One by one the hounds climbed over the rim and wearily lay down beside us.  Down the long, grassy, cedared aisle I saw Edd and Nielsen plodding up.  At length they reached us wet and dusty and thirsty.  When Edd got his breath he said:  “Right off we struck a hot trail.  Bear with eleven-inch track.  He’d come down to drink last night.  Hounds worked up thet yeller oak thicket, an’ somewhere Sue an’ Rock jumped him out of his bed.  He run down, an’ he made some racket.  Took to the low slopes an’ hit up lively all the way down Dude, then crossed, climbed around under thet bare point of rock.  Here some of the hounds caught up with him.  We heard a pup yelp, an’ after a while Kaiser Bill come sneakin’ back.  It was awful thick down in the canyon so we climbed the east side high enough to see.  An’ we were workin’ down when the pack bayed the bear round thet bare point.  It was up an’ across from us.  Nielsen an’ I climbed on a rock.  There was an open rock-slide where we thought the bear would show.  It was five hundred yards.  We ought to have gone across an’ got a stand higher up.  Well, pretty soon we saw him come paddlin’ out of the brush—­a big grizzly, almost black, with a frosty back.  He was a silvertip all right.  Niels an’ I began to shoot.  An’ thet bear began to hump himself.  He was mad, too.  His fur stood up like a ruffle on his neck.  Niels got four shots an’ I got three.  Reckon one of us stung him a little.  Lordy, how he run!  An’ his last jump off the slide was a header into the brush.  He crossed the canyon, an’ climbed thet high east slope of Dude, goin’ over the pass where father killed the big cinnamon three years ago.  The hounds stuck to his trail.  It took us an hour or more to climb up to thet pass.  Broad bear trail goes over.  We heard the hounds ‘way down in the canyon on the other side.  Niels an’ I worked along the ridge, down an’ around, an’ back to Dude Creek.  I kept callin’ the hounds till they all came back.  They couldn’t catch him.  He sure was a jack-rabbit for runnin’.  Reckon thet’s all....  Now who was smokin’ shells up on the rim?”

When all was told and talked over Haught said:  “Wal, you can just bet we put up two brown bears an’ one black bear, an’ thet old Jasper of a silvertip.”

How hungry and thirsty and tired I was when we got back to camp!  The day had been singularly rich in exciting thrills and sensorial perceptions.  I called to the Jap:  “I’m starv-ved to death!” And Takahashi, who had many times heard my little boy Loren yell that, grinned all over his dusky face.  “Aw, lots good things pretty soon!”

After supper we lounged around a cheerful, crackling camp-fire.  The blaze roared in the breeze, the red embers glowed white and opal, the smoke swooped down and curled away into the night shadows.  Old Dan, as usual, tried to sit in the fire, and had to be rescued.  Buck came to me where I sat with my back to a pine, my feet to the warmth.  He was lame to-night, having run all day on that injured leg.  The other dogs lay scattered around in range of the heat.  Natural indeed was it then, in such an environment, after talking over the auspicious start of our hunt at Dude Creek, that we should drift to the telling of stories.