198 
FOREST AND STREAM 
May, 1921 
ens, besides other novels and maga- 
zines. There was a home-made table, a 
bunk against the wall with Hudson’s 
Bay blankets for bedding and a mar- 
mot robe for a coverlet. The cabin had 
one window of six small panes, the 
floor was of rough boards, and the door 
was equipped with the old-fashioned 
latch, opened by the string which always 
hangs outside. 
The price of beef is of no concern to 
Conover; for moose are plentiful, and 
moose steak or roast is as good as the 
choicest beef. His landlord is the game 
warden, and his rent the hunter’s and 
trapper’s annual license fees. Coal 
miners’ strikes and railroad strikes 
trouble him not, for his fuel is at his 
door. He neither waits for the coming 
of winter to lay in his supply of wood, 
nor does he get it when needed; but 
early in the spring, he cuts his supply 
from green timber. Green timber is 
easily cut into proper lengths, and, when 
dried out during the summer, it makes 
the best of fuel. In the airy fur house, 
was the winter’s catch of marten, mink, 
lynx, fox, weasel and wolverine. 
Conover has for music the ripple of 
waters and the songs of many birds; 
rugged mountain peaks, with snowy 
summits and evergreen sides, provide the 
view from his doorstep, and mountain 
goats, moose, and bears are his nearest 
neighbors. 
O N May seventeenth, we loaded our 
duffle into a canoe and began the 
journey up the Clearwater River. 
It is a swift, glacial stream with many 
become sloughs. Upon the bars, and 
along the sloughs, we saw the tracks 
of grizzlies, black bears, coyotes, wolves, 
and moose. While Conover poled and 
lined the canoe up the river, I walked 
over the bgrs. 
Upon the second day out, the tracks 
of bear had apparently been made so 
recently that we camped early. 
Towards evening we started out to hunt 
along a slough. Conover, who was 
had him treed, made me hasten to him. 
I found him on a log at the foot of a 
large cottonwood tree. A fully grown 
black bear was about fifty feet up the 
tree, with his shoulders over a limb 
and his belly and hindquarters against 
the trunk. Conover had surprised the 
bear and it had taken to a tree. This 
they usually do when they are startled. 
I promptly shot the bear; but he did 
not fall. I was surprised that the force 
Captain Conover preparing to shoot the rapids 
The vehicle of an amphibious navigation 
rapids, cutting its way through a broad 
valley, covered with boulders. It is ever 
changing its channel, eroding the banks 
and throwing out new bars. As a result 
of the erosion, the valley is strewn with 
fallen trees that have been swept into 
it by the undermining of the banks. At 
places, the river bed divides into sev- 
eral channels; and as these small chan- 
nels silt up at their inlet and outlet, they 
armed with only a small axe, turned 
into a thicket to get some traps that he 
had cached a year previously, while I 
continued down the slough. I had gone 
but :a hundred yards or so when I heard 
him calling. As I answered a small 
black bear jumped to the trunk of a 
tree. I was upon the point of shooting 
it when the thought that either Conover 
had a black bear up a tree, or a grizzly 
of the blow did not knock him out of the 
tree. I shot the second time with the 
same result, and then it dawned upon us 
that the first shot had killed the animal, 
and that he was stuck in the tree. It 
seemed impossible that so large an ani- 
mal, limp and smooth, should thus hang 
over a limb. A branch from the limb, 
upon which the shoulders rested, en- 
circled the body beneath the fore leg 
and held the body firm. Killing the 
bear was an ordinary hunting incident, 
but its lodgment in the tree, and the 
incidents that followed, I believed at 
the time were quite unusual. 
T O get the bear down was our prob- 
lem. There was not a branch be- 
tween the ground and the bear; 
the cottonwood was at least ten feet in 
circumference; to climb fifty feet was 
impossible ; and we had only a small axe 
with which to fell the tree. After con- 
sidering various schemes for getting our 
bear, Conover selected a small spruce, 
about twenty feet from the bear tree, 
and felled it against that tree. Then 
he climbed the small spruce to the cot- 
tonwood and dislodged three hundred 
and fifty nounds of bear. The animal, 
with its long glossy black fur, was a 
handsome specimen of its species. 
While hunting we often believe that 
we have met with the unusual, that we 
have witnessed something new, that we 
have made an original discovery. But an 
investigation will develop that we are 
merely telling an old story. Thoreau, in 
“The Maine Woods” describes the same 
