The Selkirks Revisited 123 



He was a fine animal, much larger than the first one we had 

 killed, and after looking him over I left him where he had 

 fallen, and we came up the next day and skinned him. 



The dogs did not return to camp for about nine hours, 

 and while we never knew whether they caught up with the 

 bear or not, we had our own opinions. I doubt, indeed, 

 if, master of strategy as he was, and with the lead he had 

 when I turned back, the dog ever lived that could have 

 caught him, or, for the matter of that, any grizzly in those 

 hills that felt disposed to run. As we were to discover 

 later, however, by no means all of them were so disposed. 

 But the alternative that they adopted and its effect upon 

 these particular dogs was a puzzle we were a long time in 

 solving. 



Meanwhile our enthusiasm for hunting bears with dogs 

 suffered an eclipse. It seemed to us that the bear and the 

 dogs had all the fun, and we could not see where our 

 chances of a shot came in. So we tied the hounds up in 

 camp and reverted for a while to our original tactics. 



Toward evening the next day we climbed up to the big 

 slides where we had once set the old deadfall, and sighted 

 two grizzlies feeding along the edges of the bushes. When 

 we had succeeded in creeping up to within three hundred 

 yards of them I thought it best to risk a shot; but Coleman 

 decided that, as they had not yet seen us, we could get a 

 little nearer, and although one of them stood up and 

 sniffled over his shoulder, when he dropped down, and both 

 went on feeding their way toward a clump of brush, Cole- 

 man started to cross a small creek in order to approach 

 them. As he did so we saw the bears, now on the opposite 

 side of the brush and two hundred yards further away^ 



