He was a peculiar gray in color,--like brown hair that has silvered in many winters. His huge head was lowered between his high, rocking shoulders, his forelegs were simply great, knotty, cast-iron bunches of fiber and tendons; his long claws--worn down by digging in the rocks for marmots--were like great, curved fingers. As he stepped, his forefeet swung out, giving to his carriage an arrogance and a swagger that would have been amusing if it hadn't been terrible. His wicked teeth gleamed white in foam, and the hair stood stiff at his shoulders. There is no forest crisis that presents such a test to human nerves as the charge of a grizzly. There is no forest voice more fraught with ferocity and savagery of the beasts of prey than his low, deep, reverberating growl. Human beings have not yet reached such perfection of self-mastery that they can hear such a sound, leaping suddenly like a thing of substance through the bush, and disregard it. It was to be that these three foes, journeying toward him along Creek Despair, did not disregard it now. For all the depth of the snow, he pushed through the spruce thicket into the sunlight. Thus the three hunters met him--in all his strength and glory--not fifty feet distant at the base of the hill. He seemed to be poised to charge. Bill's keen eyes saw the bear first. All at once its huge outline against the snow leaped to his vision. At the same instant the bear growled, a sound that halted halted Virginia and Harold in their tracks. For an instant all four figures stood in indescribable tableau: the bear poised, the three staring, the snowy wastes silent and changeless and unreal. It was the last sight in the world that Bill had expected. He had supposed that the grizzlies were all in hibernation now; he hadn't conceived of the possibilities whereby the great creature had been called from his sleep. And he knew in one glance the full peril of the situation. Often in his forest travels Bill had met grizzlies, and nearly always he had passed them by. Usually the latter were glad to make their escape; and Bill would hasten their departure with shouts of glee. Yet this man knew the grizzly, his power and his wrath, and most of all he knew his utter unreliability. It is not the grizzly way to stand impassive when he is at bay, and neither does he like to flee up hill. If the animal did think his escape was cut off--a delusion to which the bear family seem particularly subject--he would charge them with a fury and might that had no equal in the North American animal world. And a grizzly charge is a difficult thing to stop in a distance of fifty feet.