Among other things, I had to be doctor and surgeon to those people. I had never taken a course at a medical school and knew very little about medicine or surgery. But I had books and studied them and did the best I could. The hardest surgical cases I had were the result of little love-taps by old Mr. Hootz, the big brown bear. This bear is almost identical, except in color, with _ursus horribilis_, the grizzly--he is as large and ferocious and as hard to kill. Farther west in Alaska he has the true grizzly color and is called the silver-tip; but in Southeastern Alaska he is a rich brown, the female being much lighter in color than the male. Once the Indians brought to me a man who had been foolish enough to shoot a hootz with his smooth-bore musket. The bear charged on the Indian, gave him one tap with his paw and went away. The poor man presented a horrible appearance. One eye was torn out, the skin of one side of his face torn loose and hanging down on his shoulder, the cheek laid entirely open. I did my best for him, washed his awful wound, replaced the skin on his face and took many stitches; but I couldn't make a pretty man of him. Another Indian was hunting in the spring when he came across a little brown cub, and thought he would have a fine pet. He had just caught the little fellow and was trying to hush its cries, when suddenly the mother-bear came on him like an avalanche and he was knocked senseless. When he came to, hours afterwards, he was unable to move. The bear had torn off much of his scalp with the first blow, and then had bitten and chewed him from head to foot, injuring his spine, so that he could never walk again. I dressed twenty-one wounds which the angry she-bear had given him. But the greatest example of the strength and ferocity of the hootz of which I ever knew was afforded by the adventure of an Irishman--a gold-prospector, whom we called Big Mike. He was a giant in stature--over six feet, broad and stalwart, physically the king of the Cassiar miners. He was a good-natured, happy-go-lucky fellow, a typical gold-prospector, making money very fast at times and spending it just as fast. Like the most of the miners of the Cassiar region (which was reached by traveling by steamboat from Victoria to Fort Wrangell, then by canoe or river steamboat up the Stickeen River a hundred and fifty miles, then across country by pack-train from one hundred to two hundred miles, according to the location of the "diggings"), Mike made Fort Wrangell his stopping place to and from the Cassiar, sometimes wintering there. One day Dave Flannery, another Irishman, whose Stickeen wife was a member of my mission, came hurriedly up to my house. "I wish you'd come down and see Big Mike," he said; "he's hurrt bad." I found Mike in one of the miners' shanties on the beach, lying on a bed, entirely helpless. He could only use his arms, his legs being paralyzed. This was the story he told me: