The road was so steep and fatiguing that I dismounted; still, I seemed to be on a path at times trodden by buffaloes, which was continued when I reached the top, where a wide tableland covered with rich vegetation was expanded before me. This plain, only interrupted by a few hillocks, was about twenty miles in diameter: it was covered with very high grass and small patches of mosquito trees, elms, dwarf oaks, and yuccas. The ground was quite black and very rich, and this earth was in some places fifteen feet deep, as I could see by the numerous channels cut by rain storms. I did not see a trace of spring water. This country is entirely dependent on the rains, which are frequent in these mountains, as well as the peculiar nature of the soil, which long resists evaporation of the humidity. On all sides I saw herds of grazing buffalo, but, though my mouth watered for a slice of hump and a marrow bone, I did not like to distress my horse, or go too far away from him while stalking. More antelopes were feeding here together than I had ever seen, and the same was the case with deer. I rode quietly on through the tall grass, resolved only to shoot some animal I could ride up to, and succeeded in doing so toward evening, when I saw something dark moving in the grass, which I recognised as a black wolf. In a second I was off Czar's back, as I should be very glad of such a skin, and was just about to fire, when I saw, on the other side of a ditch I had not observed in the tall grass, a very large bear running away. Owing to the high plants, I could not fire, and, forgetting my former resolution, I leapt on Czar's back, and flew after the fat fellow. His road led through a number of low mosquito trees, so that I was obliged to bend down over my horse's neck to escape being caught in the branches. I was close to the bear, but it coursed so rapidly under the branches, that I could not give it a shot from my revolver. At length we emerged from the trees, and I flew a few yards after the bear, when suddenly Czar made such a leap to the right, that I must have been thrown, had it not been for the heavy holsters that kept me on. I turned the horse round again, and then noticed that the bear had disappeared in a gap before me; and on drawing near, I found a _cañon_, going down a hundred feet sheer, and about twenty feet wide at this part. It was a gully washed out by the rain, which I had not observed owing to the tall grass. I dismounted, and walked to the spot where the bear had disappeared: saw that the bushes had been uprooted about thirty feet lower down, but could not discover a trace of the bear. What I had been told by old hunters now appeared to me probable--that a bear will, in a case of need, put its head between its legs, and roll like a ball from some height, without hurting itself; which can be explained by the remarkable elasticity of its bones, and the thickness of the fat over its body, I owed it solely to the agility