a whole family of bears, who spying him, as he passed unawares
too near the door of their domestic den, had sallied out,
higgledy-piggledy, to give the intruder battle. To step to one side and
with the bullet already in his rifle lay the old he-bear, who led the
onslaught, dead on the spot was easy enough; so would it have been as
easy to dispatch the old she-bear, had she but allowed him time to
reload his piece. But enraged at the sight of her slain lord, and
afflicted at the thought of her fatherless cubs at her heels, the dam,
rearing upon her hind legs, bore down upon him at once, at the same time
growling out to her litter to fall, tooth and nail, on the enemy in
flank and rear.

So sudden was the charge that the unlucky Burl had barely time to thrust
out his gun against the chief assailant, when he found himself
completely beset. Wielding his unloaded rifle as he would a
pike--poking, pushing, punching therewith at the infuriated dam, in
throat and breast and ribs--he contrived for a time to keep himself
clear of the terrible claws continually making at him in such fierce,
unwelcome greeting. But the odds were against the black hunter. Swift to
obey their mother's command, the cubs with their milk-teeth were pulling
and tugging at his buckskin breeches in a manner exceedingly lively,
which, though it did not reach his skin, was making heavy demands on his
breath, fast growing short and shorter.

He could not hope to hold out long in a contest so unequal. Where was
Grumbo--his trusty, his courageous Grumbo? why was he not there to
succor his master in that hour of peril? In his extremity he essayed to
whistle for his dog, but his breath was too far spent for that.
Mustering up all the remaining strength of his lungs, he sent pealing
afar through the forest wilds the old familiar battle-cry, "I yi, you
dogs!" at the same moment fetching the dam a poke of unusual vigor and
directness, which brought her for once sprawling upon her back. But in
the act, while yet his whole weight was thrown upon his right foot, one
of the cubs, more sturdy than the rest, caught up his left foot by the
top of the moccasin and continued to hold it up so stiffly as to reduce
him to the necessity either of coming to his knees or of hopping about
on one foot; and hop was what he did, encumbered as was the hopping limb
with the rest of the litter. Hardly had he given a hop with one foot and
a kick with the other, to free himself from the o