A crushing step on the stones told me Jones had arrived.

“Hi!  Hi!  Hi!” roared he.

I thought then that if the lioness did not cover thirty feet at every jump I was not in a condition to judge distance.  She ran away from Don as if he had been tied and reached the thicket below a hundred yards ahead of him.  And when Don leaving his brave pack far up the slide entered the thicket the lioness came out on the other side and bounded up the bare slope of yellow shale.

“Shoot ahead of her!  Head her off!  Turn her back!” cried Jones.

With the word I threw forward the Remington and let drive.  Following the bellow of the rifle, so loud in that thin air, a sharp, harsh report cracked up from below.  A puff of yellow dust rose in front of the lioness.  I was in line, but too far ahead.  I fired again.  The steel jacketed bullet hit a stone and spitefully whined away into the canyon.  I tried once more.  This time I struck close to the lioness.  Disconcerted by a cloud of dust rising before her very eyes she wheeled and ran back.

We had forgotten Don and suddenly he darted out of the thicket, straight up the slide.  Always, in every chase, we were afraid the great hound would run to meet his death.  We knew it was coming sometime.  When the lioness saw him and stopped, both Jones and I felt that this was to be the end of Don.

“Shoot her!  Shoot her!” cried Jones.  “She’ll kill him!  She’ll kill him!”

As I knelt on the rock I had a hard contraction of my throat, and then all my muscles set tight and rigid.  I pulled the trigger of my automatic once, twice.  It was wonderful how closely the two bullets followed each other, as we could tell by the almost simultaneous puffs of dust rising from under the beast’s nose.  She must have been showered and stung with gravel, for she bounded off to the left and disappeared in the cedars.  I had missed, but the shots had served to a better end than if I had killed her.

As Don raced up the ground where a moment before a battle and probably death had awaited him, the other hounds burst from the thicket.  With that, a golden form seemed to stand out from the green of the cedar, to move and to rise.

“She’s treed!  She’s treed!” shouted Jones.  “Go down and keep her there while I follow.”

From the back of the promontory where I met the main wall, I let myself down a niche, foot here and there, a hand hard on the soft stone, braced knee and back until I jumped to the edge of the slope.  The scrub oak and manzanita saved me many a fall.  I set some stones rolling and I beat them to the bottom.  Having passed the thicket, I bent my efforts to the yellow slide and when I had surmounted it my breath came in labored pants.  The howling of the hounds guided me through the cedars.

First I saw Moze in the branches of cedar and above him the lioness.  I ran out into a little open patch of stony ground at the end of which the tree stood leaning over a precipice.  In truth the lioness was swaying over a chasm.