BOSTON'S BIG BEAR FIGHT.
A small party of hunters sat by a campfire in a tamarack grove in the
high Sierra. Their guide was William Larkin, Esq., alias "Old Bill," a
man who had lived in the mountains for forty years and learned many
things worth telling about. A new Winchester rifle that was being
cleaned was the immediate provocation of some reminiscent remarks on
the subject of pump-guns.
"We old mossbacks are slow to see anything good in new contraptions,"
said Mr. Larkin, after begging a Turkish cigarette from the Dude and
lighting it with the Dude's patent pocket lamp, "but I'm just beginning
to get it socked home into my feeble old intellect that things ain't
naturally no account just because I never seen 'em afore. I stuck to
it for a good many years that an old muzzle-loading rifle was the best
shooting tool that ever was or ever could be made, but an old she-bear
with one of my bullets through her lungs taught me different by clawing
all the clothes and half the meat off my back. I'm learning' slowly,
and I ain't too old to learn some more. If I live long enough I'll
know consid'able yit.
"I remember the first pump-gun that came into these mountains. It was
a Henry sixteen-shooter, and it blew in along with a kid from Boston
who wanted to kill a bear. The young chap's uncle tried to convince
him that killing a California Grizzly was not as much fun as some folks
pretended, but the Boston boy couldn't be convinced, and so the uncle
hired me to go along and take care of him. Boston had a gun in a case,
and I told him to keep it there until we got to my bear pasture. The
rest of his outfit was 500 cartridges and a box of paper collars.
"When we got into camp over on the South Fork, Boston wanted to begin
the slaughter right away and opened up that gun case. I'd heard of the
repeating rifle, but had it put up for a Yankee lie, and when the boy
pulled out the gun I thought he had made a mistake and brought along
some scientific contrivance from his college. He told me it was a
Henry rifle and showed me how it worked, but I had no use for it.
While he stuffed his pump-gun I smoked and thought. 'Unless you go
slow, Mr. Larkin,' says I to myself, 'you'll get into plenty of
trouble. Here you are, mixed up with something that you don't sabe
pretty well. A rough canyon, two hound dogs and an able-bodied bear is
a combination that you can work, but when you throw in a college boy
and a gun that winds up like a clock and shoots till the cows come
home, the situation looks kind of misty.' I didn't think much of the
pump-gun, but for all I knew it might go off at both ends and paw up
everything by the roots, and I was tolerable sure that Boston would
wobble it around so's to take in a pretty consid'able scope of
outdoors. But I allowed I was old fashioned enough to circumvent a
Boston boy and his new gun, and concluded to go ahead.
"Next morning we put the dogs into Devil's Gulch, and by making a cut
over a spur we got about two miles below them and sat down to wait for
bear. The trees were so tall and so close together that you couldn't
see the tops and the sun never saw the ground. The canyon was narrow
and the sides were so steep that they tucked under at the bottom.
While we sat there I figured a bit on what was going to happen. There
was a light breeze, and presently I noticed something on the other side
of the canyon, about fifty yards away. The wind swayed some bushes
that grew around a charred stump, and from time to time the black end
of the stump showed up and then disappeared very much like a bear's
head peeping out of the brush.
"Pretty soon the dogs made a row up the gulch, and as the howls and
yells and promiscuous uproar came nearer I knew they had started a bear
and made him get a wiggle on. Boston danced around in great
excitement, and when I pointed to the black stump he was ready to see
bears most anywhere. 'You take care of that,' says I, 'and I'll go and
see what ails the dogs.' He opened fire on the stump, and I dodged
from tree to tree up the gulch until I was out of range.
"I never was in a battle, but if they made any more noise at Bull Run
than Boston was making, I'm glad I wasn't there. I thought I was
running away from the biggest fight on record. It was what our
military authors call 'a continual roll of musketry.' But while
running away from one battle I piled into another and had all the fight
I needed on my hands. The dogs and two bears were mixed up in some
sort of disagreement about things in general, and I was in it, as the
Dude would say, with both feet and a crutch. We got some tangled, but
things came my way pretty soon, and when the bears were laid out I
stopped to listen. The fight was still going on down the canyon. The
boy is still holding his own, I thought; it would be a pity to spoil
such a battle. So I went on and dressed my bears, while the steady
roll of musketry thundered in the gulch. Then I had a wash in the
creek, had a smoke and sat down at the foot of a tree and fell asleep.
The last I heard was a monotonous uproar indicating that the forces
down the gulch were stubbornly holding their ground.
"I never did know how long I slept, but when I awoke all was quiet.
Perhaps it was the silence following the cessation of hostilities that
awakened me. I set out to find Boston, and groped my way down the
gulch through a cloud of smoke. Presently I came to the scene of the
fray. Where my hero had made his first and last stand was a stack of
empty shells and the pump-gun so hot that it had set the dry leaves
afire, but the bear hunter was gone. I yelled, but got no answer. I
looked for tracks up and down the canyon, but there were no tracks.
The kid had vanished.
"Then I climbed up the side of the canyon, high enough to see the tops
of trees that stood in the bottom of the gulch. Near the scene of
hostilities was a giant sugar pine, the top of which had been broken
off. Boston had shinned up that tree when his ammunition gave out, and
when I discovered him he was balancing himself upon the broken shaft
and reaching out over his head into space for more limbs."