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Title: Monarch, The Big Bear of Tallac

Author: Ernest Thompson Seton

Release Date: February 17, 2004 [eBook #11135]

Language: English

Character set encoding: US-ASCII

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MONARCH, The BIG BEAR of Tallac

With 100 Drawings

by Ernest Thompson Seton

Author of
Wild Animals I have known
Trail of the Sandhill Stag
Biography of a Grizzly
Lives of the Hunted.
Two Little Savages. Etc.

1919

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED

To the memory of the days in Tallac's Pines, where by the fire I heard
this epic tale.

Kind memory calls the picture up before me now, clear, living clear: I
see them as they sat, the one small and slight, the other tall and
brawny, leader and led, rough men of the hills. They told me this
tale--in broken bits they gave it, a sentence at a time. They were
ready to talk but knew not how. Few their words, and those they used
would be empty on paper, meaningless without the puckered lip, the
interhiss, the brutal semi-snarl restrained by human mastery, the snap
and jerk of wrist and gleam of steel-gray eye, that really told the
tale, of which the spoken word was mere headline. Another, a subtler
theme was theirs that night; not in the line but in the interline it
ran; and listening to the hunter's ruder tale, I heard as one may hear
the night bird singing in the storm; amid the glitter of the mica I
caught the glint of gold, for theirs was a parable of hill-born power
that fades when it finds the plains. They told of the giant redwood's
growth from a tiny seed; of the avalanche that, born a snowflake,
heaves and grows on the peaks, to shrink and die on the level lands
b