[MARK OUTRIGGER MEETS WITH AN ADVENTURE.]
BY EDWARD I. STEVENSON.
ew guides among the Rocky Mountains are more popular than Mark Outrigger. On the occasion I am going to tell you about, he, with his brother Julius, had been conducting a party of Eastern surveyors through one of the most difficult passes to Fort L——. Upon the evening before a stray wapiti, badly spent, if not wounded, by the pursuit of some far-distant sportsman, had staggered across the very path of the party. The condition of the splendid creature was too much of a temptation for Mark, in spite of the hour of the day. Hastily shouting out to his brother a rendezvous where he might be looked for to rejoin them in the morning, Mark bounded up and along the hill-side after the staggering quarry.
But the wapiti was by no means so utterly exhausted as Mark had imagined, and was, moreover, plainly husbanding its strength. But a capital opportunity for a shot presently offered. The young hunter came to a stand-still, and embraced it. The wapiti leaped up, plunged wildly a few feet further into a tangle of furze, and then dashed headlong down into a little ravine which the tangle outlined. Mark sped after, leaped down the precipitous descent in turn, and there found his unhappy victim breathing its last, after a gallant but vain struggle against fate. Mark drew his knife and ended its sufferings.
It was dark enough by this time. Mark was thoroughly tired out. He decided not to do anything until morning, but make himself comfortable as best he could. He clambered up out of the shallow ravine, where a few ripples did duty for a little stream, and having walked some distance along the rocky slope above to a sheltered spot between two bowlders, he lit a roaring fire, cooked his supper, so opportunely overtaken, and slept the sleep of a very tired man.
When morning came, his first waking thought was about the dead wapiti. It would be a load that elk, and at least a five-mile tramp over a rough road lay ahead of him. He turned down to the ravine, and followed the tinkling brook. Presently, beyond a little point, the dead animal appeared, but, utterly to Mark's consternation, it lay there in the very act of being most critically examined by a third party—a grizzly bear of splendid size and wonderfully unamiable countenance. Mark used to continue the story somewhat as follows:
"Well, sir, I do declare that for once I was dumfounded! I really didn't know whether to get ready for a scrimmage with him so early or not. I hadn't met with many grizzlies then, and never before or since with so old and big a one. As he sat there on his hunkers sniffing the wapiti's carcass he looked the size of an elephant. I could see plain as you please the long claws on his pads, and likewise his big red tongue when he licked the wapiti's head once or twice. As to his teeth, I didn't look for them, but I was pretty positive they were all there. And, you see, unless a man fires at a grizzly from out of his parlor window, there is generally no place to take to if things happen to go contrary.
"All of a sudden what does the great ugly beast do but get up from his squatting position, and begin to drag the elk a few yards further down the ravine. Now that was just going a little too far. Me to lose my game, after all my trouble in fetching it down! I'm not quite a good-humored-enough fellow for that, so I drew up, took a pretty fair aim at his shoulder, and let fly.