It was a mile away, a great, slow-moving hulk that I might have mistaken for a rock had my eyes not been trained to the ways and movement of game. It was a grizzly. Alone I went after him, armed with man’s deadliest weapon of extinction, a .405 Winchester. Inside of half an hour I was well in the teeth of the breeze coming up the valley, and almost within gunshot of my victim. I came to a coulee and crept up that, and when I reached the table-land meadow where it began, a thousand feet above the valley, I found myself within a hundred yards of the grizzly. He was digging like a dog for a gopher. And, then, suddenly, my heart gave a thump that almost choked me. In a twist of the mountain-bench, not more than seventy or eighty yards above me, were two more grizzlies. I hesitated, and looked back down the coulee, for a moment doubtful whether to retreat or declare war. Then I decided. In my hands was a killer of the deadliest and surest kind. I was an expert shot and my nerves were steady. I began. I think I fired five shots in perhaps thirty seconds, and the three big grizzlies died almost in their tracks. A conqueror returning in his triumph to old Rome could not have been more elated than I. I remember that I leaped and danced and shrieked out at the top of my voice in the direction of camp. I was mad with joy. Three thousand pounds of flesh and blood lay hot and lifeless under my eyes, and I, the human near-god, with my own two insignificant hands and a mechanical thing, _had taken the life from it_! I sat down on one of the huge carcasses that still breathed under me. I wiped my face, and my blood was running a race that heated me as if with fire. And the thought came to me: “Oh, if the world could only see me now--here in my glorious triumph--with these great beasts about me!” For it was a mighty triumph for man, the egoist. In thirty seconds I had destroyed a possible one hundred years of throbbing, heart-beating life, a hundred years of winter, a hundred years of summer, a hundred mating-seasons, and the thousand other lives that now would never be born! I stood up, and shrieked again toward the camp, and far above me out of the blue of the sky I heard an answering cry from one of the eagles....