daisies and purple asters, and a wan blue flower.  We climbed and climbed, until my back began to give me trouble.  “Reckon we—­bit off—­a big hunk,” remarked Edd once, and I thought he referred to the endless steep and brushy slopes.  By and bye the hounds came back to us one by one, all footsore and weary.  Manifestly the bear had outrun them.  Our best prospect then was to climb on to the rim and strike across the forest to camp.

I noticed that tired as I was I had less trouble to keep up with Edd.  His boots wore very slippery on grass and pine-needles, so that he might have been trying to climb on ice.  I had nails in my boots and they caught hold.  Hotter and wetter I grew until I had a burning sensation all over.  My legs and arms ached; the rifle weighed a ton; my feet seemed to take hold of the ground and stick.  We could not go straight up owing to the nature of that jumble of broken cliffs and matted scrub forests.  For hours we toiled onward, upward, downward, and then upward.  Only through such experience could I have gained an adequate knowledge of the roughness and vastness of this rim-rock country.

At last we arrived at the base of the gray leaning crags, and there, on a long slide of weathered rock the hounds jumped a bear.  I saw the dust he raised, as he piled into the thicket below the slide.  What a wild clamor from the hounds!  We got out on the rocky slope where we could see and kept sharp eyes roving, but the bear went straight down hill.  Amazing indeed was it the way the hounds drew away from us.  In a few moments they were at the foot of the slopes, tearing back over the course we had been so many hours in coming.  Then we set out to get on the rim, so as to follow along it, and keep track of the chase.  Edd distanced me on the rocks.  I had to stop often.  My breast labored and I could scarcely breathe.  I sweat so freely that my rifle stock was wet.  My hardest battle was in fighting a tendency to utter weariness and disgust.  My old poignant feelings about my physical condition returned to vex me.  As a matter of fact I had already that very day accomplished a climb not at all easy for the Arizonian, and I should have been happy.  But I had not been used to a lame back.  When I reached the rim I fell there, and lay there a few moments, until I could get up.  Then I followed along after Edd whose yells to the hounds I heard, and overtook him upon the point of a promontory.  Far below the hounds were baying.  “They’re chasin’ him all right,” declared Edd, grimly.  “He’s headin’ for low country.  I think Sue stopped him once.  But the rest of the pack are behind.”

I had never been on the point of this promontory.  Grand indeed was the panorama.  Under me yawned a dark-green, smoky-canyoned, rippling basin of timber and red rocks leading away to the mountain ranges of the Four Peaks and Mazatzals.  Westward, toward the yellowing sunset stood out long escarpments for miles, and long sloping lines of black ridges, leading down to the basin where there seemed to be a ripple of the earth, a vast upset region of canyon and ridge, wild and lonely and dark.