Knowing the mountain well, however, and having in mind some places which might easily be overlooked by the herders, the superintendent concluded to make an attempt to clear up the mystery for his own satisfaction.  For two or three days he sought in vain for the trail of the missing sheep, visiting several likely places unknown to the herders, and he was about to give up the search when his mind pulled out of a dusty pigeon-hole of memory a faded picture of a queer nook in the mountain, into which he had stumbled many years before in chase of a wounded deer.  More for the sake of seeing if he could find the place again than in hope of solving the sheep mystery, he renewed his search, and, at the end of a day’s riding over the spurs of the mountain and up and down ravines, he recognized the slope down which he had chased the wounded deer, and saw upon it the hoof prints of sheep not quite obliterated by wind and rain.

At the bottom of the slope was a small flat seemingly hemmed in on three sides by steep walls.  At the upper end, however, behind a thick grove of pines, was a break in one of the side walls leading to an enclosed cienega, an emerald gem set deep in the mountain, as though a few acres of ground had sunk bodily some fifty feet, forming a pit in which water had collected and remained impounded until it broke an outlet through the lower wall.

When the superintendent reached the entrance to this sunken meadow, an opening perhaps thirty yards wide, he noticed a well worn path across it from wall to wall, and a glance told him that the path had been beaten by a bear pacing to and fro.  Looking closely at this beaten trail, he saw that the footprints were large and that one paw of the bear was malformed.  Old Clubfoot without doubt.

Huddled in silent terror close to the farther wall of the little valley were about forty sheep, and near the beaten path were the remains of ten or a dozen carcases.  A little study of the situation and the sign told the story to the old mountaineer.  The frightened band of sheep, fleeing blindly before the bear, had been driven by chance or by design into this natural trap, and the wily old bear had mounted guard at the entrance and paced his beat until the sheep were thoroughly cured of any tendency to wander down toward the lower end of the meadow.  When he wanted mutton, he caught a fat sheep, carried it to his sentry beat and killed and ate it there, leaving the remains as a warning to the rest not to cross the dead line.  The grass in the cienega was thick and green, and there was enough seepage of water to furnish drink for the flock.  So the provident bear had several months’ supply of mutton on the hoof, penned up and growing fat in his private storehouse, and his trail across the entrance was as good as a five-barred gate.