Page:A La California.djvu/83

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ADVENTURE ON THE SAN JOAQUIN.
63

in some underbrush. The men kept up a steady fire at her at long range, the bear fighting desperately, tearing the brush and breaking limbs, but refusing to leave her position. After awhile, they noticed her carry off, one at a time, two small cubs and hide them in the bush. Finding their range too lone to be effective, the hunters undertook to reach a position nearer the bear by going around a hill, and just when they were ascending the knoll to get a sight of her, she suddenly came over the brow and dashed at them in the most ferocious manner When discovered, she was so near them that escape was impossible, and the men stood their ground. On she came, tearing up the bushes and biting the shrubs. When within ten feet of Fowler he fired, and the shot broke her neck. She fell, and a shot from Day's rifle passed through her heart. It was a narrow escape. The hunters captured the two cubs the mother had hid in the brush, and another, which still remained in the nest. The two cubs hidden in the brush were colored precisely alike, while the one remaining in the nest was somewhat darker, from which the hunters concluded that the old bear they killed had only secreted her own young, and that the one remaining in the nest belonged to another bear and another family."

In the spring of 1869, a grizzly of the largest size "ranched" in the San Andreas Valley, near the new reservoir of the Spring Valley Water Company,—from which San Francisco is supplied,—within fifteen miles of the Golden City, for several weeks. Nobody about there had lost any bears, and nobody