When he comes down to the earth again, he has the silver bullet in his gun. He wonders what luck has in store for him that night. It is marvellous on Thursday nights, as every one knows. He goes up towards the organist’s house. Fancy if the bear knew that Faber’s cows are in a miserable shed, no better than under the bare sky.
What! surely he sees something black and big coming over the field towards the woodshed; it must be the bear. He puts the gun to his cheek and is just going to shoot, but then he changes his mind.
The little maid’s red eyes come before him in the darkness; he thinks that he will help her and the sexton a little, but it is hard not to kill the great bear himself. He said afterwards that nothing in the world had ever been so hard, but as the little maiden was so dear and sweet, it had to be done.
He goes up to the sexton’s house, wakes him, drags him out, half dressed and half naked, and says that he shall shoot the bear which is creeping about outside of Faber’s woodshed.
“If you shoot the bear, he will surely give you his sister,” he says, “for then you will be a famous man. That is no ordinary bear, and the best men in the country would consider it an honor to kill it.”
And he puts into his hand his own gun, loaded with a bullet of silver and bell-metal cast in a church tower on a Thursday evening at the new moon, and he cannot help trembling with envy that another than he shall shoot the great forest monarch, the old bear of Gurlitta Cliff.
The sexton aims,—God help us! aims, as if he meant to hit the Great Bear, which high up in the sky wanders about the North Star, and not a bear wandering on the plain,—and the gun goes off with a bang which can be heard all the way to Gurlitta Cliff.
But however he has aimed, the bear falls. So it is when one shoots with a silver bullet. One shoots the bear through the heart, even if one aims at the Dipper.
People come rushing out from all the neighboring farmyards and wonder what is going on, for never had a shot sounded so loud nor waked so many sleeping echoes as this one, and the sexton wins much praise, for the bear had been a real pest.