The sun had set and the bottom of the ravine was dark as night. The belated searcher for bear signs skirted a dense willow thicket, and brushed against the bushes with his elbow. "Woof! Woof!" snorted a bear within ten feet of him, invisible in the thicket. His heart thumped and his rifle lock clicked, together, and which sound was the louder he could not tell. For a few seconds he stood at the edge of the thicket with his rifle ready, expecting the rush of the bear, but the animal was not in a warlike mood and did not rush, and the hunter cautiously backed away about twenty yards up the steep side of the ravine. The cracking of brush indicated that bruin was moving in the thicket, but nothing could be seen in the gathering gloom. Two or three large rocks rolled down into the willows started the bear out on a run and he could be heard crashing his way down the ravine and splashing into the pools as he went. The remainder of the journey back to camp was made through the open pine forest on the top of the mountain. Superintendent McCullough, who has charge of Haggin & Carr's sheep camps on Pinos Mountain, stopped at the Examiner camp when he made his inspecting tours, and consultations were held with him about the bears. From the reports given him by the herders he judged that only the bears that lived on the mountain were prowling about, and that the invading army had not arrived from the Alamo and the Sespe region. A large cinnamon bear had walked into one camp about ten miles distant and killed two sheep in daylight, but the grizzlies had not begun to eat mutton. In July or August there would be bears enough to keep a man busy shinning up trees. Last year, he said, there were at least forty bears on the mountain, and they visited some of the sheep camps every night. Sometimes two or three bears would raid a camp, tree the herder and kill several sheep. The herders were not expected to fight bears or attempt to drive them away, and the owners reckoned upon the loss of several hundred sheep every summer. Shortly before the first of July the camp was moved to Seymore Spring, about two miles from the mill, where good water and feed were plenty, and search for bear sign was continued. Every day some deep gorge or rocky ravine was visited and thoroughly hunted, and a deer was killed occasionally, but no sign of bears was found until the 3d of July, when the tracks of a very large grizzly were discovered crossing a ridge between the Lockwood Valley and the Seymour. The tracks were followed across the Seymour Valley to a spur of the mountain between the mill ravine and a deep canyon to the westward.