MARK OUTRIGGER MEETS WITH AN ADVENTURE.

BY EDWARD I. STEVENSON.

ew guides among the Rocky Mountains are more popular than Mark Outrigger. On the occasion I am going to tell you about, he, with his brother Julius, had been conducting a party of Eastern surveyors through one of the most difficult passes to Fort L——. Upon the evening before a stray wapiti, badly spent, if not wounded, by the pursuit of some far-distant sportsman, had staggered across the very path of the party. The condition of the splendid creature was too much of a temptation for Mark, in spite of the hour of the day. Hastily shouting out to his brother a rendezvous where he might be looked for to rejoin them in the morning, Mark bounded up and along the hill-side after the staggering quarry.

But the wapiti was by no means so utterly exhausted as Mark had imagined, and was, moreover, plainly husbanding its strength. But a capital opportunity for a shot presently offered. The young hunter came to a stand-still, and embraced it. The wapiti leaped up, plunged wildly a few feet further into a tangle of furze, and then dashed headlong down into a little ravine which the tangle outlined. Mark sped after, leaped down the precipitous descent in turn, and there found his unhappy victim breathing its last, after a gallant but vain struggle against fate. Mark drew his knife and ended its sufferings.

It was dark enough by this time. Mark was thoroughly tired out. He decided not to do anything until morning, but make himself comfortable as best he could. He clambered up out of the shallow ravine, where a few ripples did duty for a little stream, and having walked some distance along the rocky slope above to a sheltered spot between two bowlders, he lit a roaring fire, cooked his supper, so opportunely overtaken, and slept the sleep of a very tired man.

When morning came, his first waking thought was about the dead wapiti. It would be a load that elk, and at least a five-mile tramp over a rough road lay ahead of him. He turned down to the ravine, and followed the tinkling brook. Presently, beyond a little point, the dead animal appeared, but, utterly to Mark's consternation, it lay there in the very act of being most critically examined by a third party—a grizzly bear of splendid size and wonderfully unamiable countenance. Mark used to continue the story somewhat as follows:

"Well, sir, I do declare that for once I was dumfounded! I really didn't know whether to get ready for a scrimmage with him so early or not. I hadn't met with many grizzlies then, and never before or since with so old and big a one. As he sat there on his hunkers sniffing the wapiti's carcass he looked the size of an elephant. I could see plain as you please the long claws on his pads, and likewise his big red tongue when he licked the wapiti's head once or twice. As to his teeth, I didn't look for them, but I was pretty positive they were all there. And, you see, unless a man fires at a grizzly from out of his parlor window, there is generally no place to take to if things happen to go contrary.

"All of a sudden what does the great ugly beast do but get up from his squatting position, and begin to drag the elk a few yards further down the ravine. Now that was just going a little too far. Me to lose my game, after all my trouble in fetching it down! I'm not quite a good-humored-enough fellow for that, so I drew up, took a pretty fair aim at his shoulder, and let fly.

"Of course his back was three-quarters to me when I fired. My ball just nipped him enough to let him know I was there—'twas a kind of a visiting-card. Down fell the wapiti and round the bear whisked, surprisingly spry for so lumbering a creature. With his red eyes and the dashes of red blood from the wapiti's carcass, he made a bad-looking brute to stand facing a man, I can tell you. He caught sight of me directly, even standing there like a stone man amongst the lot of dwarf trees and bowlders. Then he shook himself and snarled, and started straight up the ravine for me.

"I won't say that I stood my ground, or anything about not being afraid. I ran back a little off the edge of sand and stones and was exceedingly scared. The bear came panting and growling and lumbering up, snapping his teeth, which I could see plain enough now. I let fly for the second time, taking for a mark the white horseshoe on his breast.

MARK OUTRIGGER IN THE CLUTCHES OF THE BEAR.

"To this day I can't ever think of what happened just as I fired that shot without a shiver. A mole, or some other burrowing little beast, had dug a part of his tunnel right under my right foot. At the minute that I fired my foot went clean down through the roof of his house, poor fellow, and my ankle turned. I fell sidewise, my gun going off in the air as I threw out my arms, dropping the piece at the same second. Before I could wrench out my foot or struggle round into any sort of a position to defend myself, or grasp my gun to tackle him with the stock of it, the bear was at my side.

"He seized me in his jaws just here—see?—gave me a horrible shake, and then dropped me. I thought I felt every bone in it crunched in the bite.

"I can't truthfully say that I recollect thinking of anybody or anything, unless that it was certainly all over with me, and that my knife was so twisted round in my belt that it seemed as if I never could get it out. Meanwhile the bear, after that first crushing bite, stood still, breathing straight down into my face and growling like an old lion. He had one of his paws planted flat on my chest—like this, and standing completely over me from the waist downward.

"But by this time I had gripped my knife firmly underneath me. So I dragged out my arm and whipped the blade, point upward, into his body, as near to where his heart would be as I could judge. My eyes I kept tight shut; and until this movement, mostly under him, I had not stirred. I wrenched myself out at the same time from under his great paw, and fairly rolled two or three feet beyond him.

"Such a howl of fury and torment as he gave when he felt me moving and then got the benefit of the stab! I knew that it would be a very short matter after this for one or the other of us. Torn and bleeding all over, with his teeth snapping around my head and his claws tearing into my flesh—you can see the marks to-day—I fought as I believe never a hunter fought before, dodging his blows and striking at him again and again. Once I got up on one knee—an awful sight I must have looked—and gave him a stab across his face that left him only one eye for the battle.

"But the next second down I went, flat and breathless, struck full on the side by his huge paw. I managed to give a last rip, as wild as you please, with my knife. 'It's all up surely with me this time,' I recollect saying to myself, in a very dim sort of fashion. I lay there unconscious, bleeding from twenty wounds, and utterly in my enemy's clutches.

"How long this state of affairs lasted I've no means of telling. About half an hour, maybe. But it appeared to me that I had been dead and buried a week when gradually I began to feel myself a living man. After a few seconds more, in which everything seemed black and spinning around me, I was able to keep my eyes open a bit.

"'Well, I'm not killed yet, I guess,' thinks I, 'after all, unless there's a Rocky Mountains in t'other world as well as in this one.' Just then I felt the blood on my hands and neck. 'Good gracious! that bear!' I thought in a jiffey. I propped myself up weakly on my elbow, and gave a very cautious glance first on one side, then on the other—and lo! there a couple of paces off lay a pile of fur without motion or sound. The bear it was. My very last blow had saved my life by penetrating exactly to his heart, and over he must have plumped just at the minute I did.

"How I stanched my wounds and gashes and contrived to join my brother Julius and the rest of the party I can't detain you to describe here. Enough to say that I did, with both my pelts too, though the bear's was badly gashed, of course. If, however, you've a mind to come into the house yonder, I'll give you one of the biggest bear's claws that you ever saw in your life, and you can have a breastpin for your little girl made out of it."

"CLEAR THE TRACK!"—From the Painting by J. C. Brown.