X 
THE BEAR 
387 
advance most difficult. Through this chaos of 
fallen timber the young spruce had grown with 
extreme vigour, and I never experienced greater 
difficulty in making my way than in this tangled 
and obdurate mass of long trunks of gnarled trees, 
and branches lying at every angle, intergrown with 
the green boughs of younger spruce. 
Bob Stewart wore moccasins, and being exceed¬ 
ingly light and active, he ran up each sloping tree- 
stem for 40 or 50 feet, then dropped nimbly to 
another fallen trunk below, bobbed under a 
mass of heavy timber, like masts in a ship¬ 
builder’s yard, supported as they had chanced 
to fall, and then dived underneath all sorts 
of obstructions. He was followed admiringly, but 
slowly, by myself, not provided with moccasins, but 
in high riding boots. If I had been a squirrel, I 
might perhaps have beaten Bob, but after several 
hundred yards of this horrible entanglement, which 
might have been peopled by all the bears in 
Wyoming, we arrived at a small grassy swamp in 
the bottom of a hollow, just beneath a great mass of 
perpendicular rock, about 70 or 80 feet in height. 
In the centre of this hollow was a pool of water, 
about 8 feet by 6. This had been disturbed so 
recently by some large animal, that the mud was 
still curling in dusky rings, showing that the bath 
had only just been vacated. We halted, and 
examined this attentively. The edges of the little 
pool were wet with the drip from the bear’s shaggy 
coat, as it had left the water. 
