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Updated: May 4, 2025
Every bridge has its rotten plank, every fence its flimsy rail, every great one his weakness, and Kellyan, as he pondered, knew how mad it was to meet this one of brawn with mere brute force. "Steel traps are no good; he smashes them. Lariats won't do, and he knows all about log traps. But I have a scheme. First, we must follow him up and learn his range. I reckon that'll take three months."
Kellyan followed him, and Jacky waddled at Kellyan's heels, sniffing once in a while to make sure he was not following the wrong pair of legs. "There, Jacky, honey honey!" and Bonamy pointed up a tree to an immense wasps' nest. Jack cocked his head on one side and swung his nose on the other.
Without a dog, they must make a new plan of hunting. They picked out two or three good places for pen-traps, where trees stood in pairs to make the pillars of the den. Then Kellyan returned to camp for the ax while Bonamy prepared the ground. As Kellyan came near their open camping-place, he stopped from habit and peeped ahead for a minute. He was about to go down when a movement caught his eye.
They got at length in the dust the full impressions of the feet of the various monsters in regions wide apart, and they saw that all the cattle were killed in the same way their muzzles torn, their necks broken; and last, the marks on the trees where the Bears had reared and rubbed, then scored them with a broken tusk, the same all through the wide range; and Kellyan told them with calm certainty: "Pedro's Gringo, Old Pegtrack, the Placerville Grizzly, and the Monarch of the Range are one and the same Bear."
Kellyan and Bonamy were back on the Grizzly quest. "Time he was out again, and good trailing to get him, with lots of snow in the hollows." They had come prepared for a long hunt. Honey for bait, great steel traps with crocodilian jaws, and guns there were in the outfit. The pen-trap, the better for the aging, was repaired and re-baited, and several Black Bears were taken.
As they journeyed through the open country the sheep-herder's eye fell on a human figure, a man sitting on a rock above them to the left. Pedro gazed inquiringly; the man saluted and beckoned. This meant "friend"; had he motioned him to pass on it might have meant, "Keep away or I shoot." Pedro walked toward him a little way and sat down. The man came forward. It was Lan Kellyan, the hunter.
No honey; of course, that was a disappointment, but there were lots of fat white grubs almost as good and Jack ate till his paunch looked like a little rubber balloon. "How is that?" chuckled Lan. "The laugh is on us," answered Bonamy, with a grimace. Jack was now growing into a sturdy cub, and he would follow Kellyan even as far as Bonamy's shack.
One day, as they watched him rolling head over heels in riotous glee, Kellyan remarked to his friend: "I'm afraid some one will happen on him an' shoot him in the woods for a wild B'ar." "Then why don't you ear-mark him with them thar new sheep-rings?" was the sheep-man's suggestion.
They packed four horses with stuff and led them over the ridge to the east side of Tallac, and down away from Jack's Peak, that Kellyan had named in honor of his Bear cub, toward Fallen Leaf Lake. The hunter believed that here he would meet not, only the Gringo Bear that he was after, but would also stand a chance of finding others, for the place had escaped the fire.
He found the human trail, but there was something about it that rather attracted him. He strode along on the dry boughs. "Crack!" went one; "crack-crack!" went another; and Kellyan arose on the platform and strained his eyes in the gloom till a dark form moved into the opening by the bones of the sheep.
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