The bear seized a pig in no time, and having broken its neck and stopped its squealing with a dexterous right-hander on the ear, he shuffled back to a position under the limb and stood upright, holding the pig in his arms.  Then the other and heavier bear moved out toward the end of the limb until it bent beneath his weight so that he could reach the pig as the lighter one held it up.  The big bear took the pig, and the other bear seized the limb and drew it down until he got a firm hold with all four feet.  Then the big bear backed away toward the trunk and the other followed, and the limb slowly sprang up to its natural level.  The two bears backed down to the ground and waddled across the clearing, the big one walking upright and carrying the pig in his arms.

Don Mariano did not shoot.  “The Good Father,” he said, “has given brains like that only to such of his children as have souls.  I would not commit murder for the value of a pig.  Besides, I casually noticed that I had miraculously forgotten to put caps on the gun.  Nevertheless I cut away all the limbs from the tree on the side toward the corral, and I still have the old sow and one pig.”

CHAPTER XVII.

When monarch was free.

For several years a large Grizzly roamed through the rugged mountain’s in the northern part of Los Angeles county, raiding cattle ranges and bee ranches and occasionally falling afoul of a settler or prospector.  He was at home on Mt.  Gleason, but his forays took in Big Tejunga and extended for twenty or thirty miles along the range.  Every settler knew the bear and had a name for him, and he went by as many aliases as a burglar in active practice.  As his depredations ceased after the capture of Monarch in 1889, those who assert that Monarch was the wanderer of the Sierra Madre and Big Tejunga may be right, and some of the stories told about him may be true.

Jeff Martin, a cattleman, who lived in Antelope Valley, and drove his stock into the mountains in summer, had several meetings with the big bear, but never managed to get the best of him.  When the Monarch didn’t win, the fight was a draw.  Jeff had an old buckskin horse that would follow a bear track as readily as a burro will follow a trail, and could be ridden up to within a few yards of the game.  Jeff and the old buckskin met the Monarch on a trail and started a bear fight right away.  The Monarch, somewhat surprised at the novel idea of a man disputing his right of way, stood upright and looked at Jeff, who raised his Winchester and began working the lever with great industry.  Jeff was never known to lie extravagantly about a bear-fight, and when he told how he pumped sixteen forty-four calibre bullets smack into the Monarch’s shaggy breast and never “fazed” him, nobody openly doubted Jeff’s story.