“I remember the first pump-gun that came into these mountains.  It was a Henry sixteen-shooter, and it blew in along with a kid from Boston who wanted to kill a bear.  The young chap’s uncle tried to convince him that killing a California Grizzly was not as much fun as some folks pretended, but the Boston boy couldn’t be convinced, and so the uncle hired me to go along and take care of him.  Boston had a gun in a case, and I told him to keep it there until we got to my bear pasture.  The rest of his outfit was 500 cartridges and a box of paper collars.

“When we got into camp over on the South Fork, Boston wanted to begin the slaughter right away and opened up that gun case.  I’d heard of the repeating rifle, but had it put up for a Yankee lie, and when the boy pulled out the gun I thought he had made a mistake and brought along some scientific contrivance from his college.  He told me it was a Henry rifle and showed me how it worked, but I had no use for it.  While he stuffed his pump-gun I smoked and thought.  ’Unless you go slow, Mr. Larkin,’ says I to myself, ’you’ll get into plenty of trouble.  Here you are, mixed up with something that you don’t sabe pretty well.  A rough canyon, two hound dogs and an able-bodied bear is a combination that you can work, but when you throw in a college boy and a gun that winds up like a clock and shoots till the cows come home, the situation looks kind of misty.’  I didn’t think much of the pump-gun, but for all I knew it might go off at both ends and paw up everything by the roots, and I was tolerable sure that Boston would wobble it around so’s to take in a pretty consid’able scope of outdoors.  But I allowed I was old fashioned enough to circumvent a Boston boy and his new gun, and concluded to go ahead.

“Next morning we put the dogs into Devil’s Gulch, and by making a cut over a spur we got about two miles below them and sat down to wait for bear.  The trees were so tall and so close together that you couldn’t see the tops and the sun never saw the ground.  The canyon was narrow and the sides were so steep that they tucked under at the bottom.  While we sat there I figured a bit on what was going to happen.  There was a light breeze, and presently I noticed something on the other side of the canyon, about fifty yards away.  The wind swayed some bushes that grew around a charred stump, and from time to time the black end of the stump showed up and then disappeared very much like a bear’s head peeping out of the brush.

“Pretty soon the dogs made a row up the gulch, and as the howls and yells and promiscuous uproar came nearer I knew they had started a bear and made him get a wiggle on.  Boston danced around in great excitement, and when I pointed to the black stump he was ready to see bears most anywhere.  ‘You take care of that,’ says I, ’and I’ll go and see what ails the dogs.’  He opened fire on the stump, and I dodged from tree to tree up the gulch until I was out of range.