Usually the berry grounds do not offer such favorable opportunities, as they often lie in thick timber, or are covered so densely with bushes as to obstruct the view; and they are rarely commanded by a favorable spot from which to spy.  On the other hand, as already said, bears occasionally forget all their watchfulness while devouring fruit, and make such a noise rending and tearing the bushes that, if once found, a man can creep upon them unobserved.

CHAPTER IV.—­HUNTING THE GRISLY.

If out in the late fall or early spring, it is often possible to follow a bear’s trail in the snow; having come upon it either by chance or hard hunting, or else having found where it leads from some carcass on which the beast has been feeding.  In the pursuit one must exercise great caution, as at such times the hunter is easily seen a long way off, and game is always especially watchful for any foe that may follow its trail.

Once I killed a grisly in this manner.  It was early in the fall, but snow lay on the ground, while the gray weather boded a storm.  My camp was in a bleak, wind-swept valley, high among the mountains which form the divide between the head-waters of the Salmon and Clarke’s Fork of the Columbia.  All night I had lain in my buffalo-bag, under the lea of a windbreak of branches, in the clump of fir-trees, where I had halted the preceding evening.  At my feet ran a rapid mountain torrent, its bed choked with ice-covered rocks; I had been lulled to sleep by the stream’s splashing murmur, and the loud moaning of the wind along the naked cliffs.  At dawn I rose and shook myself free of the buffalo robe, coated with hoar-frost.  The ashes of the fire were lifeless; in the dim morning the air was bitter cold.  I did not linger a moment, but snatched up my rifle, pulled on my fur cap and gloves, and strode off up a side ravine; as I walked I ate some mouthfuls of venison, left over from supper.

Two hours of toil up the steep mountain brought me to the top of a spur.  The sun had risen, but was hidden behind a bank of sullen clouds.  On the divide I halted, and gazed out over a vast landscape, inconceivably wild and dismal.  Around me towered the stupendous mountain masses which make up the backbone of the Rockies.  From my feet, as far as I could see, stretched a rugged and barren chaos of ridges and detached rock masses.  Behind me, far below, the stream wound like a silver ribbon, fringed with dark conifers and the changing, dying foliage of poplar and quaking aspen.  In front the bottoms of the valleys were filled with the sombre evergreen forest, dotted here and there with black, ice-skimmed tarns; and the dark spruces clustered also in the higher gorges, and were scattered thinly along the mountain sides.  The snow which had fallen lay in drifts and streaks, while, where the wind had scope it was blown off, and the ground left bare.