Scotty slid down, arriving torn and bruised at the lower edge of the crack where the rock fan sprang up ten feet thick from the cliff. The narrow crack between it and the wall was dark as a pocket; nothing came from there but the maddening roars of Ruler and the snarling of the cat. Then Big John whooped, above, and the crash of a falling rock resounded. Out of the rift, straight at Scotty the cougar exploded in a frightful cat-spit. His rear was covered with dogs, but his chest showed clear and tawny as he sprang. Scotty met him with the heavy .405, himself knocked flat against the cliff with its recoil. A reeking mass of animals shot past him in a fury of flying paws, rolled over and over down the slope, and fetched up in a writhing heap in the midst of a nest of scraggy pinyons. “Did you git him?” yelled Big John’s voice from above. “You bet!” crowed Scotty. “Come on down and help me with the dogs.” There was a rumble of falling stones and Big John dropped down beside him. “I _knowed_ one good poak from thet ole cannon of the Doc’s would fotch him,” he laughed. “Good shootin’, son! Git some clubs, now, an’ we’ll gentle them pesky dawgs.” They needed to,--for a glorious dog-fight was in full swing over the dead body of the cougar. CHAPTER IX KAIBAB GRIZZLY “I’ve got to turn back, Sid,” gasped Colonel Colvin, as they halted at the foot of the vast slope that topped the second rim of the canyon like a house roof. “Climbing up out of here is a job for a young heart; mine would need half-soling before we’d ever make the rim again!” From safety holds on tough pinyons that overhung the precipice of the second rim, they peered down at the chase far below. This second rim was an ungodly wall, perhaps a thousand feet sheer, and it no doubt cut a noticeable figure as viewed from El Tovar, where tourists at that moment were raving in absurd sentimentalities over the canyon. To the Colonel it meant a terminus, for him, of that particular cougar chase, for to add its weight to the labors already in store on the climb back would be foolhardy to one of his age. They watched the tiny black dots weaving slowly across the lower slope, that must have been the dogs in hot chase of the cougar, and after them came two oval specks that were Scotty and Big John as viewed perpendicularly from their height. Then the whole business disappeared over a ledge and nothing but the baying of invisible hounds came floating up from the far depths. Colonel Colvin shook his head. “It’s their meat, Sid. But there’s room enough in this country for two or three hunts to be going at the same time. They’ve got the dogs, but we’ve got Niltci, who’s better than a dog at forest hunting, I’ll warrant. We’ll climb back to the rim and start something of our own back in the breaks.” Sid felt that his place was with his father, anyway, and he did not care much about being a tailender in a hunt that had already distanced them.