rdized his life by his rashness in
attacking a bear with squirrel shot, fled in another.

The man did not stop running until he reached the nearest farmhouse,
where he excitedly gasped out his adventure to wide-eyed listeners,
while Black Bruin fled as far as he could into the deep woods, to nurse
his many wounds.

There was little, however, that he could do. The wounds were not
dangerous, but they burned and smarted as though a whole swarm of bees
had penetrated his thick coat and found the skin beneath.

He spent the better part of the day lying in a cooling stream, waiting
for the burning and smarting to cease.

He had now added one more to the list of his sad experiences in the
wild. The man-scent was dangerous and henceforth he must flee at the
slightest suspicion of the proximity of man. The rank sulphurous smell
of gunpowder, too, and the roar, like thunder, that echoed away through
the cavernous woods, were things that he would remember.

Man, who he had thought was quite harmless, was a terrible enemy who
could sting him in a thousand places at once, and shake the forest with
thunder and lightning.

Even while Black Bruin lay wallowing in the stream, trying to ease the
burning shotgun wounds, there was being planned in the near-by village
a bear-hunt that should bring about his destruction, for the excited
hunter had described a monster as large as a cow.

CHAPTER X

THE GREAT BEAR-HUNT

The hair-raising story that the young squirrel-hunter told, created
quite an excitement among villagers near by, but on second
consideration the older and wiser heads were inclined to discredit it.
The imaginative Nimrod had probably seen a black stump or dark
moss-covered rock, which, in the excitement of the moment, he did not
stop to investigate. He had fired upon the instant and then fled
without taking further inventory of the place. It was doubtless one of
those hallucinations that are so common in the woods. Bears had not
been plentiful in the region for several years, so at first the story
was discredited.

About a week later Grandpa Hezekiah Butterfield, one of the old men of
the village, went about a mile into the country to a farmhouse to take
supper with an old crony and to talk over old times.

As is usual when two grandpas get to talking over old times, Grandpa
Butterfield stayed much later than he intended, starting for home at
about eight o'clock. But when he went, he felt well repaid