00-KOO-HOO PLAYS THE GAME 117 



reached many hundreds of feet up the almost perpendicular 

 mountains, yet in the middle, where it bridged the river, it 

 was no more than two hundred feet high, though it was about 

 two thousand feet in width. Year in and year out that great 

 snow-bridge spanned the little river, and now when I wanted 

 to make use of it, I had no sooner started over than I dis- 

 covered three bears with the same intention. They, too, had 

 just come out of the woods, and were only forty paces from me 

 — as I afterward measured. We were all going in the same 

 direction, and though we were exactly opposite one another and 

 all walking in a parallel line, no one ran, and for two thousand 

 feet or more, without stick or stone between us, we had a good 

 opportunity to study each other. As usual, I was armed — as 

 I always take care to be — with a penknife and a pocket hand- 

 kerchief. 



Occasionally one reads in the daily press shocking stories 

 of the ferocity of bears. What a pity that the truth of these 

 stories cannot always be run to earth! Billy Le Heup, a 

 prospector and guide of northern Ontario, once having occasion 

 to call for his mail in a little backwoods settlement, opened a 

 newspaper and was shocked to learn that a most harrowing 

 affliction had befallen an old friend of his, by name — But I'm 

 sorry I have forgotten it, so let us call him Jones. The paper 

 reported that while several of Jones's children were out berry- 

 picking, a great, black bear had attacked them, and killing the 

 youngest, a little girl, had devoured her entirely, save only one 

 tiny fragment; for when the rescue party went in search of 

 the poor little child they found nothing but her blood-stained 

 right hand. Le Heup was so overcome with sorrow and so 

 filled with indignation that he then and there determined to 

 get together a few trapper friends of his and at once start by 

 canoe for the scene of the tragedy, only a few miles away; there 

 to condole with the poor father, trail the huge brute and wreak 

 vengeance upon the child-eating monster. So Bill, with several 



