iding away
in peace. He passed over the ridge, and finding berries, ate the first
meal he had known since killing his last sheep. He had wandered on,
gathering fruit and digging roots, for an hour or two, when the smoke
grew blacker, the smell of fire stronger. He worked away from it, but
in no haste. The birds, deer, and wood hares were now seen scurrying
past him. There was a roaring in the air. It grew louder, was coming
nearer, and Jack turned to stride after the wood things that fled.

The whole forest was ablaze; the wind was rising, and the flames,
gaining and spreading, were flying now like wild horses. Jack had no
place in his brain for such a thing; but his instinct warned him to
shun that coming roaring that sent above dark clouds and flying
fire-flakes, and messengers of heat below, so he fled before it, as
the forest host was doing. Fast as he went, and few animals can outrun
a Grizzly in rough country, the hot hurricane was gaining on him. His
sense of danger had grown almost to terror, terror of a kind that he
had never known before, for here there was nothing he could fight;
nothing that he could resist. The flames were all around him now;
birds without number, hares, and deer had gone down before the red
horror. He was plunging wildly on through chaparral and manzanita
thickets that held all feebler things until the fury seized them; his
hair was scorching, his wound was forgotten, and he thought only of
escape when the brush ahead opened, and the Grizzly, smoke-blinded,
half roasted, plunged down a bank and into a small clear pool. The fur
on his back said "hiss," for it was sizzling-hot. Down below he went,
gulping the cool drink, wallowing in safety and unheat. Down below the
surface he crouched as long as his lungs would bear the strain, then
slowly and cautiously he raised his head. The sky above was one great
sheet of flame. Sticks aflame and flying embers came in hissing
showers on the water. The air was hot, but breathable at times, and he
filled his lungs till he had difficulty in keeping his body down
below. Other creatures there were in the pool, some burnt, some dead,
some small and in the margin, some bigger in the deeper places, and
one of them was close beside him. Oh, he knew that smell; fire--all
Sierra's woods ablaze--could not disguise the hunter who had shot at
him from the platform, and, though he did not know this, the hunter
really who had followed him all day, and who had tried t