Rock and Old Tom had given up.  This track was six inches wide and ten inches long.  The bear that had made it had come down this very morning from over the ridge east of Bear Canyon.  I trailed him up this ridge, over the steepest and roughest and wildest part of it, marveling at the enormous steps and jumps he made, and at the sagacity which caused him to choose this route instead of the saddle trail where I had waited so long.  His track led up nearly to the rim and proved how he had climbed over the most rugged break in the ridge.  Indeed he was one of the wise old scoundrels.  When I reached camp I learned that Sue and several more of the hounds had held a bear for some time in the box of the canyon just beyond where I had to give up.  Edd and Nielsen were across this canyon, unable to go farther, and then yelled themselves hoarse, trying to call some of us.  I asked Edd if he saw the bear.  “Sure did,” replied Edd.  “One of them long, lean, hungry cinnamons.”  I had to laugh, and told how near I had come to meeting a bear that was short, fat, and heavy:  “One of the old Jasper scoundrels!”

That night at dark the wind still blew a gale, and seemed more bitterly cold.  We hugged the camp-fire.  My eyes smarted from the smoke and my face grew black.  Before I went to bed I toasted myself so thoroughly that my clothes actually burned me as I lay down.  But they heated the blankets and that made my bed snug and soon I was in the land of dreams.  During the night I awoke.  The wind had lulled.  The canopy above was clear, cold, starry, beautiful.  When we rolled out the mercury showed ten above zero.  Perhaps looking at the thermometer made us feel colder, but in any event we would have had to move about to keep warm.  I built a fire and my hands were blocks of ice when I got the blaze stirring.

That day, so keen and bright, so wonderful with its clarity of atmosphere and the breath of winter through the pines, promised to be as exciting as it was beautiful.  Maybe this day R.C. would bag a bear!

When we reached the rim the sunrise was just flushing the purple basin, flooding with exquisite gold and rose light the slumberous shadows.  What a glorious wilderness to greet the eye at sunrise!  I suffered a pang to realize what men missed—­what I had to miss so many wonderful mornings.

We had made our plan.  The hounds had left a bear in the second canyon east of Dude.  Edd started down.  Copple and Takahashi followed to hug the lower slopes.  Nielsen and Haught and George held to the rim to ride east in case the hounds chased a bear that way.  And R.C. and I were to try to climb out and down a thin rock-crested ridge which, so far as Haught knew, no one had ever been on.