“Hist!” called the Colonel, suddenly, stooping down to whip out his .35 from its scabbard. The bushes shook, up in a densely grown ravine that lost itself somewhere in the upper flanks of the mountain. Gray shapes bounded across it, stiff-legged, flashing into sight occasionally, to disappear as quickly.
The Colonel’s rifle barked, followed by Sid’s. One of the gray shapes plunged, and there was a mad scramble in the timber. They were mule deer, a whole drove of them! Sid fired at another, running bewilderedly up a bush-strewn slope in full flight. Then all was still again.
“I nailed mine,” said the Colonel. “We’ll wait a while. Once he lies down he’ll never get up.—Lord, boys, there must have been thirty in that drove!”
He got out his pipe and lit it, while the horses switched flies patiently. Then Niltci, who had been scouting through the bush, called to them with a low grunt of eagerness. There seemed to be suppressed excitement in it, too, and the tones of his voice thrilled Sid with a nameless feeling as he urged his horse over to where Niltci stood, pointing down at the track.
“Come over here, Father—for the love of Pete, look!” called Sid, tingling with shivery sensations as he looked down from his horse at a deep hollow in the needles, over which Niltci still stood, his wild eyes snapping meaningly.
The Colonel came over and halted his horse. The track looked as if someone had set down a long oval bowl there. It was all of fourteen inches long, and the foot that made it had borne down so heavily that a trilobed palm and the five toeprints, huddled together like a human foot, were distinctly visible. And such toes! Each one was the size of two human thumbs laid down together! Some distance beyond each was a long, pointed gash in the soil at least five inches from base to tip, the claw marks, all heading together.
“Good Lord! That’s more than a grizzly, Sid!” ejaculated the Colonel after studying it awhile. “I tell you what!—in the old days we used to have the giant yellow grizzly of California, a whale of a brute. He’d carry off a whole horse, and many’s the cowman who has been suddenly charged by one from ambush. The old boy wanted the horse, but he didn’t mind fetching its rider a swipe, incidentally, that knocked him into kingdom come. A .45-90,—even the old Sharps .45-105 with the 550-grain bullet—never fazed him. That tribe of grizzlies has been extinct since the early ’90’s in California, boys, but I’ll miss my guess if here isn’t one! First track like this I’ve seen in thirty years. Here, if anywhere, there’d be a few survivors. He’s my meat, Sid! You got old Ring-Neck, up in Montana; this bird is mine!” declared the old Indian fighter, his eyes flashing. “How old is that track, Niltci?”
The Indian boy knelt down and smelled it for some time. Then he raised his head and held up one finger.
“One day, eh? It’s a good thing we got two bucks, Sid. We’ll get one of them out of here for camp meat and leave the other for bait.”
Niltci pointed silently into the bush ahead of him. Here was another deep footprint, and, sighting along it, a dim line of them led up the ravine flank. They followed slowly on the horses, who were shivering and plunging violently, for even up to their nostrils had come that faint grizzly odor that a horse fears above all other things. Up on the ridge the track crossed bare rock, and on a little sandy spot a huge track lay, a beautiful print, like an enormous, flat, stubby hand with long, sharp, in-pointing nails for fingers. Beyond the ridge lay a hideous gulch, a bad-land, all bowlders and scraggly pinyons, twisting and writhing among the rocks in weird contortions. It would invite a broken foreleg to attempt to work the horses in there.