368 BIG GAME SHOOTING 
body had been in my way, but now they were in full view, 
standing almost up to their shoulders in the stream, still as 
stone images in the dark shadow of the overhanging bank, 
their heads turned over their shoulders looking in our direc- 
tion, and the long silvery ripples running from their legs down 
stream. It was lucky for me that night that I carried a 
Paradox, with which a man can shoot at short ranges as if he 
were snap-shooting at rabbits in covert, for I had to stand up 
to get a clean shot, I had not a second to lose, and the canoe 
rocked horribly under my feet. The big beast of the two fell 
to my first barrel, sinking where she stood, while her mate got 
my second barrel in the back as he scrambled up the bank, 
making good his escape for the moment into the dense scrub. 
I don’t suppose that the whole incident, from the find until 
we began to fish up my bear, took a minute, and yet into that 
minute was crowded a third of the reward for forty days of 
hard work, short commons and general misery. Is the game 
worth the candle? I think it is, but I don’t want to persuade 
any man to be of my way of thinking, nor do I want to convey 
the impression that all bear hunting is necessarily as grim and 
miserable as it is in Alaska. Butin places where bear hunting 
is easy, bears are getting scarce (at least, grizzlies are), for their 
hides bring a good price and there is a bounty upon their 
scalps as well. The result is that more bears are trapped in 
one year than would be shot in five under ordinary circum- 
stances. For instance, two ‘brothers whom I know killed 
thirty-five bears in 1890 within a radius of eighty miles of their 
cabin. Of course, this sort of thing cannot last. 
It seems a pity, as, whether you hunt him among the mists 
and storms of an Alaskan autumn, or watch for him by a hill 
at the edge of some dark canyon, until even the bird chiguetta - j 
stops her noisy little song, and the outlines of all objects 
become indistinct and moving, Ursus horribilis is better worth 
hunting than any other beast, except perhaps the bighorn, in 2 
all America. 
P.S.—Since writing this, Sir George Lampson has kindly 
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