[Illustration:  Pinto Looked Down on the Platform.]

This is the sort of bear Old Pinto was, eminently entitled to the name that Lewis and dark applied to his tribe—­Ursus Ferox.  Of course he was called “Old Clubfoot” and “Reelfoot” by people who did not know him, just as every big Grizzly has been called in California since the clubfooted-bear myth became part of the folk lore of the Golden State, but his feet were all sound and whole.  The Clubfoot legend is another story and has nothing to do with the big bear of the Castac.

Pinto was a “bravo” and a killer, a solitary, cross-grained, crusty-tempered old outlaw of the range.  What he would or might do under any circumstances could not be predicated upon the basis of what another one of his species had done under similar circumstances.  The man who generalizes the conduct of the Grizzly is liable to serious error, for the Grizzly’s individuality is strong and his disposition various.  Because one Grizzly scuttled into the brush at the sight of a man, it does not follow that another Grizzly will behave similarly.  The other Grizzly’s education may have been different.  One bear lives in a region infested only by small game, such as rabbits, wood-mice, ants and grubs, and when he cannot get a meal by turning over flat rocks or stripping the bark from a decaying tree, he digs roots for a living.  He is not accustomed to battle and he is not a killer, and he may be timorous in the presence of man.  Another Grizzly haunts the cattle or sheep ranges and is accustomed to seeing men and beasts flee before him for their lives.  He lives by the strong arm, takes what he wants like a robber baron, and has sublime confidence in his own strength, courage and agility.  He has killed bulls in single combat, evaded the charge of the cow whose calf he has caught, stampeded sheep and their herders.  He is almost exclusively carnivorous and consequently fierce.  Such a bear yields the trail to nothing that lives.  That is why Old Pinto was a bad bear.

So long as Pinto remained in his dominions and confined his maraudings to the cattle ranges, he was reasonably safe from the hunters and perfectly safe from the settler and his strychnine bottle, but for some reasons of his own he changed his habits and his diet and strayed over to San Emigdio for mutton.  Perhaps, as he advanced in years, the bear found it more difficult to catch cattle, and having discovered a band of sheep and found it not only easy to kill what he needed, but great fun to charge about in the band and slay right and left in pure wanton ferocity, he took up the trade of sheep butcher.  For two or three years he followed the flocks in their summer grazing over the vast, spraddling mesas of Pine Mountain, and made a general nuisance of himself in the camps.  There have been other bears on Pine Mountain, and the San Emigdio flocks have been harassed there regularly, but no such bold marauder as Old Pinto ever struck the range.  Other bears made their forays in the night and hid in the ravines during the day, but Pinto strolled into the camps at all hours, charged the flocks when they were grazing and stampeded Haggin and Carr’s merinos all over the mountains.