have deserved it if the steer had really been the bear.  Certainly I hoped the bear would outrun the hounds and escape.  I weighed the wonderful thrill of the chase, the melody of hounds, the zest of spirited action, the peril to limb and life against the thing that they were done for, with the result that I found them sadly lacking.  Peril to limb and life was good for man.  If this had not been a fact my performance would have been as cowardly as that of my horse.  Again I had rise up before my mind the spectacle of opposing forces—­the elemental in man restrained by the spiritual.  Then the old haunting thought returned to vex me—­man in his development needed the exercise of brawn, muscle, bone red-blood, violence, labor and pain and agony.  Nature recognized only the survival of the fittest of any species.  If a man allowed a spiritual development, intellect, gentleness, to keep him from all hard, violent action, from tremendous exertion, from fierce fight with elements and beasts, and his own kind—­would he not soon degenerate as a natural physical man?  Evolution was a stern inevitable seeking of nature for perfection, for the unattainable.  This perfection was something that lived and improved on strife.  Barbarians, Indians, savages were the most perfect specimens of nature’s handiwork; and in proportion to their development toward so-called civilized life their physical prowess and perfectness—­that was to say, their strength to resist and live and reproduce their kind—­absolutely and inevitably deteriorated.

My reflection did not carry me at that time to any positive convictions of what was truest and best.  The only conclusions I eventually arrived at were that I was sore and bruised and dirty and torn—­that I would be happy if the bear got away—­that I had lost my mean horse and was glad therefore—­that I would have half a dozen horses and rifles upon my next hunt—­and lastly that I would not be in any hurry to tell about mistaking a steer for a bear, and climbing a tree.  Indeed these last facts have been religiously kept secret until chronicled here.

Shortly afterward, as I was making a lame and slow headway toward Horton Thicket, where I hoped to find a trail out, I heard Edd yelling, and I answered.  Presently we met.  He was leading my horse, and some of the hounds, notably Old Tom and Dan, were with him.

“Where’s the bear?” I asked.

“He got away down in the breaks,” replied Edd.  “George is tryin’ to call the hounds back.  What happened to you?  I heard you shoot.”

“My horse didn’t care much for me or the brush,” I replied.  “He left me—­rather suddenly.  And—­I took a shot at what I thought was a bear.”

“I seen him once,” said Edd, with eyes flashing.  “Was just goin’ to smoke him up when he jumped out of sight.”

My mortification and apprehension were somewhat mitigated when I observed that Edd was dirty, ragged, and almost as much disheveled as I was.  I had feared he would see in my appearance certain unmistakable evidences that I had made a tenderfoot blunder and then run for my life.  But Edd took my loss of hat, and torn coat, and general bedraggled state as a matter of course.  Indeed I somehow felt a little pride at his acceptance of me there in the flesh.