“THE LAST AMERICAN”? 291 
the very Americans who had proclaimed him their 
national bird, their proud and dominant emblem. 
And in this battle, he, like all the other creatures 
of the wild, was at a tremendous disadvantage, 
for to man alone belongs the coward’s weapon 
which kills from afar—gunpowder. Before gun- 
powder, man had bows and arrows and spears. 
If, instead of primitive man, some other creature 
had learned to kill from afar, how different would 
have been the history of the world! But that is 
idle speculation now. To return to Baldy —— 
As he rose from the river with his fish, he did 
not come back to a tree on the cliff to devour his 
meal. Instead he climbed rapidly till his pierc- 
ing yellow eyes could see well over the upper rim 
of the gorge, on either side, and then sailed west- 
ward, following the curves of an erosion cafion 
which ran back into the folds of the hills, hiding 
a rushing stream at the bottom, beneath its hem- 
locks. Soon, from the rock where he was first 
seen, he became only a moving fleck of black and 
white against the dark mountainsides, and then 
the eye lost him and could not tell where he sank 
into the tree tops—if he did sink into the tree tops 
