saw where perhaps the night before he had eaten 

 part of the carcass of a bighorn. To judge from 

 tooth marks, the sheep had been killed by wolves. 

 The trail continued in general northward, parallel 

 to the summit and a little below it. As I followed, 

 the tracks approached timber-line, the trees being 

 scattered and the country quite open. 



Suddenly the trail broke off to the right for 

 five or six hundred feet into the woods, as though 

 Old Timberline had remembered an acquaintance 

 whom he must see again. He had hustled along 

 straight for a much-clawed Engelmann spruce, a 

 tree with bear-claw and tooth marks of many 

 dates, though none were recent. Old Timberline, 

 apparently, had smelled the base of the tree and 

 then risen up and sniffed the bark as high as 

 his nose could reach. He had neither bitten nor 

 clawed. Then he had gone to two near-by trees, 

 each of which had had chunks bitten or torn out, 

 and here smelled about. 



Retracing his tracks to where the trail had 

 turned off abruptly, the bear resumed his general 

 direction northward. When he stopped on a ridge 

 and began digging, I hurried across a narrow neck 

 of woods and crept up as close as I dared. A wagon- 



131 



