HOW OLD PINTO DIED.
This is an incredible bear story, but it is true. George Gleason told
it to a man who knew the bear so well that he thought the old Pinto
Grizzly belonged to him and wore his brand, and as George is no bear
hunter himself, but is a plain, ordinary, truthful person, there is not
the slightest doubt that he related only the facts. George said some
of the facts were incredible before he started in. He had never heard
or read of such tenacity of life in any animal. But there are
precedents, even if George never heard of them.
The vitality of the California Grizzly is astonishing, as many a man
has sorrowful reason to know, and the tenacity of the Old Pinto's hold
on life was remarkable, even among Grizzlies. This Pinto was a famous
bear. His home was among the rocks and manzanita thickets of La Liebra
Mountain, a limestone ridge southwest of Tehachepi that divides Gen.
Beale's two ranches, Los Alamos y Agua Caliente and La Liebra, and his
range was from Tejon Pass to San Emigdio. His regular occupation was
killing Gen. Beale's cattle, and the slopes of the hills and the
_cienegas_ around Castac Lake were strewn with the bleached bones of
his prey. For twenty years that solitary old bear had been monarch of
all that Gen. Beale surveyed--to paraphrase President Lincoln's remark
to Surveyor-General Beale himself--and wrought such devastation on the
ranch that for years there had been a standing reward for his hide.
Men who had lived in the mountains and knew the old Pinto's infirmity
of temper were wary about invading his domains, and not a vaquero could
be induced to go afoot among the manzanita thickets of the limestone
ridge. The man who thought he owned the Pinto followed his trail for
two months many years ago and learned many things about him; among
others that the track of his hind foot measured fourteen inches in
length and nine inches in width; that the hair on his head and
shoulders was nearly white; that he could break a steer's neck with a
blow of his paw; that he feared neither man nor his works; that while
he would invade a camp with leisurely indifference, he would not enter
the stout oak-log traps constructed for his capture; and finally, that
it would be suicide to meet him on the trail with anything less
efficient than a Gatling gun.
Old Juan, the vaquero, who lived in a cabin on the flat below the
alkaline pool called Castac Lake, was filled with a fear of Pinto that
was akin to superstition. He told how the bear had followed him home
and besieged him all night in the cabin, and he would walk five miles
to catch a horse to ride two miles in the hills. To him old Pinto was
"mucho diablo," and a shivering terror made his eyes roll and his voice
break in trembling whispers when he talked of the bear while riding
along the cattle trails.
Once upon a time an ambitious sportsman of San Francisco, who wanted to
kill something bigger than a duck and more ferocious than a jackrabbit,
read about Pinto and persuaded himself that he was bear-hunter enough
to tackle the old fellow. He went to Fort Tejon, hired a guide and
made an expedition to the Castac. The guide took the hunter to
Spike-buck Spring, which is at the head of a ravine under the limestone
ridge, and showed to him the footprints of a big bear in the mud and
along the bear trail that crosses the spring. One glance at the track
of Pinto's foot was sufficient to dispel all the dime-novel day dreams
of the sportsman and start a readjustment of his plan of campaign.
After gazing at that foot-print, the slaying of a Grizzly by "one
well-directed shot" from the "unerring rifle" was a feat that lost its
beautiful simplicity and assumed heroic proportions. The man from San
Francisco had intended to find the bear's trail, follow it on foot,
overtake or meet the Grizzly and kill him in his tracks, after the
manner of the intrepid hunters that he had read about, but he sat down
on a log and debated the matter with the guide. That old-timer would
not volunteer advice, but when it was asked he gave it, and he told the
man from San Francisco that if he wanted to tackle a Grizzly all by his
lonely self, his best plan would be to stake out a calf, climb a tree
and wait for the bear to come along in the night.
So the man built a platform in the tree, about ten feet from the
ground, staked out a calf, climbed up to the platform and waited. The
bear came along and killed the calf, and the man in the tree saw the
lethal blow, heard the bones crack and changed his plan again. He laid
himself prone upon the platform, held his breath and hoped fervently
that his heart would not thump loudly enough to attract the bear's
intention. The bear ate his fill of the quivering veal, and then
reared on his haunches to survey the surroundings. The man from San
Francisco solemnly assured the guide in the morning, when he got back
to camp, that when Pinto sat up he actually looked down on that
platform and could have walked over to the tree and picked him off like
a ripe persimmon, and he thanked heaven devoutly that it did not come
into Pinto's head that that would be a good thing to do. So the man
from San Francisco broke camp and went home with some new and valuable
ideas about hunting Grizzlies, chief of which was the very clear idea
that he did not care for the sport.
[Illustration: Pinto Looked Down on the Platform.]
This is the sort of bear Old Pinto was, eminently entitled to the name
that Lewis and dark applied to his tribe--Ursus Ferox. Of course he
was called "Old Clubfoot" and "Reelfoot" by people who did not know
him, just as every big Grizzly has been called in California since the
clubfooted-bear myth became part of the folk lore of the Golden State,
but his feet were all sound and whole. The Clubfoot legend is another
story and has nothing to do with the big bear of the Castac.
Pinto was a "bravo" and a killer, a solitary, cross-grained,
crusty-tempered old outlaw of the range. What he would or might do
under any circumstances could not be predicated upon the basis of what
another one of his species had done under similar circumstances. The
man who generalizes the conduct of the Grizzly is liable to serious
error, for the Grizzly's individuality is strong and his disposition
various. Because one Grizzly scuttled into the brush at the sight of a
man, it does not follow that another Grizzly will behave similarly.
The other Grizzly's education may have been different. One bear lives
in a region infested only by small game, such as rabbits, wood-mice,
ants and grubs, and when he cannot get a meal by turning over flat
rocks or stripping the bark from a decaying tree, he digs roots for a
living. He is not accustomed to battle and he is not a killer, and he
may be timorous in the presence of man. Another Grizzly haunts the
cattle or sheep ranges and is accustomed to seeing men and beasts flee
before him for their lives. He lives by the strong arm, takes what he
wants like a robber baron, and has sublime confidence in his own
strength, courage and agility. He has killed bulls in single combat,
evaded the charge of the cow whose calf he has caught, stampeded sheep
and their herders. He is almost exclusively carnivorous and
consequently fierce. Such a bear yields the trail to nothing that
lives. That is why Old Pinto was a bad bear.
So long as Pinto remained in his dominions and confined his maraudings
to the cattle ranges, he was reasonably safe from the hunters and
perfectly safe from the settler and his strychnine bottle, but for some
reasons of his own he changed his habits and his diet and strayed over
to San Emigdio for mutton. Perhaps, as he advanced in years, the bear
found it more difficult to catch cattle, and having discovered a band
of sheep and found it not only easy to kill what he needed, but great
fun to charge about in the band and slay right and left in pure wanton
ferocity, he took up the trade of sheep butcher. For two or three
years he followed the flocks in their summer grazing over the vast,
spraddling mesas of Pine Mountain, and made a general nuisance of
himself in the camps. There have been other bears on Pine Mountain,
and the San Emigdio flocks have been harassed there regularly, but no
such bold marauder as Old Pinto ever struck the range. Other bears
made their forays in the night and hid in the ravines during the day,
but Pinto strolled into the camps at all hours, charged the flocks when
they were grazing and stampeded Haggin and Carr's merinos all over the
mountains.
The herders, mostly Mexicans, Basques and Portuguese, found it
heart-breaking to gather the sheep after Pinto had scattered them, and
moreover they were mortally afraid of the big Grizzly and took to
roosting on platforms in the trees instead of sleeping in their tents
at night. Worse than all else, the bear killed their dogs. The men
were instructed by the boss of the camp to let the bear alone and keep
out of his way, as they were hired to herd sheep and not to fight
bears, but the dogs could not be made to understand such instructions
and persisted in trying to protect their woolly wards.
The owners were accustomed to losing a few hundred sheep on Pine
Mountain every summer, and figured the loss in the fixed charges, but
when Pinto joined the ursine band that followed the flocks for a
living, the loss became serious and worried the majordomo at the home
camp. So another reward was offered for the Grizzly's scalp and the
herders were instructed to notify the Harris boys at San Emigdio
whenever the bear raided their flocks.
Here is where Gleason's part of the story begins. The bear attacked a
band of sheep one afternoon, killed four and stampeded the Mexican
herder, who ran down the mountain to the camp of the Harris boys, good
hunters who had been engaged by the majordomo to do up Old Pinto. Two
of the Harris boys and another man went up to the scene of the raid,
carrying their rifles, blankets and some boards with which to construct
a platform. They selected a pine tree and built a platform across the
lower limbs about twenty feet from the ground. When the platform was
nearly completed, two of the men left the tree and went to where they
had dropped their blankets and guns, about a hundred yards away. One
picked up the blankets and the other took the three rifles and started
back toward the tree, where the third man was still tinkering the
platform.
The sun had set, but it was still twilight, and none of the party
dreamed of seeing the bear at that time, but within forty yards of the
tree sat Old Pinto, his head cocked to one side, watching the man in
the tree with much evident interest. Pinto had returned to his
muttons, but found the proceedings of the man up the tree so
interesting that he was letting his supper wait.
[Illustration: Watching the Man in the Tree.]
The man carrying the blankets dropped them and seized a heavy express
rifle that some Englishman had left in the country. The other man
dropped the extra gun and swung a Winchester 45-70 to his shoulder.
The express cracked first, and the hollow-pointed ball struck Pinto
under the shoulder. The 45-70 bullet struck a little lower and made
havoc of the bear's liver. The shock knocked the bear off his pins,
but he recovered and ran into a thicket of scrub oak. The thicket was
impenetrable to a man, and there was no man present who wanted to
penetrate it in the wake of a wounded Grizzly.
The hunters returned to their camp, and early next morning they came
back up the mountain with three experienced and judicious dogs. They
had hunted bears enough to know that Pinto would be very sore and
ill-tempered by that time, and being men of discretion as well as
valor, they had no notion of trying to follow the dogs through the
scrub oak brush. Amateur hunters might have sent the dogs into the
brush and remained on the edge of the thicket to await developments,
thereby involving themselves in difficulties, but these old
professionals promptly shinned up tall trees when the dogs struck the
trail. The dogs roused the bear in less than two minutes, and there
was tumult in the scrub oak. Whenever the men in the trees caught a
glimpse of the Grizzly they fired at him, and the thud of a bullet
usually was followed by yells and fierce growlings, for the hear is a
natural sort of a beast and always bawls when he is hurt very badly.
There is no affectation about a Grizzly, and he never represses the
instinctive expression of his feelings. Probably that is why Bret
Harte calls him "coward of heroic size," but Bret never was very
intimately acquainted with a marauding old ruffian of the range.
The hunters in the trees made body shots mostly. Twice during the
imbroglio in the brush the bear sat up and exposed his head and the men
fired at it, but as he kept wrangling with the dogs, they thought they
missed. This is the strange part of the story, for some of the bullets
passed through the bear's head and did not knock him out. One
Winchester bullet entered an eye-socket and traversed the skull
diagonally, passing through the forward part of the brain. A Grizzly's
brain-pan is long and narrow, and a bullet entering the eye from
directly in front will not touch it. Wherefore it is not good policy
to shoot at the eye of a charging Grizzly. Usually it is equally
futile to attempt to reach his brain with a shot between the eyes,
unless the head be in such a position that the bullet will strike the
skull at a right angle, for the bone protecting the brain in front is
from two and a half to three inches thick, and will turn the ordinary
soft bullet. One of the men did get a square shot from his perch at
Pinto's forehead, and the 45-70-450 bullet smashed his skull.
The shot that ended the row struck at the "butt" of the Grizzly's ear
and passed through the base of the brain, snuffing out the light of his
marvelous vitality like a candle.
Then the hunters came down from their roosts, cut their way into the
thicket and examined the dead giant. Counting the two shots fired the
night before, one of which had nearly destroyed a lung, there were
eleven bullet holes in the bear, and his skull was so shattered that
the head could not be saved for mounting. Only two or three bullets
bad lodged in the body, the others having passed through, making large,
ragged wounds and tearing the internal organs all to pieces.
The skin, which weighed over one hundred pounds, was taken to
Bakersfield, and the meat that had not been spoiled by bullets was cut
up and sold to butchers and others. Estimating the total weight from
the portions that were actually tested on the scales, the butchers
figured that Pinto weighed 1100 pounds. The 1800 and 2000-pound bears
have all been weighed by the fancy of the men who killed them, and the
farther away they have been from the scales the more they have weighed.
There is no other case on record of a bear that continued fighting with
a smashed skull and pulped brains, although possibly such cases may
have occurred and never found their way into print. Gleason saw Old
Pinto shortly after the fight and examined the head, and there is no
reason to doubt his description of the effect of the bullets.