Soon I worked or wormed out of the pines into the thicket of scrub oaks, maples and aspens.  The change was welcome.  Not only did the slope lengthen out, but the light changed from gloom to gold.  There was half a foot of scarlet, gold, bronze, red and purple leaves on the ground, and every step I made I kicked acorns about to rustle and roll.  Bear sign was everywhere, tracks and trails and beds and scratches.  I kept going down, and the farther down I got the lighter it grew, and more approaching a level.  One glade was strangely luminous and beautiful with a blending of gold and purple light made by the sun shining through the leaves overhead down upon the carpet of leaves on the ground.  Then I came into a glade that reminded me of Kipling’s moonlight dance of the wild elephants.  Here the leaves and fern were rolled and matted flat, smooth as if done by a huge roller.  Bears and bears had lolled and slept and played there.  A little below this glade was a place, shady and cool, where a seep of water came from under a bank.  It looked like a herd of cattle had stamped the earth, only the tracks were bear tracks.  Little ones no longer than a child’s hand, and larger, up to huge tracks a foot long and almost as wide.  Many were old, but some were fresh.  This little spot smelled of bear so strongly that it reminded me of the bear pen in the Bronx Park Zoological Garden.  I had been keen for sight of bear trails and scent of bear fur, but this was a little too much.  I thought it was too much because the place was lonely and dark and absolutely silent.  I went on down to the gully that ran down the middle of the canyon.  It was more open here.  The sun got through, and there were some big pines.

I could see the bluff that the Haughts had climbed so laboriously, and now I understood why they had been so slow.  It was straight up, brush and jumbled rock, and two hundred feet over my head.  Somewhere above that bluff was the bluff where our bear had run along.

I rested and listened for the dogs.  There was no wind to deceive me, but I imagined I heard dogs everywhere.  It seemed unwise for me to go on down the canyon, for if I did not meet the men I would find myself lost.  As it was I would have my troubles climbing out.

I chose a part of the thicket some distance above where I had come down, hoping to find it more open, if not less steep, and not so vastly inhabited with bears.  Lo and behold it was worse!  It was thicker, darker, wilder, steeper and there was, if possible, actually more bear sign.  I had to pull myself up by holding to the trees and branches.  I had to rest every few steps.  I had to watch and listen all the time.  Half-way up the trunks of the aspens and oaks and maples were all bent down-hill.  They curved out and down before the rest of the tree stood upright.  And all the brush was flat, bending down hill, and absolutely almost impassable.  This feature of tree and brush was of course caused