Old Bill, who had lived in the canyon many years, sorrowfully admitted that the canyon’s reputation for harboring persons of unimpeachable veracity was not what it should be.  The man-who-was-afraid-of-bears could not be depended upon to give bed-rock facts about bears, but he, Old Bill, was a well of truth in that line and had some good horses and burros to let to bear hunters.  He, Old Bill, had killed many bears in the canyon, but had left enough to provide entertainment for other hunters.  His last bear killing was heaps of fun.  He ran across three in a bunch, shot one, drowned another in the creek, and jumped upon the third, and “just stomped him to death.”  As for the man up the creek, who pretended to have found a den of bears, he had been telling that story for so many years that he probably believed it, but nobody else did.  The man up the creek had the nerve to pretend that his favorite pastime was fighting Grizzlies with a butcher knife, and anybody acquainted with bears ought to size up that sort of a man easy enough, said Old Bill.

The man up the creek, the original locator of the denful of Grizzlies, had his opinion of Old Bill as a slayer of bears.  It was notorious in the canyon that the only bear Old Bill ever saw was a fifty-pound cub that stole a string of trout from under Bill’s nose, waded the creek and went away while Old Bill was throwing his gun into the brush and hitching frantically along a fallen spruce under the impression that he was climbing a tree.  As for himself, he was getting too old and rheumatic to hunt, but he had had a little sport with bears in his time.  He recalled with especial glee a little incident of ten or a dozen years ago.  He had been over on the Iron Fork hunting for a stray mule, and he was coming back through the canyon after dark.  It was darker than a stack of black cats in the canyon, and when he bumped up against a bear in the trail he couldn’t see to get in his favorite knife play—­a slash to the left and a back-handed cut to the right, severing the tendons of both front paws—­and so he made a lunge for general results, and then shinned up a sycamore tree.  To his great surprise he heard the bear scrambling up the tree behind him, and he crawled around to the other side of the trunk and straddled a big branch in the fork, where he could get a firm seat and have the free use of his right arm.  He could just make out the dark bulk of the bear as the beast crawled clumsily up the slanting trunk in front of him, and as the bear’s left arm came around and clasped the trunk, he chopped at it with his heavy knife.  The bear roared with pain.  Instantly he lunged furiously at the bear’s body just under the arm pit, driving the knife to the hilt two or three times, and with a moan the beast let go all holds and fell heavily to the ground.

For a minute all was silent.  Then the growling began again, and he heard the scratching of claws upon the tree.  In another moment the dark bulk of the bear appeared again in front of him, and again he drove the knife to the hilt into his body and felt the hot blood spurt over his hand.  Clawing, scratching and yelling, the bear slid back down the tree and bumped heavily on the ground, but in a moment resumed the attack and climbed the tree as quickly as if he were fresh and unwounded.