My First Grizzly 61 



for my gun I could, at first, see nothing of it. But, raising 

 my head a bit, I spied it lying where I had thrown it in my 

 haste to get away, and I at once cut the shell out, carefully 

 thumbed it while I pumped in another cartridge, and 

 then, my own man again, I stood up and looked about me. 



And the first thing I saw was that terrible bear, as dead 

 as a stone, and not more than twenty feet from where it 

 had stood when I shot it. Moreover, it had turned a com- 

 plete somersault and was headed the other way. The bul- 

 let had entered between the shoulder and the neck, had 

 hit no bones except a rib, and had passed over the heart, 

 severing the large blood-vessels. 



Since then I have found that nearly all grizzlies, if shot 

 when they are not aware of the presence of the hunter, will, 

 for some reason, run in the direction from which the wound 

 is received. This, I believe myself, is why so many claim 

 that grizzlies always charge them. The next time my 

 attention was drawn to this I shot across a ravine at a 

 grizzly that had just come out of the bushes. I obtained 

 a side shot at about a hundred and fifty yards, and I made 

 it sitting down, aiming close up to the shoulder. At the 

 crack of the gun the bear turned and charged straight at 

 me, and I could see the brush in the gully sway, and could 

 hear him tearing through it. I ran back a few yards from 

 the edge of the brush so as to get a clear shot at him when 

 he came out of the ravine, and when he emerged I made 

 a movement to shoot. Like a flash he saw me, evidently 

 for the first time, and turned so quickly that, as I was not 

 expecting such a move, I did not have time to fire. He 

 only made a few jumps after seeing me and changing his 

 course, before he fell dead. 



