e ground.

The bear had had him on his back between her teeth by the thick chest
piece of his double-breasted buckskin. Except for his face, he seemed
uninjured; but down that face the great brute had drawn the claws of her
fore paw.

Ba'tiste raised his hands to his face.

"Mon dieu!" he asked thickly, fumbling with both hands, "what is done
to my eyes? Is the fire out? I cannot see!"

Then the man who had fought like a demon armed with only a hunting-knife
fainted because of what his hands felt.

* * * * *

Traitors there are among trappers as among all other classes, men like
those who deserted Glass on the Missouri, and Scott on the Platte, and
how many others whose treachery will never be known.

But Ba'tiste's comrades stayed with him on the banks of the river that
flows into the Missouri. One cared for the blind man. The other two
foraged for game. When the wounded hunter could be moved, they put him
in a canoe and hurried down-stream to the fur post before the freezing
of the rivers. At the fur post, the doctor did what he could; but a
doctor cannot restore what has been torn away. The next spring, Ba'tiste
was put on a pack horse and sent to his relatives at the Canadian fur
post. Here his sisters made him the curtain to hang round his helmet and
set him to weaving grass mats that the days might not drag so wearily.

Ask Ba'tiste whether he agrees with the amateur hunter that bears never
attack unless they are attacked, that they would never become ravening
creatures of prey unless the assaults of other creatures taught them
ferocity, ask Ba'tiste this and something resembling the snarl of a
baited beast breaks from the lipless face under the veil:

"S--s--sz!--" with a quiver of inexpressible rage. "The bear--it is an
animal!--the bear!--it is a beast!--toujours!--the bear!--it is a
beast!--always--always!" And his hands clinch.

Then he falls to carving of the little wooden animals and weaving of
sad, sad, bitter thoughts into the warp of the Indian mat.

Are such onslaughts common among bears, or are they the mad freaks of
the bear's nature? President Roosevelt tells of two soldiers bitten to
death in the South-West; and M. L'Abbe Dugast, of St. Boniface,
Manitoba, incidentally relates an experience almost similar to that of
Ba'tiste which occurred in the North-West. Lest Ba'tiste's case seem
overdrawn, I quote the Abbe's words:

"At a little distance Madame Lajim