WELL HEELED.
"Curious how some men will lose their grip on the truth when they talk
about bears," said Mr. Jack Waddell, of Ventura. "There's old Ari
Hopper, for example, a man whose word is good in a hoss trade, but when
he tells about his bear fights he puts your confidence in him to an
awful strain. I don't say that Ari would tell lies, but he puts a
whole lot of fancy frills on his stories and fixes 'em up gorgeous. I
reckon I've run across most as many bears as anybody, but I never had
no such adventures as I read about.
"The most curious bear scrape I ever had was over on the Piru last
spring, and just the plain facts of the case beat anything you ever
heard. There was an old white-headed Grizzly in that part of the
country that did a heap of damage, but nobody had been able to do him
up. They set spring guns for him on the mountain and put out poison
all around, but he'd beat the game every time. Taylor, of the Mutaw
ranch, fixed a spring gun that he thought would fix the old fellow for
sure. It was a big muzzle-loading musket, with a bore as big as an
eight-gauge shotgun, and Taylor loaded it with a double handful of
powder, thirty buckshot and a wagon bolt six inches long. It was set
right in the trail and baited with a chunk of pork tied to the muzzle
and connected with the trigger by a string.
"The gun was about a mile from the house, and the very first night
after it was set, Taylor was awakened by a roar that made the windows
rattle and seemed to shake the very hills. Taylor knew the old gun had
gone off, and he chuckled as he thought of the wreck it made of the old
Grizzly. In the morning he started out to take a look at his dead
bear, and found his tracks leading from the meadow right up the trail.
He knew the sign, because the Grizzly put only the heel of his off
forefoot to the ground and there was a round mark in the track that
looked as though it were made by the end of a bone.
"As I was saying, Taylor recognized the tracks and was sure he had got
old Whitehead, but he was sort of puzzled when he noticed a hog's track
in the same trail and saw that those were sometimes wiped out by the
bear's tracks. When he got near the spring gun he saw bits of meat
hanging in the brush, but no fur anywhere. He kept on, and pretty soon
he saw a dark mass lying on the ground in front of the wreck of the old
musket. He stepped up to look at it and saw that it was the mangled
corpse of the biggest hog on the ranch. One of the hams was gone, and
apparently it had been cut away with a knife. The head and all the
fore part of the hog had been blown to flinders, and the brush was just
festooned with pork.
"Taylor thought somebody had happened along and cut a ham out of the
dead hog, but there were no man tracks anywhere; nothing but hog and
bear tracks. It was plain that the cunning old bear had driven the hog
ahead of him up the trail to spring the gun, but that missing ham could
not be accounted for.
"Another curious thing was noticed about all the cattle that the
Grizzly killed. Ordinarily, you know, the Grizzly strikes a blow that
breaks a steer's neck or shoulder, and then pulls him down and finishes
him. In the Piru country a great many cattle were found with their
throats neatly cut, and old Whitehead's tracks were invariably found
near the carcasses. The only man that the Grizzly ever killed, so far
as is known, was a Mexican sheepherder, and he was found with a slash
in the side of the head that looked like the work of a hatchet or other
sharp tool. Some people didn't believe that the Mexican was killed by
a bear, but there were no other tracks where his body was found, and I
know for a fact that old Whitehead did kill him.
"I was pirooting around in the brush on a hill pretty well up toward
the head of Piru Creek one afternoon, when I caught sight of a bear
about twenty yards ahead of me. I could see only a part of his fur,
and couldn't tell how he was lying or what part of him was in sight. I
figured around a few minutes, but couldn't get a better sight, and so I
just took chances and let drive for luck at what I could see. It was a
fool thing to do, of course, but I just happened to feel careless and
confident. There was a snort and a crash, and old Whitehead loomed up
madder than a hornet. I had shot him in the haunch and he felt
insulted. He made a rush at me, and I skipped aside and jumped for a
small tree standing on the brink of a little ravine. My rifle dropped
into the ravine, and I went up the tree like a monkey up a pole, and by
the time the old bear had put his helm down and swung around to take a
whack at me I was out of his reach and felt safe.
"The bear sat down and deliberately sized up the situation, and then he
walked up to the tree and began striking at the trunk with his right
paw. That made me laugh at first, but I was just paralyzed with
amazement when I saw clean-cut chips flying at every stroke and caught
a metallic gleam as his paw swung in the air. I didn't have much time
to investigate the matter because the old Grizzly was a boss chopper
and my tree began to totter very soon. I had sense enough to see that
if I came down with the tree on the upper side the bear would nail me
with one jump, and I threw my weight on the other side so as to fall
the tree into the ravine. I thought I might have the luck to land
without breaking any bones, and then I'd have quite a start of the bear
and perhaps be able to pick up my rifle.
"As the tree toppled over the edge of the ravine and began to fall I
swung around to the upper side and braced myself for the crash. During
the fall I managed to throw my legs out over a branch, and when the
tree struck bottom I shot out feet foremost, sliding down through the
brushy top and landing with a pretty solid jar right side up and no
damage except a few bruises and scratches. The first thing I looked
for was my rifle, and, luckily, it wasn't two yards away. I grabbed it
and ran up the other side of the ravine to a rocky ledge, while the
Grizzly was crashing down through the brush on his side, expecting to
find me under the fallen tree. Before he knew what had happened I was
shooting him full of holes and he was dead in a minute.
"When I examined the dead Grizzly I found the most singular thing I
ever came across. In the sole of his right forepaw was an
ivory-handled bowie-knife, firmly imbedded and partly surrounded by
calloused gristle as hard as bone. The handle was out of sight, but
the butt of it made a knob in the heel of the bear's foot and left a
mark on the ground. Evidently he walked on that heel to keep the blade
from striking stones and getting dulled. That knife accounted for all
the mysteries about the white-headed Grizzly.
"What's that? Mystery about how the knife got into his foot? Not at
all; that's simple enough. He swallowed the knife during some fight or
other, and it worked around in his system and down into his foot just
as a needle does in a man."