“All you’ve got to do,” says Morgan, “is to stand to one side and keep quiet, and the bear’ll just scoot by without noticing you.  It’s the light that’s bothering him, and all he’s thinking about is getting out of that hole as fast as he can.  He don’t like the smoke and the fire, and he won’t pay any attention to anything else until he gets outside, but then you want to look out.  He goes for the first live thing in sight when he’s clear of the cave and the smudge, and he don’t go very slow either.  Jim Brackett found that out over in Squaw Valley one day.  He found a bear in a den, and built a fire at the mouth to smoke him out.  The fire was burning rather slowly, Brackett thought, and he stood looking around and waiting for something to happen.  While he had his back turned to the den something did happen, and it happened dog-gone sudden.  That fire was plenty fast enough for the bear, and the old cuss came out without waiting to be choked.  He came out galleycahoo, and the first thing he saw was Brackett leaning on his gun and waiting for the show to begin.  He just grabbed Brackett by the back of the neck and slammed him around through the manzanita brush like a dog shaking a groundhog, Brackett told me that he never felt so surprised and hurt in his life.  He hadn’t cal’lated on that bear coming out for a good two minutes more; but mebbe the bear had stronger objections to smoking than Brackett knew.  If it hadn’t been for Brackett’s little cur dog, that he supposed wasn’t fit for nothing but barking at chipmunks, I reckon the bear would have chawed and thumped the life out of him.  The cur seemed to tumble to the situation right away, and he went for the bear’s heels in good shape.  It generally takes time and a few knock-out cuffs from bear’s paw to teach a dog that there’s two ends to a bear and only one of them safe to tackle, but that little ornery kiyi knew it from the start.  If there’s anything a bear can’t stand, it’s a dog nipping his heels, and when the cur began snapping at his hind legs and yelping, he lost interest in Brackett and attended to the disturbance in the rear.  The little cuss was cute and spry enough to keep out of his reach, though, and he made such a nuisance of himself, without doing any serious damage of course, that the bear got disgusted with the whole performance and hiked out through the brush.  Brackett was hurt too badly to follow him or to fire a gun, and it was two months before he was able to get around.  But he wouldn’t have sold that little scrub cur for all the money he ever saw.”

Budd Watson, who used to hunt and trap on the Pitt River and the McCloud, had an adventure with a bear that didn’t conduct his part of the hunt according to Hoyle.  Budd and Joe Mills tracked a big Cinnamon to a den in the mountains near the McCloud and built a big smudge to smoke him out.  The wind blew the wrong way to drive the smoke in, and so Budd took a torch and went after the bear, leaving Mills on guard