Sept. a8, iQOi,] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
249 
evergreen tree, lay a vast, brown object, so big that I 
could not believe it was our game. "What is that, Jack?" 
I asked, pointing down into the coulee. 
"By the Lord'" cried Jack. "There he is!" 
So now we shook hands, as only two hunters could do 
under such circumstances^ and then plunged on down the 
steep incline. 
There, lyiiig vast and shapeless, inert and soft looking, 
sliU gasping- and perhaps still dangerous, was our bear. 
He had run perhaps one hundred and fifty yards, or, 
rather, had perhaps run fifty yards before he stumbled^ 
raiid fell with his first breath. We later found a vast 
quantity of blood where he had first fallen, probably 
blown from his lungs when he first breathed. Thence 
he had tried to cross along the steep side, had stumbled 
and staggered and finally dropped just in the little stream 
of water which ran down the coulee. 
The whole world now seemed changed. So far from 
this being a vale of tears and an abode of grief and sor- 
row, we both decided this earth to be a spot of joy and 
gladness. We jabbered like two school children as we 
went to work to take care of our meat. Knowing that 
it would be too late to get the others up from camp, 
and too dark for any photographing, we decided simply 
to open the bear and come back the next morning with 
the others of the party and make some photographs 
of his bearship. 
When we opened the carcass we found evidence enough 
of the terrible quality of this hollow point, steel-jacketed 
.30-40 bullet. The shot had entered through the side, 
rather high up and well back in the flank. It had torn 
the liver into pieces, cut the entrails, and blown the 
upper part of the hmgs practically into bits. This much 
we found in our hurried exaxnination of that evening. 
When, on the following morning, we brought up the 
entire oarty, Madame and all, to see the fallen game, we 
found upon skinning the bear that the wound had been 
leven more serious than we had first supposed. Upon the 
far side of the carcass, just back of the shoulder, there 
were tAvo holes, either of which was larger than the first 
one made bv the bullet on its entry. A part of the metal 
base of the bulkt we found within the body of the bear. 
Two other parts of the bullet had passed on clear through 
the bear, probably a part of the metal jacket making one 
hole and the lead of the bullet making the other. One 
of the ribs was shattered. Two holes were about eight 
inches apart upon the farther side of the body. Old John 
Monroe, who came up with us the next morning, gravely 
assured me that I must have shot the bear twice, as there 
were two holes. Yet the wound was made with a single 
charge. Strangest of all, after removing the hide, we 
came upon a g«-eat blood- shotten mass of flesh, which 
lay outside of the ribs. Here the bullet had some ex- 
plosive effect. The flesh was simply blown into pulp, 
.ind one could take his hand and scrape away from the 
ribs all their covering for a space of eight or ten inches. 
It is supposed that these hollow point .30-4OS do not 
go through the game, and Billy Hofer thought that the 
fact of this btdlet having traversed the entire body of 
so large an animal was due to the fact that it was shot 
at rather long range. I was about one hundred and twen- 
ty-five vards from the bear when I shot it. At thirty, 
forty, or fifty yards, the bullet probably would not have 
gone through, and its ef?ect would have been still more 
terrific. 
After studying the nature of this wound, I came to the 
deliberate conclusion that I was not afraid of the biggest 
srizzly bear that ever ran the riiountains. One of these 
times I hope to meet him face to face and in the open, 
and if he ever starts toward me and I have this same gun 
and same load, he'll be the very worst mussed-up bear 
that ever was. T do not believe that any bear can stand 
a single shot from one of these hollow-point bullets at 
close range, provided that the shot be delivered anywhere 
within the hollow of the body. It would blow a bear's 
head to nieces. I imagme. Of course, when a bullet 
passes through the body of an animal, it lessens the 
•ihock very much. It is impossible to suppose that any 
idnimal could take the full impact of that blow within its 
body and then have strength enough left to come on, 
The only wonder to me was that this bear was able to go 
so far after being hit so hard. The shot would not 
ordinarily be called a good one; that is to say, a well- 
placed one, as it was far back and through the bowels. 
Yet it was good enough to land the meat with this car- 
tridge, as we now had plenty of proof. 
That night we made merry at our camp on Two Medi- 
cine Lake As I have said, John Monroe and his "hu- 
man" were there, Jack Monroe was there (no relative of 
John Monroe, it should be remembered, but a pure An- 
glo-Saxon, albeit as keen a bear hunter as even the old 
Hudson Bay man) ; we were all there, and since I had 
now become more tolerable as a camp associate after 
killing the bear, there was a sound of revelry by night. 
In the morning, when we tried to make some photo- 
graphs of our bear the weather was not quite so favorable. 
Rain was falling nearly rdl the time, and the valley from 
Eising Wolf to the upper lake was filled with storm 
after storm. Yet, wonderful to see, and one more of 
those wonderful things which are continually happening 
in the Rockies, there'was a vast rainbow, not quite per- 
fect but tremendous in its size, reaching from the bot- 
tom of the mountain to its top, a glorious, bright-painted 
rainbow, which swung not in an arch, as does the rain- 
bow of the prairies, but lay like an enormous blanket, 
fiat on tiie side of Rising Wolf. This was, perhaps the 
piost remarkable spectacle ever afforded us by this moun- 
tain, the moimtain which is called Mahqueeapah, or the 
Wolf That Stands. 
Old John Monroe proved the main beneficiary by our 
bear hunt. We kept out one ham, which was all we cared 
to retain of the meat John and his "woman" deftly 
butchered the rest of the carcass, and somehow managed 
to pack it on a couple of horses, with which they forth- 
with started out for home. I gave the hide to Mrs. Mon- 
roe for tanning, and the last I saw of it it was stretched 
on a big pole frame, nicely grained and promising to 
make a splendid robe. T found no fault with it except 
that it was not the hide of a grizzly nor the hide of a 
bear which died fighting. As to that latter part, I do 
not believe one is very apt to find any bear in the Rocky 
Mountains which will make much of a fight these days. 
They ar? all. bvisj pecking to take care of their own Jiides, 
hiffeed. thev hi^Y"-' ^ vn' e^ood right to do This 
bear hide, when spread out over "Bucky" Collins' all- 
suffering Uttle cayuse, proved pretty nearly big enough to 
cover him up. We took it to be about seven feet in 
length. When stretched on the frame and partly dried, 
it was as wide across as I could span with my out- 
stretched arms. The feet were peculiarly large on this 
beari. The track in the snow was as long as the comb 
of my rifle, which we afterward" measured and found to 
be eight inches. It was eight inches between the eyes 
and built all round like a hired man. Everybody told 
me. as everybody has told me since I came back, that I 
had no right to complain about the success of my bear 
hunt, aiad had every reason in the world to be congratu- 
lated. 
Uv bear made the fourth which had been killed between 
ihe Great Northern Railroad and the British line th^s 
spring. A man by the name of McNeil got a splendid 
silver tip in the St. Mary's country the same week that 
I killed my bear, but this bear was killed by means of 
a set gun, which was left at the bait, and not shot in the 
open by the hunter. Another man by the name of Purdy, 
whom I met at the Agency before I came away, had two 
good skins, one a black and one a siiver tip, the i)lack 
bear being larger than the silver tip. He and some friends 
had shot both these bears, which were bayed up by a dog. 
The grizzly skin, I think, was not a very large one, net 
so large as the - black bear, and, according to Purdy's 
story, not six feet in length. These were the only bears 
I heard of being killed during the season at the tnne I 
left. Tom Dawson and a party last fall, while hunting 
around the upper lake, ran into a bunch of four grizzlies, 
and of these they killed two very nice on'es. 
My trip was now nearly at its natural end, for time was 
growing short. I felt much disappointment at not having 
landed my grizzly, and hung on like grim death, taking 
Jack Monroe's advice in regard to the last day of the 
hunt. Nothing came in again at the bait, and nothing 
bothered our Hudson Bay dead fall, which we continually 
hoped would produce the hide of that little i)lack bear 
which was roaming the wood back of our camp and 
whose trail we saw nearly every time we came down the 
mountainside. We waited two more days, ai:d, on the 
second day, Collins, Jack and I again went up through 
the woods to sec the dead fall. Coming down through 
the little parks at the edge, of the lake to take ship again 
in the canvas boat in which we had come part of '..he way 
on our journey from camp. Jack sat down with his field 
glasses, and, following his usual custom, began to search 
the mountainsides for game. He was examining some 
little open parks or dark-colored slides on the face of 
the mountain across the lake and about three miles away 
from us, when all at once he stopped and uttered an 
exclamation. 
"Four bears!" said he, "and all in one bunch! Weil, 
wouldn't that kill you?" 
ITe handed me the glasses and I looked where he in- 
dicated. Sure enough, there were four bears — one black 
bear, or a dark-colored one, and two smaller ones, also 
dark in color. The fourth bear was as big as all the 
other three together. He was a yellowish, whitish, pep- 
per and salt color. This I could see distinctly. All at 
once he turned ?nd ambled off across the open face of the 
slide, where he had been digging, and then, in a fla.sh, T 
saw the square, blocky head, the square-cut quarters, the 
high shoulders and the unmistakable back of the grizzly 
bear. There he was, the very bear in all likelihood which 
had eaten up the first horse, and the very bear on whose 
trail we had been camping thus long! 
On the day before, Jack Monroe and I had been over 
on that part of the mountain and we had trailed a bunch 
of four bears through the fresh snow clear .lown to the 
foot of the lake, just opposite to where we were sitting 
at that time- We had taken it that these bears were ali 
black bears, although one of them was a very large one. 
This fourth black bear we now missed, but his place was 
taken by this big grizzly, on what sort of basis only the 
bear faiiiily itself could have told us. Yet here he_ was, 
and he was a grizzly just as sure as we were sitting 
there. 
Under these circumstances, although it was now late, 
in the evening, and although Collins and Jack were in 
their shirt sleeves, we did not hesitate for an instant. 
We hurried to the boat, and in spite of the stiff wind, 
were soon across the lake and on our way up the steep 
mountain side. Then I saw a specimen of mountain 
climbing such as I had never before witnessed. If I 
had not been there. Jack and Collins would have gone 
clear up without a single pause. It was more than two 
miles and about forty-five degrees, over all sorts of go- 
•ng, and much of the way over deep, wet snow. I fr.und 
it imperative to stop and rest very often, and, of course, 
this delayed the others. Had I been as fast as Jack Mon- 
roe, for instance, we would probably have gotten that 
grizzly, but there are few such sets of lungs and legs as 
these with which I was now in friendly competition. I 
do not know how long it was before we got up to the 
little, open place where we had seen the bears, perhaps 
an hour. 
Here we met with another piece of that bad luck which 
seemed to hang over me all the way through the trip. 
We got up above the first slide where we had seen the 
bears. There were two other little, open spaces or parks 
on the face of the mountain, all within a quarter of a 
mile, and we had figured out that, as the bears were 
feeding toward us, they would probably show up on one 
of these other open places by the time we got up there. 
Yet we could not get any trace of them. Losing our way 
in the dense forest, ottt of which we could not see the 
.spurs of the mountains in order to range ourselves, we 
appeared on the first park where we had seen the bears 
instead of the last one, where we expected to see tliem. 
.\s a matter of fact, we were standing within twenty-five 
feet of the trail of the bears when we looked down into 
that first open place. This we did not kno\y, so we 
swung around and spent an hour and a quarter in travel- 
ing over that steep country in the hope of taking up the 
trail of the bears after they had left the slide. At last 
we were obliged to come out into the open countrj- our- 
selves. We saw the great holes which the bears had torn 
in the soft soil of the earth slides where they had been 
looking for little roots and pieces of green vegetation. 
Aggin we had occasion to admire the tremendous power 
of these great animals. Here we <!ould see the foot 
mark pf the bie^ hear and note his e?NCPYating operations, 
I had sized this bear up against a big rock which was lo- 
cated in the middle of the slide. He looked pretty nearly 
as big as the rock, but when I got to the rock, it seemed 
so large that I could hardly credit my own vision. 
We spread out at this point, fully an houi; behind the 
game, and began to cast around for the trail, there be- 
ing only patches of snow here and there. At last we 
found that the bears had gone straight up the mountain 
instead of along its face. We at length lined out their 
trail and followed it up until it struck continuous snow 
along the face of the rocks, just at the edge of the tim- 
ber line. We had proof enough here of the accuracy of our 
original conclusion. With this party of bears, three black 
bears, without peradventure, there was one tremendous 
grizzly bear. We figured that he had probably driven off 
the big black bear which was with this same bunch the 
day previous. He was following along behind the 
others, sometimes a little at one side. Collins had a foot 
of rather generous proportions, at least, a number ten. 
He stepped into the track of the big fellow's hind foot, 
and there was enough of the bear's footprint showing in 
the snow in front and behind the rubber overshoe 
enough to prove that he was a very big grizzly indeed. 
Where he had struck the snow banks, he plowed through 
much as a herd of cattle wotdd, or like a steam shovel 
throtigh a bank of mud. 
At last we had located a real grizzly and a good, big 
one at that. I need not say that we strained every 
muscle in our attempt to get »p with this game. We 
now did a nice piece of still hunting as I have ever seen, 
and one so well planned and executed that it deserved 
success. Under Jack's leadership, he being far and away 
the best hunter of us all, we did not follow along this 
tiail, but paralleled it, only going into it every half mile 
or so, and keeping the wind in our favor as much as 
possible. The trail, as obvious as a pack train could 
have made it, could be seen at some distance through 
the woods on the surface of the snow. It wound and 
zig-zagged and led off on and up, as well as off to the 
eastward. I do not know whether or not the bears had 
seen us when we crossed the lake, but thought it very 
unlikely, as a bear cannot see more than a half or three- 
quarters of a mile at most, according to the old hunters. 
The bears did not seem to be alarmed, and we followed 
them until nearly dark, over the snow banks, through the 
worst of timber, and at last over a vast blowout of 
ragged rocks, where the trail could not be seen at all, 
though we picked it up tipon the other side. At the top 
of this blowout we made our one error, and a fatal one. 
For perhaps one hundred yards we followed directly 
along the trail, because the going was better at that place 
and because the trail was plainer. Fatal mistake! We 
were then, although we did not know it, less than three 
hundred yards from the bears. That infant black bear 
ran ttp on a little hillock of snow, as we saw by his tell- 
tale footprints. He turned around, and then he either 
saw us or smelt us. This news he communicated to the 
others. There lay the record on the snow. We went 
along a little way and saw that, instead of walking and 
playing and rolling around in the snow, as the bears 
had been doing previously, they had now broken into a 
' long gallop. 
"It's all up," said Jack. "It's no use scanng them any 
more. We'd just as well go back to camp." 
So, drenched to the skin, cold and shivering in the 
cold, night wind in spite of our exertions, we again 
turned down the hill and reported at camp the last of our 
story of ill-fortune. 
I would not weary the readers of. Forest and Stream 
with a mere record of personal doings. Our time was 
now up, and although I much longed to spend a week 
or ten days more and get that grizzly, as I am satisfied 
we could' have done, I decided that on the second day 
thereafter we must break camp and start for home. Yet 
we fought it out to the end as gamely as we could. On 
the next morning after that long trail in the snow. Jack 
and I rode forty-five miles among the Indian houses be- 
low, until at length we rounded up in the woods, high 
up on the mountains, with a poor and broken-down 
cayuse. whose merciful end we made serve us as yet 
another temptation for the wandering bear. This time 
we put out our bait far to the east of where we had left 
the bunch of bears the day before, hoping that they 
might not have fled far out of the country, and have 
turned back and continued to feed along the range of 
mountain where we had seen so much bear sign; namely, 
that vast, black slope of timber which lies on the north- 
ern or upper part of the Two Medicine Lake. We had 
left two nights and one day as the sum total of time in 
which we could land our grizzly. While Jack and I were 
doing this work, the others broke camp and moved down 
toward the Agency, camping in a little coulee on the 
high ridge, where there was water and wood. Here, 
after our long day in the saddle, Jack and I slept. 
The next day there came a bitter cold rain, which fell 
steadily for more than twelve hours, and we did not think 
It worth while to go up into the mountains under the 
circumstances. The next morning camp was broken and 
a start made for home by the wagon outfit. Jack and 
1 rode up to visit our last bait. Nothing had touched it, 
and so, v/ith a final sinking of the heart, I gave it up 
and started for the settlements. Collins, whom we sent 
up to visit the old bait about six miles above and on the 
lower side of Two Medicine lake, reported that he had 
seen nothing at the dead , horse, but had seen a black 
bear at the dead fall. He said that he destroyed the 
dead fall, according to our orders. We laughed at him 
and told him that he was "seeing things," and asked him 
why he didn't shoot the bear according to instructions. 
He declared that he had come down and tried to find us 
so that I could kill this bear. I had no more use for 
black bears, and after finding that we were not going to 
land the big grizzly, whom we had christened "Old 
Pete," the subsequent proceedings interested me very 
little. 
That same night Madame and I started east for the 
busy city. Billy Hofer went west to Seattle, and Jack 
Monroe and Collins resumed their activities among the 
coyote population. Jack had landed two litters of coy- 
ote puppies, 15 in all. Worth $S apiece. I told him to 
watch those baits, and if he saw "Old Pete" to kill him 
sure and send me his hide, for if I couldn't kill him 
myself. I owed him a gfudge for having led ug the 
dance he had for all these many days, I don't think Ja>Lk 
^Y9lll(l til? bvtir or t^ll anyone else whe?^ t\\^ 
