

A COLORADO BEAR HUNT 81 



Next morning we rode off early, taking with us all 

 twenty-six hounds and the four terriers. We wished first 

 to find whether the bear had gone out of the country in 

 which we had seen him, and so rode up a valley and then 

 scrambled laboriously up the mountain-side to the top of 

 the snow-covered divide. Here the snow was three feet 

 deep in places, and the horses plunged and floundered as 

 we worked our way in single file through the drifts. But 

 it had frozen hard the previous night, so that a bear could 

 walk on the crust and leave very little sign. In conse- 

 quence we came near passing over the place where the 

 animal we were after had actually crossed out of the 

 canyon-like ravine in which we had seen him and gone 

 over the divide into another set of valleys. The trail was 

 so faint that it puzzled us, as we could not be certain how 

 fresh it was, and until this point could be cleared up we 

 tried to keep the hounds from following it. Old Jim, 

 however, slipped off to one side and speedily satisfied 

 himself that the trail was fresh. Along it he went, giving 

 tongue, and the other dogs were maddened by the sound, 

 while Jim, under such circumstances, paid no heed what- 

 ever to any effort to make him come back. Accordingly, 

 the other hounds were slipped after him, and down they 

 ran into the valley, while we slid, floundered, and scram- 

 bled along the ridge crest parallel to them, until a couple 

 of miles farther on we worked our way down to some 

 great slopes covered with dwarf scrub-oak. At the edge 

 of these slopes, where they fell off in abrupt descent to 

 the stream at the bottom of the valley, we halted. Op- 

 posite us was a high and very rugged mountain-side cov- 



