They were a worthy breed! It is doubtful if any other section of the United States offered an environment so favorable to them. Game was in abundance, they could venture down into the valleys at the approach of winter and thus miss the rigors of the snow, and at first there were no human enemies. Unfortunately, stories are likely to grow and become sadly addled after many tellings; but if the words of certain old men could be believed, the Southern Oregon grizzly occasionally, in the bountiful fall days, attained a weight of two thousand pounds. No doubt whatever remains that thousand-pound bears were fairly numerous. They trailed up and down the brown hillsides; they hunted and honey-grubbed and mated in the fall; they had their young and fought their battles and died, and once in a long while the skeleton of a frontiersman would be found with his skull battered perfectly flat where one of the great beasts had taken a short-arm pat at him. But unlike the little black bears, the grizzlies developed displeasing habits. They were much more carnivorous in character than the blacks, and their great bodily strength and power enabled them to master all of the myriad forms of game in the Oregon woods. By the same token, they could take a full-grown steer and carry it off as a woman carries her baby. It couldn't be endured. The cattlemen had begun to settle the valleys, and it was either a case of killing the grizzlies or yielding the valleys to them. In the relentless war that followed, the breed had been practically wiped out. A few of them, perhaps, fled farther and farther up the Cascades, finding refuges in the Canadian mountains. Others traveled east, locating at last in the Rocky Mountains, and countless numbers of them died. At last, as far as the frontiersmen knew, only one great specimen remained. This was a famous bear that men called Slewfoot,--a magnificent animal that ranged far and hunted relentlessly, and no one ever knew just when they were going to run across him. It made traveling in the mountains a rather ticklish business. He was apt suddenly to loom up, like a gray cliff, at any turn in the trail, and his disposition grew querulous with age. In fact, instead of fleeing as most wild creatures have learned to do, he was rather likely to make sudden and unexpected charges. He was killed at last; and seemingly the Southern Oregon grizzlies were wiped out. But it is rather easy to believe that in some of his wanderings he encountered--lost and far in the deepest heart of the land called Trail's End--a female of his own breed. There must have been cubs who, in their turn, mated and fought and died, and perhaps two generations after them. And out of the last brood had emerged a single great male, a worthy descendant of his famous ancestor. This was the Killer, who in a few months since he had left his fastnesses, was beginning to ruin the cattle business in Trail's End.