XIV. THE CATARACT


Just as fads will for a time sway human life, so crazes may run
through all animals of a given kind. This was the year when a
beef-eating craze seemed to possess every able-bodied Grizzly of the
Sierras. They had long been known as a root-eating, berry-picking,
inoffensive race when let alone, but now they seemed to descend on the
cattle-range in a body and make their diet wholly of flesh.

One cattle outfit after another was attacked, and the whole country
seemed divided up among Bears of incredible size, cunning, and
destructiveness. The cattlemen offered bounties--good bounties,
growing bounties, very large bounties at last--but still the Bears
kept on. Very few were killed, and it became a kind of rude jest to
call each section of the range, not by the cattle brand, but by the
Grizzly that was quartered on its stock.

Wonderful tales were told of these various Bears of the new breed. The
swiftest was Reelfoot, the Placerville cattle-killer that could charge
from a thicket thirty yards away and certainly catch a steer before it
could turn and run, and that could even catch ponies in the open when
they were poor. The most cunning of all was Brin, the Mokelumne
Grizzly that killed by preference blooded stock, would pick out a
Merino ram or a white-faced Hereford from among fifty grades; that
killed a new beef every night; that never again returned to it, or
gave the chance for traps or poisoning.

The Pegtrack Grizzly of Feather River was rarely seen by any. He was