Quick as a Grizzly--that is, quicker than a flash--the Bear reared.
The man sprang backward, tripped and fell, and the Grizzly was upon
him. Face to earth the hunter lay like dead, but, ere he struck, Jack
caught a scent that made him pause. He smelt his victim, and the smell
was the rolling back of curtains or the conjuring up of a past. The
days in the hunter's shanty were forgotten, but the feelings of those
days were ready to take command at the bidding of the nose. His nose
drank deep of a draft that quelled all rage. The Grizzly's humor
changed. He turned and left the hunter quite unharmed.
Oh, blind one with the gun! All he could find in explanation was: "You
kin never tell what a Grizzly will do, but it's good play to lay low
when he has you cornered." It never came into his mind to credit the
shaggy brute with an impulse born of good, and when he told the
sheep-herder of his adventure in the pool, of his hitting high on the
body and of losing the trail in the forest fire--"down by the shack,
when he turned up sudden and had me I thought my last day was come.
Why he didn't swat me, I don't know. But I tell you this, Pedro: the
B'ar what killed your sheep on the upper pasture and in the sheep
canon is the same. No two B'ars has hind feet alike when you get a
clear-cut track, and this holds out even right along."
"What about the fifty-foot B'ar I saw wit' mine own eyes, caramba?"
"That must have been the night you were working a kill-care with your
sheep-herder's delight.
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