752 
FOREST AND STREAM 
Dec. 13, 1913. 
“Speaking Of Bears” 
I N the half-light of the early morning the ski 
slipped with a sharp, brisk, whisking sound 
over the crusted snow; as the frosty crystals 
softened and disappeared before the first rays of 
the rising sun our progress, save for the thud of 
the steering poles, was almost noiseless; in an¬ 
other hour the crust settled around us with a 
protesting crunch, and soon the thin layer, honey¬ 
combed by the April rains, began to "pick up,” 
and we pushed our way with difficulty through 
the soft and bally snow. 
Through the shaded stretches in the timber 
it was better—just hard enough to keep us on top 
of the crust, and soft enough to give good steer¬ 
ing grip. Then we came into the open again and 
stopped to tighten our straps for the steep, twisty 
coast to the river. Fifty yards below the trail 
was broken and wallowed as by some large ani¬ 
mal, and we “corduroyed” carefully down to 
avoid the hole before beginning our plunge. 
“Grizzlies,” pronounced Hope, the scout, as 
he examined the deep row of footprints that ran 
on down the hill. “See them claw marks? Black 
an' brown uns alius walk wi’ um sheathed; 
nothin’ but grizzlies nail down their footprints. 
Don't ’peer to keer if they do be follered.” 
“Bears, hey?” laughed Ford, my hunting com¬ 
panion, coming up and stopping to poke a wad 
of packed snow from under his instep. Well, 
I haven’t lost any bears. Why, three years ago, 
up in Alaska, I— 
Hope was disappearing, a gray streak, around 
the first bend, and knowing the story would keep 
I hastened to follow; Ford, new to the sport, 
awkwardly steadied himself on his floundering 
ski and fell in behind. 
I rounded the turn at a sharp clip, cutting 
hard on the inside with my pole to keep the road; 
then, swinging into the straight stretch, I set¬ 
tled myself to a crouching balance, swung my 
pole above my head and tensed mind and body 
for the downward plunge. And then, and not 
till then, when the air was beginning to whip my 
face and my seed was quite beyond control, did I 
see two great hairy beasts, standing shoulder-deep 
in the snow, squarely in the middle of the trail. 
Hope was on them even as I looked. Holding 
his direction until he had almost reached the wal¬ 
low, he swerved sharply to the right, shot against 
and partly up the steeply sloping bank, passed the 
bears, and darted back to the road again. A few 
seconds later he was a twinkling shadow, flit¬ 
ting down the long lane of spruces on the river 
bottom. 
The stolid brutes never moved from their 
tracks. I made no endeavor to stop, but adopting 
Hope’s tactics, managed, though far less expertly, 
to skirt the danger zone as he had done. Ven¬ 
turing to glance back as I regained the trail, I 
crossed the points of my ski and was thrown 
.with a good deal of force headlong into the bank, 
filling my eyes with snow, but not hurting myself 
in the least or even breaking the thongs which 
bound the ski to my ankles. 
My momentary glance had revealed Ford, his 
eyes almost popping from his head and his face 
purple with exertion, riding his pole and strain¬ 
ing every nerve and sinew to come to a stop. 
But all in vain. While I still struggled to right 
myself, there was a crash and a yell from above, 
and when at last I regained my feet nothing was 
visible on the trail but the ends of two long strips 
of hickory, while just entering the timber below, 
and fairly falling over each other in their terror, 
were the panic-stricken grizzlies. 
By LEWIS R. FREEMAN 
Ford’s head rose cautiously out of the hole, 
as though he expected every instant to feel a 
paw on his neck, and his stare of thankful amaze¬ 
ment when he saw a clear coast was comical in 
the extreme. But the humor of the situation 
struck him almost as soon as it did me, and he 
laughed heartily at his predicament like the good 
fellow that he was. 
“Reminds me of the time, old chap,” he 
panted, as he picked his way down to me, “that 
I started to tell you of at the top of the hill. 
It was in Alaska where the bears are different 
from these well-fed. half-tame brutes of the Yel¬ 
lowstone country. Sleep eight months out of the 
twelve. Come out with a six-inch coat of hair 
and an appetite that respects nothing from brown 
bark to green prospectors. And big—well—•” 
A faint haloo from below cut short the re¬ 
cital, and coasting down to Hope we learned that 
the water was rising rapidly on the river flats 
and that in another hour they would probably be 
impassable. The rest of the day was a heart¬ 
breaking run in slush and water, but half a dozen 
times, when his breath came back to him during 
a spell of good going in the shadows, Ford began 
his story, and as often was he compelled to give 
it up and concentrate his attention upon the ever 
recurrent problem of making one lagging hickory 
push past the other. But at night, after we had 
reached the Government emergency cabin at the 
forks, eaten a hearty supper and watched the 
glory of the Wyoming sunset fade above the 
jagged summits of the distant Tetons, as we 
lighted our pipes around the glowing sheet iron 
army stove, he opened up again. 
“Speaking of bears—” Hope and I refilled 
and settled back resignedly into our sack-uphol¬ 
stered camp chair and Ford started in at the 
beginning. 
“In the winter of ’99, accompanied by Con¬ 
nie Chamberlain, who had been at Oxford with 
me and with whom I had been ranching in Al¬ 
berta. I went to Alaska on the heels of the gold 
excitement which so stirred the world that fall. 
Together we had ‘mushed’ our dog teams across 
the frozen mountains into Northwest Territory—■ 
it has since been named Yukon Territory—and, 
with a dozen others, were preparing to placer on 
one of the numerous tributaries of the upper 
Alsek River. After innumerable adventures and 
no little hardship and suffering, we had reached 
our claims early in May and were spending the 
time till the snow went away sufficiently to allow 
11s to placer in whip-sawing lumber, building 
boxes and generally putting things in shape for 
a prosperous summer. Game was abundant and 
it was an unusual thing not to have a mess of 
fish or a cut of venison sizzling in our frying 
pans, or a stew of grouse or ptarmigan simmer¬ 
ing on our little Yukon stove. 
“One morning spring came. Perhaps it had 
come before, but it was only now, when the pre¬ 
liminary work was over and another week of 
thaw would leave us ready to begin shovelling 
nuggets—as we hoped—that I noticed it. Any¬ 
how, it was nothing more than the charm of the 
long-deferred but doubly beautiful Arctic spring, 
and as I kicked into my snowshoes—not ski, but 
the regular old Siwash webs—and turned down 
the canon, inhaling the fresh but almost balmy 
air, it seemed to me that the subtle influences 
of nature had never appealed so strongly to my 
senses, and I sped along over the still firm crust 
as happy as a child chasing butterflies. 
“There was still a great depth of snow on 
the mountain tops and in the ravines, but here 
and there the most rugged crags were dropping 
their fringes of icicles and rearing their black 
buttresses higher every day from the encompass¬ 
ing banks below. Even the rounded edges of the 
benches were peeping forth, clothed from the 
moment of their first appearance with the bright¬ 
est verdure which, nursed and fed by the almost 
endless sunlight of the Arctic summer eagerly ad¬ 
vanced over every inch given up by the rapidly re¬ 
treating snow. In some places daisies and butter¬ 
cups were out, heralding there, as in warmer 
climes, the coming of summer, and bravely hold¬ 
ing up their heads, though now and then the 
morning Chinook, softly stirring through the 
canon, brushed their bright faces against the 
snow at their backs. 
The morning was well along, though the sun, 
which had been shining for hours on the distant 
peaks, had not yet invaded the river bottom. 
Right ahead, over across the valley, it struck on 
the flank of a great pyramidal mountain, leaving 
the shadowed side dark and indistinct, and throw¬ 
ing the other, like a floating sheet of chiseled ala¬ 
baster, into bright and sparkling relief. Far off 
on the sides of the mountain where the sun was 
striking, the little streamlets were beginning to 
run, falling ‘like downward smokes,’ gaining in 
volume as they struck the lower levels, till they 
finally plunged under the snow and disappeared. 
Only a slight depression in the snow and the 
‘chunk-chunk’ of the water-rolled boulders told 
where the roaring Kha-Sha—‘The Daughter of 
the Mountains’—foamed on its tumultuous course 
to the lower valley. 
“At intervals of several hundred feet down 
the canon, where the black sides were the steep¬ 
est, great slides had come down during the win¬ 
ter, carrying rocks and trees with them and pil¬ 
ing up all the way across the gulch. When once 
into the canon, therefore, it was impossible to 
see ahead or behind farther than the summits of 
the nearest of these towering ridges of snow. 
“I had brought my rifle—a new Savage—in 
the hope of seeing a deer or a sheep. Then, too, 
there was the big bald-faced bear that had chased 
Gardner into camp one night, but—well, the most 
of us thought him a creature of Gardner’s imagi¬ 
nation. I pushed down the canon, taking an 
occasional shot at the head of a ptarmigan, and 
invariably tearing up the snow beyond or to one 
side, or striking it full in the body with the soft- 
nosed bullet and leaving only a head, a pair of 
furry legs and a few blood-stained feathers to 
mark the spot. I couldn’t shoot any better then 
than I can now. 
“I saw some sheep on the mountainside at a 
considerable distance, standing motionless and 
watching me from the edge of a cliff, their white 
bodies almost indistinguishable against the snowy 
background, and only their great back-curving 
horns betraying their presence. I elevated my 
sights, blazed away, and the- splinters flew from 
the face of the cliff many feet below my marks. 
With heads thrown back, the sheep scurried off 
across the mountainside, jumping from rock to 
rock and keeping clear of the soft snow with 
marvelous instinct. They came to a rock-walled 
gulch, twenty feet or more in the sheer, with its 
bottom swept clean by a recent slide. Over the 
edge they went without a pause—a whole half 
dozen in the air at once—struck, fell forward to 
their knees with their great horns butting full 
upon the rock and dividing the force of the shock 
