My First Trip to the Selkirks 113 



looked around and found a fellow who had an old wind- 

 broken horse which we bought for twenty dollars, and 

 started back for the bear country. It took us two days to 

 get that old horse to the point we wanted it, for every two 

 or three hundred yards we would have to stop and wait 

 until he got his wind; but at last we got him to a spot about 

 three miles above camp, led him across the creek, and 

 killed him at the edge of a slide fifty yards from the creek 

 and fifty feet from a cedar thicket. This, we had found, 

 was a sort of a general converging point for the bear, and 

 we had counted the tracks of twelve that had passed it in 

 a single night. About a hundred yards away we built a 

 blind, so arranged that we could climb up and enter it with- 

 out going near the bait. 



We had already, some distance up the creek beyond 

 the blind, found an old deadfall that some prospector had 

 set up a few years before. Indeed, we afterward learned 

 that the man who said that he had shot the bear had 

 caught them in it. Coleman, who was determined to have 

 one of those bears, whether or no, now proposed that we 

 fix up and set this old trap. We therefore dragged the 

 head and neck of the horse up there, rebuilt the trap, set 

 it, and piled upon the top of it the largest and heaviest log 

 we could roll up. The trap was built between two large 

 cedar trees, so as to compel the bear to enter by the front 

 door, and Coleman rubbed blood over the lintel at the 

 entrance. We also cut off one of the front legs of the horse 

 and dragged it back to camp and placed it on the slide 

 where we had seen the second bear. This slide was about 

 four hundred yards above the creek and we had just got 

 back to camp after placing this last bait, and I was doing 



