All alone I waited; got hot, cold, thirsty, cross as a bear and so sick of sitting there that I was about to go to my blankets, for the flames had almost died out on the hills, leaving only a circle of little dots and dying embers, like a fading diadem on the mighty lifted brow of the glorious Manzanita mountain. And now the new moon came, went softly and sweetly by, like a shy, sweet maiden, hiding down, down out of sight. Crash! His head was thrown back, not over his shoulder, as you may read but never see, but down by his left foot, as he looked around and back up the brown mountain side. He had stumbled, or rather, he had stepped on himself, for a bear gets down hill sadly. If a bear ever gets after you, you had better go hill and go down hill fast. It will make him mad, but that is not your affair. I never saw a bear go down hill in a good humor. What nature meant by making a bear so short in the arms I don't know. Indians say he was first a man and walked upright with a club on his shoulder, but sinned and fell. As evidence of this, they show that he can still stand up and fight with his fists when hard pressed, but more of this later on. This huge brute before me looked almost white in the tawny twilight as he stumbled down through the steep tangle of chaparral into the opening on the stony bar of the river. He had evidently been terribly tangled up and disgusted while in the bush and jungle, and now, well out of it, with the foamy, rumbling, roaring Sacramento River only a few rods beyond him, into which he could plunge with his glossy coat, he seemed to want to turn about and shake his huge fists at the crescent of fire in the pine-quills that had driven him down the mountain. He threw his enormous bulk back on his haunches and rose up, and rose up, and rose up! Oh, the majesty of this king of our continent, as he seemed to still keep rising! Then he turned slowly around on his great hinder feet to look back; he pushed his nose away out, then drew it back, twisted his short, thick neck, like that of a beer-drinking German, and then for a final observation he tiptoed up, threw his high head still higher in the air and wiggled it about and sniffed and sniffed and--bang! I shot at him from ambush, with his back toward me, shot at his back! For shame! Henry Highton would not have done that; nor, indeed, would I or any other real sportsman do such a thing now; but I must plead the "Baby Act," and all the facts, and also my sincere penitence, and proceed.