trapping, but I accepted the assignment with
entire confidence and great joy over the chance to get into the
mountains for a long outing. The outing proved to be much longer than
the editor expected, and trapping a bear quite a different matter from
killing one.

From Santa Paula, I struck into the mountains of Ventura county with an
outfit largely composed of information, advice and over-paid
assistance. The first two months of the trip were consumed in
developing the inaccuracy of most of the information and the utter
worthlessness of all the advice and costly assistance, and in acquiring
some rudimentary knowledge of the habits of bears and the art of
trapping them. Traps were built, under advice, where there was not one
chance in a thousand of catching anything, and bogus bear-tracks, made
with a neatly-executed model by an ingenious guide, who preferred
loafing about camp to moving it, kept the expedition from seeking more
promising country.

The editor became tired of waiting for his big sensation and ordered me
home. I respectfully but firmly refused to go home bearless, and the
editor fired me by wire. I fired the ingenious but sedentary
assistant, discarded all the advice that had been unloaded upon me by
the able bear-liars of Ventura, reduced my impedimenta to what one
lone, lorn burro could pack, broke camp and struck for a better Grizzly
pasture, determined to play the string out alone and in my own way.
The place I selected for further operations was the regular beat of old
Pinto, a Grizzly that had been killing cattle on Gen. Beale's range in
the mountains west of Tehachepi and above Antelope Valley.

Old Pinto was no myth, and he didn't make tracks with a whittled pine
foot. His lair was a dense manzanita thicket upon the slope of a
limestone ridge about a mile from the spring by which I camped, and he
roamed all over the neighborhood. In soft ground he made a track
fourteen inches long and nine inches wide, but although at the time I
took that for the size of his foot, I am now inclined to think that it
was the combined track of front and hind foot, the hind foot
"over-tracking" a few inches, obliterating the claw marks of the front
foot and increasing the size of the imprint both in length and width.
Nevertheless he was a very large bear, and he loomed up formidably in
the dusk of an evening when I saw him feasting, forty yards away, upon
a big steer he had killed.

[Illustration: Feasting