XI THE SECOND RED BEAR 1S3 



for an animal with such an essentially carnivorous mouth. 

 He allowed us to get within 100 yards, when leaning 

 the rifle against a birch-tree I fired. He swung round 

 to the shot, and then started off at a lumbering gallop 

 apparently uninjured. I opened and closed the breech 

 quickly and pulled the trigger, but there was no report, 

 for I had forgotten to undo the lid that closed the 

 magazine. Rectifying my error, I slipped in a cartridge 

 and fired, but the bear went on. Rapidly letting in 

 another cartridge, I had a third shot just as the animal 

 was topping a rise. This brought him over, and he 

 went rolling out of sight down the hill. When we got 

 up to him he was quite dead, the last bullet having 

 caught him behind the right ear and gone out at the 

 right eye, smashing that side of his skull into fragments. 

 The second shot had been a miss. The first had a 

 curious result. 



The animal had been standing when I fired the first 

 time nearly broadside on, but with his left shoulder 

 slightly further away from me than his left quarters. 

 He was a little below the level at which I stood. On 

 examining the body, I found a large hole in the skin, 

 just above where the left hind leg joins the backbone, 

 and a fragment of bone sticking in the skin ; the side of 

 the backbone was splintered up a bit, but there was no 

 injury to the neighbouring tissues, nor was the backbone 

 broken. Apparently the Jeffrey's bullet had split up on 

 impact, as proved by the large hole in the skin, and had 

 then glanced upwards off the backbone, chipping a piece 

 off it, but not doing any other harm. The animal would 

 have gone off, practically uninjured, but for the bullet 



