Long ago, when Oregon was a new land to white men, in the days of the
clipper ships and the Old Oregon Trail, the breed to which the Killer
belonged were really numerous through the little corner north of the
Siskiyous and west of the Cascades. The land was far different then. The
transcontinental lines had not yet been built; the only settlements were
small trading posts and mining camps, and people did not travel over
paved highways in automobiles. If they went at all it was in a
prairie-schooner or on horseback. And the old grizzly bears must have
found the region a veritable heaven.
They were a worthy breed! It is doubtful if any other section of the
United States offered an environment so favorable to them. Game was in
abundance, they could venture down into the valleys at the approach of
winter and thus miss the rigors of the snow, and at first there were no
human enemies. Unfortunately, stories are likely to grow and become
sadly addled after many tellings; but if the words of certain old men
could be believed, the Southern Oregon grizzly occasionally, in the
bountiful fall days, attained a weight of two thousand pounds. No doubt
whatever remains that thousand-pound bears were fairly numerous. They
trailed up and down the brown hillsides; they hunted and honey-grubbed
and mated in the fall; they had their young and fought their battles and
died, and once in a long while the skeleton of a frontiersman would be
found with his skull battered perfectly flat where one of the great
beasts had taken a short-arm pat at him.
But unlike the little black bears, the grizzlies developed displeasing
habits. They were much more carnivorous in character than the blacks,
and their great bodily strength and power enabled them to master all of
the myriad forms of game in the Oregon woods. By the same token, they
could take a full-grown steer and carry it off as a woman carries her
baby.
It couldn't be endured. The cattlemen had begun to settle the valleys,
and it was either a case of killing the grizzlies or yielding the
valleys to them. In the relentless war that followed, the breed had been
practically wiped out. A few of them, perhaps, fled farther and farther
up the Cascades, finding refuges in the Canadian mountains. Others
traveled east, locating at last in the Rocky Mountains, and countless
numbers of them died. At last, as far as the frontiersmen knew, only one
great specimen remained. This was a famous bear that men called
Slewfoot,--a magnificent animal that ranged far and hunted relentlessly,
and no one ever knew just when they were going to run across him. It
made traveling in the mountains a rather ticklish business. He was apt
suddenly to loom up, like a gray cliff, at any turn in the trail, and
his disposition grew querulous with age. In fact, instead of fleeing as
most wild creatures have learned to do, he was rather likely to make
sudden and unexpected charges.
He was killed at last; and seemingly the Southern Oregon grizzlies were
wiped out. But it is rather easy to believe that in some of his
wanderings he encountered--lost and far in the deepest heart of the land
called Trail's End--a female of his own breed. There must have been cubs
who, in their turn, mated and fought and died, and perhaps two
generations after them. And out of the last brood had emerged a single
great male, a worthy descendant of his famous ancestor. This was the
Killer, who in a few months since he had left his fastnesses, was
beginning to ruin the cattle business in Trail's End.
As he came growling from his bed this September evening he was not a
creature to speak of lightly. He was down on all fours, his vast head
was lowered, his huge fangs gleamed in the dark red mouth. The eyes were
small, and curious little red lights glowed in each of them. The Killer
was cross; and he didn't care who knew it. He was hungry too; but hunger
is an emotion for the beasts of prey to keep carefully to themselves. He
walked slowly across the little glen, carelessly at first, for he was
too cross and out of temper to have the patience to stalk. He stopped,
turning his head this way and that, marking the flight of the wild
creatures. He saw a pair of blacktail bucks spring up from a covert and
dash away; but he only made one short, angry lunge toward them. He knew
that it would only cost him his dignity to try to chase them. A grizzly
bear can move astonishingly fast considering his weight--for a short
distance he can keep pace with a running horse--but a deer is light
itself. He uttered one short, low growl, then headed over toward a great
wall of buckbush at the base of the hill.
But now his hunting cunning had begun to return to him. The sun was
setting, the pines were growing dusky, and he began to feel the first
excitement and fever that the fall of night always brings to the beasts
of prey. It is a feeling that his insignificant cousins, the black
bears, could not possibly have,--for the sole reason that they are
berry-eaters, not hunters. But the cougar, stealing down a deer trail on
the ridge above, and a lean old male wolf--stalking a herd of deer on
the other side of the thicket--understood it very well. His blood began
to roll faster through his great veins. The sullen glare grew in his
eyes.
It was the beginning of the hunting hour of the larger creatures. All
the forest world knew it. The air seemed to throb and tingle, the
shadowing thickets began to pulse and stir with life. The Fear--the
age-old heritage of all the hunted creatures--returned to the deer.
The Killer moved quite softly now. One would have marveled how silently
his great feet fell upon the dry earth and with what slight sound his
heavy form moved through the thickets. Once he halted, gazing with
reddening eyes. But the coyote--the gray figure that had broken a twig
on the trail beside him--slipped quickly away.
He skirted the thicket, knowing that no successful stalk could be made
where he had to force his way through dry brush. He moved slowly,
cautiously--all the time mounting farther up the little hill that rose
from the banks of the stream. He came to an opening in the thicket, a
little brown pathway that vanished quickly into the shadows of the
coverts.
The Killer slipped softly into the heavy brush just at its mouth. It was
his ambush. Soon, he knew, some of the creatures that had bowers in the
heart of the thicket would be coming along that trail toward the feeding
grounds on the ridge. He only had to wait.
As the shadows grew and the twilight deepened, the undercurrent of
savagery that is the eternal quality of the wilderness grew ever more
pronounced. A thrill and fever came in the air, mystery in the deepening
shadows, and brighter lights into the eyes of the hunting folk. The dusk
deepened between the trees; the distant trunks dimmed and faded quite
away. The stars emerged. The nightwind, rising somewhere in the region
of the snow banks on the highest mountains, blew down into the Killer's
face and brought messages that no human being may ever receive. Then his
sharp ears heard the sound of brush cracked softly as some one of the
larger forest creatures came up the trail toward him.
The steps drew nearer and the Killer recognized them. They were plainly
the soft footfall of some member of the deer tribe, yet they were too
pronounced to be the step of any of the lesser deer. The bull elk had
left his bed. The red eyes of the grizzly seemed to glow as he waited.
Great though the stag was, only one little blow of the massive forearm
would be needed. The huge fangs would have to close down but once. The
long, many-tined antlers, the sharp front hoofs would not avail him in a
surprise attack such as this would be. Best of all, he was not
suspecting danger. He was walking down wind, so that the pungent odor of
the bear was blown away from him.
The bear did not move a single telltale muscle. He scarcely breathed.
And the one movement that there was was such that not even the keen ears
of an elk could discern, just a curious erection of the gray hairs on
his vast neck.
The bull was almost within striking range now. The wicked red eyes could
already discern the dimmest shadow of his outline through the thickets.
But all at once he stopped, head lifting.
Perhaps a grizzly bear does not have mental processes as human
beings know them. Perhaps all impulse is the result of instinct
alone,--instinct tuned and trained to a degree that human beings find
hard to imagine. But if the bear couldn't understand the sudden halt
just at the eve of his triumph, at least he felt growing anger. He knew
perfectly that the elk had neither detected his odor nor heard him, and
he had made no movements that the sharp eyes could detect. Just a
glimpse of gray in the heavy brush would not have been enough in itself
to arouse the stag's suspicions. For the lower creatures are rarely able
to interpret outline alone; there must be movement too.
Yet the bull was evidently alarmed. He stood immobile, one foot lifted,
nostrils open, head raised. Then, the wind blowing true, the grizzly
understood.
A pungent smell reached him from below,--evidently the smell of a living
creature that followed the trail along the stream that flowed through
the glen. He recognized it in an instant. He had detected it many times,
particularly when he went into the cleared lands to kill cattle. It was
man, an odor almost unknown in this lonely glen. Dave Turner, brother of
Simon, was walking down the stream toward Hudson's camp.
The elk was widely traveled too, and he also realized the proximity of
man. But his reaction was entirely different. To the grizzly it was an
annoying interruption to his hunt; and a great flood of rage swept over
him. It seemed to him that these tall creatures were always crossing his
path, spoiling his hunting, even questioning his rule of the forests.
They did not seem to realize that he was the wilderness king, and that
he could break their slight forms in two with one blow of his paw. It
was true that their eyes had strange powers to disquiet him; but his
isolation in the fastnesses of Trail's End had kept him from any full
recognition of their real strength, and he was unfortunately lacking in
the awe with which most of the forest creatures regard them. But to the
elk this smell was Fear itself. He knew the ways of men only too well.
Too many times he had seen members of his herd fall stricken at a word
from the glittering sticks they carried in their hands. He uttered a
far-ringing snort.
It was a distinctive sound, beginning rather high on the scale as a loud
whistle and descending into a deep bass bawl. And the Killer knew
perfectly what that sound meant. It was a simple way of saying that the
elk would progress no further down _that_ trail. The bear leaped in wild
fury.
A growl that was more near a puma-like snarl came from between the bared
teeth, and the great body lunged out with incredible speed. Although the
distance was far, the charge was almost a success. If one second had
intervened before the elk saw the movement, if his muscles had not been
fitted out with invisible wings, he would have fought no more battles
with his herd brethren in the fall. The bull seemed to leap straight up.
His muscles had been set at his first alarm from Turner's smell on the
wind, and they drove forth the powerful limbs as if by a powder
explosion. He was full in the air when the forepaws battered down where
he had been. Then he darted away into the coverts.
The grizzly knew better than to try to overtake him. Almost rabid with
wrath he turned back to his ambush.