For full half an hour that bear struggled fiercely to free itself, and often did the shaken hunter fear that he had miscalculated the strength of his ropes, but they stood the test well, and, being elastic, acted in some degree like lines of indiarubber. At the end of that time the bear fell prone from exhaustion, which, to do him justice, was more the result of semi-strangulation than exertion.
This was what Little Tim had been waiting for and expecting. Quietly but quickly he descended to the ground, but the bear saw him, partially recovered, no doubt under an impulse of rage, and began to rear and plunge again, compelling his foe to run to the fallen rocks for shelter. When Bruin had exhausted himself a second time, Tim ran forward and seized the old net with which he had failed to catch the previous bear, and threw it over his captive. The act of course revived the lively monster, but his struggles now wound him up into such a ravel with the two lines and the net that he was soon unable to get up or jump about, though still able to make the very earth around him tremble with his convulsive heaves. It was at once a fine as well as an awful display of the power of brute force and the strength of raw material!
Little Tim would have admired it with philosophic interest if he had not been too busy dancing around the writhing creature in a vain effort to fix his third rope on a hind leg. At last an opportunity offered. A leg burst one of the meshes of the net. Tim deftly slipped the noose over it, and made the line fast to the tree. “Now,” said he, wiping the perspiration from his brow, “you’re safe, so I’ll have a meal.”
And Little Tim, sitting down on a stone at a respectful distance, applied himself with zest to the cold breakfast of which he stood so very much in need.
He was thus occupied when his son with the prairie chief and his party found him.
It would take at least another chapter to describe adequately the joy, surprise, laughter, gratulation, and comment which burst from the rescue party on discovering the hunter. We therefore leave it to the reader’s imagination. One of the young braves was at once sent off to find the agent and fetch him to the spot with his cage on wheels. The feat, with much difficulty, was accomplished. Bruin was forcibly and very unwillingly thrust into the prison. The balance of the stipulated sum was honourably paid on the spot, and now that bear is—or, if it is not, ought to be—in the Zoological Gardens of New York, London, or Paris, with a printed account of his catching, and a portrait of Little Tim attached to the front of his cage!