the way of geographic features than any other in the Union. It possesses arid deserts, fertile plains; and the whole upper part is a mass of rugged mountain ranges, some of them as yet really never fully explored, and in which many valuable minerals have been found that yield fortunes to the capitalists whose money has made the mines possible.