84 The Grizzly Bear 



I would then search carefully the open hillside as far as 

 possible before moving ahead on the trail. Once I was 

 able, with the aid of my field glasses, to make out his 

 course for nearly a half mile, where he had climbed up 

 the side of an open hill. 



By this time, however, the sun had gone down and 

 trailing was now not only necessarily slow work, but bad 

 policy, since a wrong move would spoil my whole game. 

 I was ten miles or more from camp, and only a short dis- 

 tance behind the bear, yet I did not dare follow him, for fear 

 he would discover me and I would lose him altogether. 

 I therefore turned down the mountain into the bottom 

 where there was a little creek, built a small lean-to of fir 

 boughs back some ten or twelve feet from a large boulder, 

 got up plenty of wood, built a fire against the rock, and ate 

 the lunch I had brought with me. The lean-to sheltered 

 me from the wind, the heat reflected from the rock made 

 my camp comfortable, and when my fire needed replenish- 

 ing during the night, Jack Frost woke me up to attend 

 to it. 



At the first streak of day I started up the mountain to 

 the point where I had left the trail the evening before, and 

 took up the stern chase with renewed interest. I followed 

 up mountains and down gulches for miles without finding 

 where the animal had stopped to dig for anything, and 

 I began to think that he had made up his mind to leave 

 the country. At last, however, I saw a pile of dirt far 

 ahead, and knew that he had stopped at least for a short 

 time. The hole was not so large or so deep as the first 

 one, but it had evidently yielded a mouthful or two of 

 ground squirrel for breakfast. Farther along he had dug 



