Old Juan, the vaquero, who lived in a cabin on the flat below the alkaline pool called Castac Lake, was filled with a fear of Pinto that was akin to superstition.  He told how the bear had followed him home and besieged him all night in the cabin, and he would walk five miles to catch a horse to ride two miles in the hills.  To him old Pinto was “mucho diablo,” and a shivering terror made his eyes roll and his voice break in trembling whispers when he talked of the bear while riding along the cattle trails.

Once upon a time an ambitious sportsman of San Francisco, who wanted to kill something bigger than a duck and more ferocious than a jackrabbit, read about Pinto and persuaded himself that he was bear-hunter enough to tackle the old fellow.  He went to Fort Tejon, hired a guide and made an expedition to the Castac.  The guide took the hunter to Spike-buck Spring, which is at the head of a ravine under the limestone ridge, and showed to him the footprints of a big bear in the mud and along the bear trail that crosses the spring.  One glance at the track of Pinto’s foot was sufficient to dispel all the dime-novel day dreams of the sportsman and start a readjustment of his plan of campaign.  After gazing at that foot-print, the slaying of a Grizzly by “one well-directed shot” from the “unerring rifle” was a feat that lost its beautiful simplicity and assumed heroic proportions.  The man from San Francisco had intended to find the bear’s trail, follow it on foot, overtake or meet the Grizzly and kill him in his tracks, after the manner of the intrepid hunters that he had read about, but he sat down on a log and debated the matter with the guide.  That old-timer would not volunteer advice, but when it was asked he gave it, and he told the man from San Francisco that if he wanted to tackle a Grizzly all by his lonely self, his best plan would be to stake out a calf, climb a tree and wait for the bear to come along in the night.

So the man built a platform in the tree, about ten feet from the ground, staked out a calf, climbed up to the platform and waited.  The bear came along and killed the calf, and the man in the tree saw the lethal blow, heard the bones crack and changed his plan again.  He laid himself prone upon the platform, held his breath and hoped fervently that his heart would not thump loudly enough to attract the bear’s intention.  The bear ate his fill of the quivering veal, and then reared on his haunches to survey the surroundings.  The man from San Francisco solemnly assured the guide in the morning, when he got back to camp, that when Pinto sat up he actually looked down on that platform and could have walked over to the tree and picked him off like a ripe persimmon, and he thanked heaven devoutly that it did not come into Pinto’s head that that would be a good thing to do.  So the man from San Francisco broke camp and went home with some new and valuable ideas about hunting Grizzlies, chief of which was the very clear idea that he did not care for the sport.