When it became evident that the bear was bound for the Sespe, the horses were saddled. Balaam the Burro was concealed under a mountainous pack, and the march was resumed over the Alder Creek trail to the deep gorge through which the Sespe River runs. The man who made the Alder Creek trail was not born to build roads. He laid it out right over the top of a high and steep mountain, when by making a slight detour, he could have avoided a difficult and unnecessary climb. In the broiling hot sun of a breezeless day in June, the march over the mountains was hard on men and horses, and the pace was necessarily slow. The heat coaxed the rattlesnakes out of their holes, and the angry hum of their rattles was an almost incessant accompaniment to the hoof beats of the horses. Where the trail wound along a steep slope, affording but slight foothold for an animal, a more than unusually strenuous and insistent singing of a snake, disturbed from his sunny siesta, caused Balaam to jump aside. Balaam avoided the snake, but he lost his balance and rolled down the slope, heels in the air and pack underneath. The acrobatic feats achieved by Balaam in his struggles to regain his footing were watched by an admiring and solicitous audience, and when he cleverly took advantage of the slight obstruction offered by a manzanita bush, and got safely upon his feet, he was loudly applauded. The deep solicitude of the party for the safety of Balaam and his pack was accounted for when he scrambled back to the trail and gravely walked up to the packer to have his pack straightened. Every man anxiously felt of the pack, and heaved a sigh of relief. The bottles containing O. P. S., antidote for snake bite, were not broken, but it was a narrow escape. "Great Beeswax!" said the Doctor, "suppose those bottles had been smashed and then some one of us should go to work and bite himself with a snake! Wouldn't that be a fix?" "Dogdurn if it don't make my blood run cold to think of it," said Dad. Everybody's blood seemed to be congealing, and as the pack was loose and the antidote accessible, an ounce of prevention was administered to each man, and Balaam was rewarded for his timely agility with a handful of sugar. No more accidents occurred, and late in the afternoon the cavalcade slid, coasted and scrambled down the last steep hill into the Sespe Canyon, where a camp was made under an immense oak beside a deep, rocky pool. That evening, around the camp-fire, some strange bear stories were evolved from either the memories or imagination of the hunters.