At sunset we had covered about sixteen miles of rough road, and had arrived at a point where we were to turn away from the rim, down into a canyon named Barber Shop Canyon, where we were to camp.

[Illustration:  Z.G.’S cinnamon bear]

[Illustration:  R.C.’S big brown bear]

Before turning aside I rode out to the rim for a look down at the section of country we were to hunt.  What a pleasure to recognize the point from which Romer-boy had seen his first wild bear!  It was a wonderful section of rim-rock country.  I appeared to be at the extreme point of a vast ten-league promontory, rising high over the basin, where the rim was cut into canyons as thick as teeth of a saw.  They were notched and v-shaped.  Craggy russet-lichened cliffs, yellow and gold-stained rocks, old crumbling ruins of pinnacles crowned by pine thickets, ravines and gullies and canyons, choked with trees and brush all green-gold, purple-red, scarlet-fire—­these indeed were the heights and depths, the wild, lonely ruggedness, the color and beauty of Arizona land.  There were long, steep slopes of oak thickets, where the bears lived, long gray slides of weathered rocks, long slanting ridges of pine, descending for miles out and down into the green basin, yet always seeming to stand high above that rolling wilderness.  The sun stood crossed by thin clouds—­a golden blaze in a golden sky—­sinking to meet a ragged horizon line of purple.

[Illustration:  Another bear]

Here again was I confronted with the majesty and beauty of the earth, and with another and more striking effect of this vast tilted rim of mesa.  I could see many miles to west and east.  This rim was a huge wall of splintered rock, a colossal cliff, towering so high above the black basin below that ravines and canyons resembled ripples or dimples, darker lines of shade.  And on the other side from its very edge, where the pine fringe began, it sloped gradually to the north, with heads of canyons opening almost at the crest.  I saw one ravine begin its start not fifty feet from the rim.

Barber Shop Canyon had five heads, all running down like the fingers of a hand, to form the main canyon, which was deep, narrow, forested by giant pines.  A round, level dell, watered by a murmuring brook, deep down among the many slopes, was our camp ground, and never had I seen one more desirable.  The wind soughed in the lofty pine tops, but not a breeze reached down to this sheltered nook.  With sunset gold on the high slopes our camp was shrouded in twilight shadows.  R.C. and I stretched a canvas fly over a rope from tree to tree, staked down the ends, and left the sides open.  Under this we unrolled our beds.