om him.

"See 'im?" asked Bruce.

"The glass has pulled him within four feet of my nose," replied Langdon.
"Bruce, that's the biggest grizzly in the Rocky Mountains!"

"If he ain't, he's his twin brother," chuckled the packer, without moving a
muscle. "He beats your eight-footer by a dozen inches, Jimmy! An'"--he
paused at this psychological moment to pull a plug of black MacDonald from
his pocket and bite off a mouthful, without taking the telescope from his
eye--"an' the wind is in our favour an' he's as busy as a flea!" he
finished.

Otto unwound himself and rose to his feet, and Langdon jumped up briskly.
In such situations as this there was a mutual understanding between them
which made words unnecessary. They led the eight horses back into the edge
of the timber and tied them there, took their rifles from the leather
holsters, and each was careful to put a sixth cartridge in the chamber of
his weapon. Then for a matter of two minutes they both studied the slope
and its approaches with their naked eyes.

"We can slip up the ravine," suggested Langdon.

Bruce nodded.

"I reckon it's a three-hundred-yard shot from there," he said. "It's the
best we can do. He'd get our wind if we went below 'im. If it was a couple
o' hours earlier--"

"We'd climb over the mountain and come down on him from _above_!" exclaimed
Langdon, laughing.

"Bruce, you're the most senseless idiot on the face of the globe when it
comes to climbing mountains! You'd climb over Hardesty or Geikie to shoot a
goat from above, even though you could get him from the valley without any
work at all. I'm glad it isn't morning. We can get that bear from the
ravine!"

"Mebbe," said Bruce, and they started.

They walked openly over the green, flower-carpeted meadows ahead of them.
Until they came within at least half a mile of the grizzly there was no
danger of him seeing them. The wind had shifted, and was almost in their
faces. Their swift walk changed to a dog-trot, and they swung in nearer to
the slope, so that for fifteen minutes a huge knoll concealed the grizzly.
In another ten minutes they came to the ravine, a narrow, rock-littered and
precipitous gully worn in the mountainside by centuries of spring floods
gushing down from the snow-peaks above. Here they made cautious
observation.

The big grizzly was perhaps six hundred yards up the slope, and pretty
close to three hundred yards from the nearest point reached by the gully.

Bruce