THE GUN AT HOME AND ABROAD 
One evening two ravens appeared and dived about the air over a certain 
spot. I made my way to it and found a skeleton of a female white -tail 
that had been dead about two months. That was the end of a very painful 
episode which lived in my memory for years afterwards. Had we only 
kept on shooting, when the bear first fell, I am sure we should have 
killed him. That he was dead somewhere in the swamp was doubtless 
true, but without a dog he could not have been found. 
The grizzly bear is a tough animal and I resolved that if I ever met 
another I would not spare the cartridges. Twenty -two years passed away 
before I met another, and then I had a better rifle and had more experience 
of wild animals. 
Down in the rain-soaked valley of the Stickine many grizzlies and black 
bears come to haunt the streams that flow into the great northern river in 
the autumn. Here the hump -backed salmon are in abundance and easily 
caught as they wallow in a dying state in the shallows. 
I was accompanied by a Liard River Indian and a Thaltan Indian who 
knew the river and where bears were to be found. We hunted the first 
day without success. On the second day we reached a side stream which 
was evidently a fine bear resort, for the whole place was trampled with the 
trails of many black bears and two large grizzlies. 
I did not see a grizzly but had a shot at a fine old male black bear which 
I killed. The next day we reached the little canon at three in the afternoon, 
just as it began to snow heavily. In fact, it never ceases to rain or to snow 
in this inhospitable region. We landed on the edge of a dense forest of giant 
Menzies’s spruce trees and, leaving one Indian to make camp, Albert, the 
Liard Indian, and I wandered slowly up the stream, which here comes out 
of the great mountains into the main Stickine. We could see for a distance 
of 500 yards over a perfectly open flat before the little stream entered the 
forest jungle at the base of the main range. The scenery is here magnificent. 
Great woods of spruce, too dense to penetrate, clothed the river levels, and 
above is the stunted pine and birch region for several thousand feet, and 
above that the bare rocks and plateaux, ascending to seven or eight thousand 
feet. Not a breath of wind stirred and the snow descended in a white cloud. 
Far away in the gloomy recesses of the small canon the stream disappeared, 
and that I knew was the length of our hunting ground, for man can scarcely 
penetrate the mass of fallen timber and devil’s club. We had not gone far 
when, on the snow, we saw the fresh track of a huge grizzly. He had crossed 
and recrossed the stream less than an hour before our advent. 
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