traight away to the east and except for 
iccasional hard climbing amongst wind- 
alls we made good time. t hen we 
truck a big swamp and it seemed as 
hough that grizzly had tried to track up 
. square mile of it and we counted a 
iozen different places where he had 
tarted digging, as though in search of a 
| >lace to den. After considerable trouble 
! ve caught his track, leading east again, 
nd followed it with increasing difficulty 
or another four or five miles, where we 
lad to give up and camp when night 
■vertook us. By this time we were not 
uite so enthusiastic over the chase and 
calized that a grizzly bear can travel a 
nighty long ways in a mighty short time, 
lefore retiring we agreed that we would 
ollow him until noon of the next day 
nd then retrace our steps. 
Daylight again found us on the trail 
if Ursus horribilis, and freshened by our 
ij light’s rest, we pushed forward, eager to 
j aake as far as possible ere night over¬ 
look us. We were crossing a wide tama- 
ack swamp. Walters was at one side 
if me and slightly ahead when we heard 
crashing off to my right. There, am- 
ling off through a maze of down-fallen 
amarack poles, was the grizzly. 1 leaped 
ip on a fallen log and fired just as he 
iove in sight clearing some small brush 
The recoil of the .280 Ross I carried was 
lot very noticeable under ordinary cir- 
unistances, but in this instance it was 
ufficient to upset me off that log so that 
couldn't tell whether I had hit Bruin 
r not. 
“I believe you hit him, Ray,” Walters 
aid as he stopped to see if I was hurt, 
was on my feet in a short time and we 
uirried on to where the grizzly had dis- 
ppeared. A red trail marked the direc- 
ion he had taken and from the way he 
. ras running we came to the conclusion 
hat I had hit him in the right hind foot. 
Ve waited there a good hour in order to 
;t him have a chance to lie down, in 
dtich event his leg would stiffen up and 
reatly.handicap him in traveling. Ac- 
ording to some writers that grizzly 
hould have attacked us when I fired on 
im, but he must have been a faint- 
earted one. I am not making light of a 
rizzly’s ferocity for I personally know 
Cree Camp on the Sturgeon Reserve, a hundred miles north of Ninety-mile House 
of men who have had some close calls at 
the hands of these gentlemen. I do be¬ 
lieve, however, that under ordinary cir¬ 
cumstances a grizzly will give a man all 
the room lie wants. 
When we took up the grizzly’s trail 
again we soon came to where he had 
swung off back toward tbe northwest. Jn 
the course of a mile or so he had lain 
down three times and the snow was crim¬ 
soned all about. He was certainly bleed¬ 
ing badly and the farther we went the 
more copious became the signs of blood. 
This cheered us up, for we knew that no 
animal could long keep up while losing 
such an enormous amount of blood, so 
we pressed on at an ever increasing pace. 
We concluded that the bones in bis leg or 
foot must be badly shattered to allow of 
so much bleeding, and that being so low 
down the wound would drain every drop 
of blood that flowed through that limb. 
One would have sworn from tbe amount 
of sign that no animal could have so 
much blood in his system ! 
We confidently expected to run into 
the bear within the next mile or so and 
kept a sharp lookout so as to avoid any 
ambush on Bruin’s part. Even so, Wal¬ 
ters almost fell on top of him! The 
grizzly, instead of keeping to the more 
-• « v " 4 T : ..-. 
i « 
1 
• -,... 
jfe "7 > in*, . _ 
. 
open country, where the traveling was 
easy, had made for tbe worst deadfalls 
he could find, and it was quite a job for 
us to climb over some of them. My 
partner bad just stepped, or rather 
climbed, up onto a mass of fallen spruce 
until he must have been easily six feet 
above the ground, when the grizzly rose 
immediately on his right from behind a 
small but heavily-limbed balsam and 
made directly for him. T was still to the 
right of Walters and the bear was be¬ 
tween us, so I never was sure whether he 
was really charging my partner or 
merely trying to escape me. 
Walters, in endeavoring to get his bal¬ 
ance on the log, slipped off without firing 
a shot, and before I could get a chance 
the grizzly was gone again. He was 
traveling pretty slow by then and falling 
every hundred yards or so, but he kept 
going for another mile after which we 
came on him lying too far gone to move 
and we dispatched him right there. When 
he was lying at our feet he looked even 
larger than before and he was by far the 
biggest bear whose killing I have ever 
had any hand in. He was of the true 
Silver Tip variety. There were not many 
grizzlies in that country, so we were 
somewhat elated getting this fellow. The 
native haunts of these wandering griz¬ 
zlies is some fifty miles directly west in 
the Canadian Rockies, but there are 
nearly always a few of them somewhere 
near the Athabasca Valley. 
' I ’ HE warm weather did not last for 
long, after our grizzly hunt, and 
with the next cold snap came Walters’ 
first customer for the year, a French- 
Canadian named La Roeque. He was one 
of the “educated” type and could speak 
English, French and Cree; he was mar¬ 
ried and wished to leave his squaw and 
little boy in one of Walters’ shacks while 
he went over to Buck Lake, as his trap¬ 
ping grounds were east of there. 
La Roeque informed us that an un¬ 
usually large number of Indians were 
figuring on trading at Ninety Mile House 
on account of its being so much handier 
to their trapping grounds than the Hud¬ 
son’s Bay Post at Sturgeon Lake. He also 
told us that Dan McMillar, an old-timer 
(Continued on page 216) 
Page 173 
Knowles in a canoe on the Athabasca River 
