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It sounded like the baying of hounds, and now like the hallooing of men, and then like the distant peal of a horn. By and bye Copple said he heard the hounds. I could not be sure. Soon we indeed heard the deep-sounding, wild bay of Old Dan, the course, sharp, ringing bay of Old Tom, and then, less clear, the chorus from the other hounds.
I tried frantically to get my sights on one. All I could aim at was bobbing ears. I shot twice, and of course missed. R.C. shot four times, once at a running buck, and three at a small deer that he said was flying! Here Copple and Haught caught up with us. We went on, and turned off the road on the blazed trail to See Lake. It was pretty open forest, oaks and scattered pines, and a few spruce.
"Cinnamon," declared Copple, and turning him over he pointed to a white spot on his breast. "Fine bear. About four hundred pounds. Maybe not so heavy. But he'll take some packin' up to the rim!" Then I became aware of the other men. Takahashi had arrived on the scene first, finding the bear dead. Edd came next, and after him Pyle. I sat down for a much needed rest.
No hunter was I then, but a man stricken by the spirit and mystery of life, by the agony and terror of death, by the awful strange sense that this stag would kill me. But Copple galloped up, and drawing his revolver, he shot the deer through the head. It fell in a heap. "Don't ever go close to a crippled deer," admonished my comrade, as he leaped off his horse.
So we rode out with the hounds on another bear hunt. Pyle's Canyon lay to the east of Dude Creek, and we decided to run it that day. Edd and Nielsen started down with the hounds. Copple and I followed shortly afterward with the intention of descending mid-way, and then working along the ridge crests and promontories.
The latter reminded me that we were out hunting. I could carry a deadly rifle in my hands, yet dream dreams of flower-decked Elysian fields. We climbed a wooded bench or low step of the canyon slope, and though Copple and I were side by side I saw two turkeys before he did. They were running swiftly up hill. I took a snap shot at the lower one, but missed. My bullet struck low, upsetting him.
Way out and beyond rolled the floor of the basin, green and vast, like a ridged sea of pines, to the bold black Mazatzals so hauntingly beckoning from the distance. Copple spoke now and then, but I wanted to be silent. How wild and wonderful this place in the early morning! But I had not long to meditate and revel in beauty and wildness.
The first park we came to was a flat grassy open, with places where deer licked the bare earth. Copple left several pounds of salt in these spots. R.C. and I went up to the upper end where he had seen deer before. No deer this day! But saw three turkeys, one an old gobbler. We lost sight of them. Then Copple and R.C. went one way and Haught and I another.
Holes and caves and cracks showed, and yellow blank walls, and bronze points, and green slopes, and weathered slides. Soon the baying of the hounds appeared to pass below and beyond us, up the canyon to our right, a circumstance that worried Copple. "Let's go farther up," he kept saying. But I was loath to leave that splendid stand.
"It must be nice to have a rector ... he is such an intellectual-looking man, so quiet and dignified; just the way a minister should be, instead of like Mr. Copple, who tries to be jolly and get up sociables and parlor meetings." There were tears in the girl's eyes. A tea-bell rang, and Clara went down-stairs to eat dinner with her father. He had just come in and was putting on a short linen coat.
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