Old Pinto was no myth, and he didn’t make tracks with a whittled pine foot.  His lair was a dense manzanita thicket upon the slope of a limestone ridge about a mile from the spring by which I camped, and he roamed all over the neighborhood.  In soft ground he made a track fourteen inches long and nine inches wide, but although at the time I took that for the size of his foot, I am now inclined to think that it was the combined track of front and hind foot, the hind foot “over-tracking” a few inches, obliterating the claw marks of the front foot and increasing the size of the imprint both in length and width.  Nevertheless he was a very large bear, and he loomed up formidably in the dusk of an evening when I saw him feasting, forty yards away, upon a big steer he had killed.

[Illustration:  Feasting upon a big steer he had killed.]

Pinto had the reputation of being not only dangerous but malevolent, and there were oft told tales of domiciliary visits paid by him at the cabins of settlers, and of aggressive advances upon mounted vaqueros, who were saved by the speed of their horses.  Doubtless the bear was audacious in foraging and indifferent to the presence of man, but he was not malevolent.  Indeed, I have yet to hear on any credible authority of a malevolent bear, or, for that matter, any other wild animal in North America whose disposition and habit is to seek trouble with man and go out of its way with the deliberate purpose of attacking him.  For many weeks I camped by that spring, much of the time alone, and without even a dog, with only a blanket for covering and the heavens for a roof, and my sleep never was disturbed by anything larger than a wood rat.  My camp was on one of Pinto’s beaten trails, but he abandoned it and passed fifty yards to one side or the other whenever his business took him down that way, and he never meddled with me or mine.  One night, as his tracks showed, he came to within twenty feet of my bivouac, sniffed around inquiringly and passed on.

I built two stout traps for Pinto’s benefit, and day after day I dragged bait around and through the manzanita thickets on the ridge and over all his trails, and sometimes I found tracks so fresh that I was satisfied he had heard me coming and had turned aside.  There were cougar and lynx tracks all over the mountains, but I seldom saw the animals and then only got fleeting glimpses of them as they fled out of my way.

Many of my prejudices and all my story-book notions about the behavior of the carnivorae were discredited by experience, and I was forced to recognize the plain truth that the only mischievous animal, the only creature meditating and planning evil on that mountain—­excepting of course the evil incident to the procurement of food—­was a man with a gun.  I was the only really dangerous and unnecessarily destructive animal in the woods, and all the rest were afraid of me.