Above the head of the third gorge Copple and I ran across an enormous bear track, fresh in the dust, leading along an old bear trail.  This track measured twelve inches.  “He’s an old Jasper, as Haught says,” declared Copple.  “Grizzly.  An’ you can bet he heard the dogs an’ got movin’ away from here.  But he ain’t scared.  He was walkin’.”

I forgot the arduous toil.  How tight and cool and prickling the feel of my skin!  The fresh track of a big grizzly would rouse the hunter in any man.  We made sure how fresh this track was by observing twigs and sprigs of manzanita just broken.  The wood was green, and wet with sap.  Old Bruin had not escaped our eyes any too soon.  We followed this bear trail, evidently one used for years.  It made climbing easy for us.  Trust a big, heavy, old grizzly to pick out the best traveling over rough country!  This fellow, I concluded, had the eye of a surveyor.  His trail led gradually toward a wonderful crag-crowned ridge that rolled and heaved down from the rim.  It had a dip or saddle in the middle, and rose from that to the lofty mesa, and then on the lower side, rose to a bare, round point of gray rock, a landmark, a dome-shaped tower where the gods of that wild region might have kept their vigil.

Long indeed did it take us to climb up the bear trail to where it crossed the saddle and went down on the other side into a canyon so deep and wild that it was purple.  This saddle was really a remarkable place—­a natural trail and outlet and escape for bears traveling from one canyon to another.  Our bear tracks showed fresh, and we saw where they led down a steep, long, dark aisle between pines and spruces to a dense black thicket below.  The saddle was about twenty feet wide, and on each side of it rose steep rocks, affording most effective stands for a hunter to wait and watch.

We rested then, and listened.  There was only a little wind, and often it fooled us.  It sounded like the baying of hounds, and now like the hallooing of men, and then like the distant peal of a horn.  By and bye Copple said he heard the hounds.  I could not be sure.  Soon we indeed heard the deep-sounding, wild bay of Old Dan, the course, sharp, ringing bay of Old Tom, and then, less clear, the chorus from the other hounds.  Edd had started them on a trail up this magnificent canyon at our feet.  After a while we heard Edd’s yell, far away, but clear:  “Hi!  Hi!” We could see a part of the thicket, shaggy and red and gold; and a mile or more of the opposite wall of the canyon.  No rougher, wilder place could have been imagined than this steep slope of bluffs, ledges, benches, all matted with brush, and spotted with pines.  Holes and caves and cracks showed, and yellow blank walls, and bronze points, and green slopes, and weathered slides.

Soon the baying of the hounds appeared to pass below and beyond us, up the canyon to our right, a circumstance that worried Copple.  “Let’s go farther up,” he kept saying.  But I was loath to leave that splendid stand.  The baying of the hounds appeared to swing round closer under us; to ring, to swell, to thicken until it was a continuous and melodious, wild, echoing roar.  The narrowing walls of the canyon threw the echoes back and forth.