pasture, determined to play the string out alone and in my own way.
The place I selected for further operations was the regular beat of old
Pinto, a Grizzly that had been killing cattle on Gen. Beale's range in
the mountains west of Tehachepi and above Antelope Valley.

Old Pinto was no myth, and he didn't make tracks with a whittled pine
foot. His lair was a dense manzanita thicket upon the slope of a
limestone ridge about a mile from the spring by which I camped, and he
roamed all over the neighborhood. In soft ground he made a track
fourteen inches long and nine inches wide, but although at the time I
took that for the size of his foot, I am now inclined to think that it
was the combined track of front and hind foot, the hind foot
"over-tracking" a few inches, obliterating the claw marks of the front
foot and increasing the size of the imprint both in length and width.
Nevertheless he was a very large bear, and he loomed up formidably in
the dusk of an evening when I saw him feasting, forty yards away, upon
a big steer he had killed.

[Illustration: Feasting upon a big steer he had killed.]

Pinto had the reputation of being not only dangerous but malevolent,
and there were oft told tales of domiciliary visits paid by him at the
cabins of settlers, and of aggressive advances upon mounted vaqueros,
who were saved by the speed of their horses. Doubtless the bear was
audacious in foraging and indifferent to the presence of man, but he
was not malevolent. Indeed, I have yet to hear on any credible
authority of a malevolent bear, or, for that matter, any other wild
animal in North America whose disposition and habit is to seek trouble
with man and go out of its way with the deliberate purpose of attacking
him. For many weeks I camped by that spring, much of the time alone,