A COLORADO BEAR HUNT 93 



She was smaller than the one I had shot the day before, 

 but full grown. In her stomach, as in those of the two 

 yearlings, there were buds of rose-bushes and quaking 

 aspens. One yearling had also swallowed a mouse. It 

 was a long ride to camp, and darkness had fallen by the 

 time we caught the gleam from the lighted tents, across 

 the dark stream. 



With neither of these last two bear had there been any 

 call for prowess ; my part was merely to kill the bear dead 

 at the first shot, for the sake of the pack. But the days 

 were very enjoyable, nevertheless. It was good fun to 

 be twelve hours in the saddle in such wild and beautiful 

 country, to look at and listen to the hounds as they 

 worked, and finally to see the bear treed and looking 

 down at the maddened pack baying beneath. 



For the next two or three days I was kept in camp 

 by a touch of Cuban fever. On one of these days Lam- 

 bert enjoyed the longest hunt we had on the trip, after 

 an old she-bear and three yearlings. The yearlings treed 

 one by one, each of course necessitating a stoppage, and 

 it was seven in the evening before the old bear at last went 

 up a cottonwood and was shot; she was only wounded, 

 however, and in the fight she crippled Johnny's Rowdy 

 before she was killed. When the hunters reached camp 

 it was thirteen hours since they had left it. The old bear 

 was a very light brown; the first yearling was reddish- 

 brown, the second light yellowish-brown, the third dark 

 black-brown, though all were evidently of the same litter. 



Following this came a spell of bad weather, snow- 

 storm and blizzard steadily succeeding one another. 



