nose with a
load of shot and let out a yell, and she herded those cubs off into the
brush and lit out for Devil's Gulch, and I went home. That was the
nearest I ever came to being eaten up by bears."

CHAPTER VIII.

IN THE BIG SNOW.

The winter of 1889-90 is memorable in California as the winter of "the
big snow." In the latter part of January the Central Pacific line over
the Sierra Nevada was blockaded, and three or four passenger trains
were imprisoned in the drifts for more than two weeks. Passing through
the blockade and over the range afoot, I walked at times above the tops
of the telegraph poles, and think it no exaggeration to estimate the
depth of snow at the higher altitudes at 25 feet. Drifts in the
canyons must have been more than double the depth of the snow on a
level. The storm was general and the snowfall throughout the mountain
region was extraordinary, not only for quantity but for rapidity. It
can snow more inches to the hour in the high Sierra than feet to the
week anywhere else, and the big storm of 1890 broke all previous
records.

Miners' cabins in the gulches and hunters' shacks on the mountains were
buried in a night and the occupants had to tunnel their way out. Deer
fled from the slopes down into secluded glens which had been their safe
refuge from Sierra storms before, but the white death followed them and
softly folded its feathery wings about them. In the spring the dead
deer were found in hundreds where they had "yarded" safely through many
winters before the big snow. Warm weather before the storm had brought
the bears out of their holes and set them to foraging for grub. The
snow fell lightly and no crust formed for some time, and bruin could
not wallow through it. The best he could do was to get under the lee
of a log or ledge, take another nap and nurse his inconvenient
appetite. Being a philosopher, bruin did the best he could and trusted
the god of the wild things to do the rest.

Upon the long western slope of a big sprawling mountain in Sierra
county a Grizzly dam and two gaunt cubs of the vintage of '89 were
caught in the big snow miles away from the deep gulch in which they had
passed the winter. No doubt that dam was weatherwise enough to sense
the coming storm in time to have returned to the den, but neither beast
nor man could have guessed what a thick blanket of white the gray
clouds were about to lay upon the land. When the flakes began to fall
th