From the camp on the Mutaw the expedition followed Piru Creek down to Lockwood, and the latter up to the divide between Lockwood Valley and the Cuddy ranch at the foot of Mount Pinos, called Sawmill Mountain by the settlers. The mountain is about 10,000 feet high, and is covered with heavy pine timber. Ever since Haggin & Carr's sheep have been on the mountain, the bears from forty miles around have made annual marauding expeditions, and kept the herders on the jump all the summer. The first band of sheep and the Examiner expedition arrived at the old Sawmill simultaneously this year, and the Basque who was herding the band, having a very lively sense of the danger of his situation, pitched his tent close to the camp, where he would be under the protection of three rifles. The Basque had never been on the mountain before, but he had heard about the bears and their audacious raids, and he was not at all enamored of his job. When the campfires were started, and the forest became an enclosing wall of gloom, behind which lurked all the mysteries and menaces of the mountains, the Basque came shyly into camp, bringing a shoulder of mutton with which to establish friendly relations, and under the mellowing influence of a glass of something hot he became confidential and as communicative as his broken jargon of French and California Spanish would permit. He had come to the mountain reluctantly, and having been told about the herder whose hand was torn off by a grizzly last year, he was still more unwilling to remain. He would stay as long as the Examiner party remained near him, but when the hunters went away he proposed to quit and hasten back to the plains, where he would have nothing worse than the coyotes to encounter. Every night after that, so long as the hunters were in that camp, the Basque came and sat at the fire until bedtime, talking about _los osos_, and when the grass and water gave out and the expedition was obliged to move camp about two miles, the gentle shepherd packed his blankets over the trail to Bakersfield, leaving his flock in the care of a leathery skinned bear-hardened Mexican. The bears were later this year than usual in coming to the mountain, probably because the warm weather was longer delayed, and for many days the hunters scanned the trails in the canyons in vain for the footprints of grizzlies. The first indication of their arrival was given in a somewhat startling way to the correspondent one evening as he was slowly toiling through a deep, rocky ravine back to camp, after a weary tramp over the foothills of the big mountain.