A Spring-Gun Avoided 139 



the bait hidden there. I then dug the trap out from the 

 wreck of the pen, set it, and slid it in among the leaves and 

 moss, throwing some meat around it, and that night the 

 bear came again, picked up all the loose meat, but touched 

 nothing under the moss. 



A mile up the stream there was an open hill, in the side 

 of which there was a large elk lick where three of our party 

 had been watching, hoping to bag an entire family of elk 

 that frequented it. The morning after the bear made his 

 second visit to the trap this family of elk, a bull, a cow, and 

 a calf, were killed on a small flat above a stream that en- 

 tered our river near the lick. This stream ran through a 

 deep gully and at the point where the elk were killed the 

 sides of this gully formed a sort of shoot, sloping at an ex- 

 tremely steep angle, from a point a hundred feet above the 

 water, sheer to its edge. At the north end of this shoot a 

 mass of down timber, their ends sticking in the water, 

 formed an effective barrier. At the south it was bounded 

 by an outcropping of rock which fell, in a succession of 

 ledges three or four feet high, to the water in front and to 

 the shoot at the side. Twenty-five or thirty feet from the 

 creek, in the middle of this shoot, grew an old cedar-tree. 



Of the three animals that had been shot, we dressed 

 the calf and took it to camp, all except the entrails; we 

 saved the head and hide of the cow, together with the loins 

 and the other choice cuts, but of the bull we took only the 

 head and the hide. All that was left we dragged to the top 

 of this shoot and rolled down it. The carcass of the cow 

 happened to hit the tree and lodged against its trunk. The 

 old bull brought up at the bottom. And there we left 

 them. 



