Detective and mystery stories; Hunting stories; Wilderness areas -- Fiction
It was a day of great discoveries. I found that what is true of the
sticks is equally true of the pebbles and a displaced fragment of stone
immediately caught my eyes. With the tenacity of a bloodhound I stuck to
my task until I suddenly found myself at the base of the park wall, at
the foot of the diagonal fracture in the face of the cliff where I had
climbed when I discovered the golden trout. As I have said, the
fracture led diagonally up the towering face of the beetling precipice.
For fear that I might have made some mistake I carefully retraced my
steps backward toward the bullberry bushes near the camp. On the back
trail I came upon some distinct and obvious footprints in a dusty place,
but so deeply interested was I in hidden signs, the slight but tell-tale
disturbances of leaf and soil, that I once passed these plainly marked
tracks with only a glance and would have done so the second time had not
their marked peculiarities accidentally caught my attention.
When examining the trail of this mysterious camp visitor I suddenly
realized that in place of moccasin footprints I was following bear
tracks, my heart ceased to beat for a moment or two before I could pull
myself together and smother the prehensile footed superstitious old
savage in me with the practical philosophy of the up-to-date man of
today.
Taking a short cut I ran back to the foot of the pass and there, on
hands and knees, ascended for a hundred feet or more—the bear steps led
up the pass, and yet at the beginning of the trail the feet wore
moccasins. This I knew because at one place the foot-mark showed plainly
in the gray alkali dust which had accumulated upon a projecting stone a
few feet below the ledge. Obviously whoever the visitor was, he had
entered and left by this pass. Returning to camp I sat down on a log
lost in thought. My reverie was at last broken by the voice of my guide
quietly remarking. “Well, Le-loo, what’s your judication?”
“Pete,” I said, “that bear walks on its hind-legs; there is not the sign
of a forefoot anywhere along the trail. Now this could not be caused by
the hind feet obliterating the tracks of the front feet, because in many
places the pass is so steep that the forefeet in reaching out for
support would make tracks not overlapped by the hind ones.”
“That’s true, Le-loo; sartin true. If you live to be a hundred years
you’ll make as good a trailer as the great Greaser trailer of New
Mexico, Dolores Sanchez, or my old friend Bill Hassler, who could follow
a six-month-old trail,” replied my guide. “But,” he continued, “maybe
witch-bears do walk on their hind legs same as people.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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