Sure enough he had shot straight this time.  The buck lay motionless under a pine, with one point of his antlers imbedded deep in the ground.  A sleek, gray, graceful deer he was just beginning to get his winter coat.  His color was indeed a bluish gray.  Haught hung him up to a branch, spread his hind legs, and cut him down the middle.  The hunter’s dexterity with a knife made me wonder how many deer he had dressed in his life in the open.  We lifted the deer upon the saddle of Haught’s horse and securely tied it there with a lasso; then with the hunter on foot, leading the way, we rode through the forest up the main ridge between Beaver and Turkey Canyons.  Toward the rim I found the pines and spruces larger, and the thickets of aspen denser.  We passed the heads of many ravines running down to the canyons on either side, and these were blazing gold and red in color, and so thick I could not see a rod into them.  About the middle of the afternoon we reached camp.  With venison hanging up to cool we felt somewhat like real hunters.  R.C. had gone off to look for turkeys, which enterprise had been unsuccessful.

Upon the following day, which was October tenth, we started our bear hunting.  Haught’s method appeared to me to lack something.  He sent the hounds down below the rim with George; and taking R.C. and me, and Lee and Nielsen, he led us over to what he called Horton Thicket.  Never would I forget my first sight of that immense forest-choked canyon.  It was a great cove running up from the basin into the rim.  Craggy ledges, broken, ruined, tottering and gray, slanted down into this abyss.  The place was so vast that these ledges appeared far apart, yet they were many.  An empire of splintered cliff!

High up these cracked and stained walls were covered with lichens, with little spruces growing in niches, and tiny yellow bushes.  Points of crumbling rock were stained gold and russet and bronze.  Below the huge gorge was full of aspens, maples, spruces—­a green, crimson, yellow density of timber, apparently impenetrable.  We were accorded different stations on the ledges all around the cove, and instructed to stay there until called by four blasts from a hunting horn.  My point was so far from R.C.’s, across the canyon, that I had to use my field-glass to see him.  When I did look he seemed contented.  Lee and Nielsen and Haught I could not see at all.  Finding a comfortable seat, if hard rock could ever be that, I proceeded to accept my wait for developments.  One thing was sure—­even though it were a futile way to hunt it seemed rich in other recompense for me.  My stand towered above a vast colorful slope down which the wind roared as in a gale.  How could I ever hear the hounds?  I watched the storm-clouds scudding across the sky.  Once I saw a rare bird, a black eagle in magnificent flight; and so whatever happened I had my reward in that sight.