Adventures in Many Lands | Page 6

III
A VERY NARROW SHAVE
One winter's day in San Francisco my friend Halley, an enthusiastic
shot who had killed bears in India, came to me and said, "Let's go south.
I'm tired of towns. Let's go south and have some real tip-top shooting."
In the matter of sport, California in those days--thirty years

ago--differed widely from the California of to-day. Then, the sage
brush of the foot-hills teemed with quail, and swans, geese, duck
(canvas-back, mallard, teal, widgeon, and many other varieties) literally
filled the lagoons and reed-beds, giving magnificent shooting as they
flew in countless strings to and fro between the sea and the fresh water;
whilst, farther inland, snipe were to be had in the swamps almost "for
the asking." On the plains were antelope, and in the hills and in the
Sierra Nevadas, deer and bears, both cinnamon and grizzly. Verily a
sportsman's paradise!
The next day saw us on board the little Arizona, bound for San Pedro, a
forty-hours' trip down the coast. We took with us only shot-guns,
meaning to try for nothing but small game. At San Pedro, the port for
Los Angeles (Puebla de los Angeles, the "Town of the Angels"), we
landed, and after a few days' camping by some lagoons near the sea,
where we shot more duck than could easily be disposed of, we made
our way to that little old Spanish settlement, where we hired a horse
and buggy to take us inland.
Our first stopping-place was at a sheep-ranche, about fifty miles from
Los Angeles, a very beautiful property, well grassed and watered, and
consisting chiefly of great plains through which flowed a crystal-clear
river, and surrounded on very side by the most picturesque of hills,
1,000 to 1,500 feet in height.
The ranche was owned by a Scotsman, and his "weather-board" house
was new and comfortable, but we found ourselves at the mercy of the
most conservative of Chinese cooks, whom no blandishments could
induce to give us at our meals any of the duck or snipe we shot, but
who stuck with unwearying persistency to boiled pork and beans. And
on boiled pork and beans he rang the changes, morning, noon, and
night; that is to say, sometimes it was hot, and sometimes it was cold,
but it was ever boiled pork and beans. At its best it is not a diet to
dream about (though I found that a good deal of dreaming could be
done upon it), and as we fancied, after a few days, that any attraction
which it might originally have possessed had quite faded and died, we
resolved to push on elsewhere.

The following night we reached a little place at the foot of the higher
mountains called Temescal, a very diminutive place, consisting, indeed,
of but one small house. The surroundings, however, were very beautiful,
and the presence of a hot sulphur-spring, bubbling up in the scrub not
one hundred yards from the house, and making a most inviting natural
bath, coupled with the favourable reports of game of all kinds to be got,
induced us to stop. And life was very pleasant there in the crisp dry air,
for the quail shooting was good, the scenery and weather perfect,
everything fresh and green and newly washed by a two days' rain, the
food well cooked, and, nightly, after our day's shooting, we rolled into
the sulphur-spring and luxuriated in the hot water.
But Halley's soul began to pine for higher things, for bigger game than
quail and duck. "Look here," he said to me one day, "this is all very
well, you know, but why shouldn't we go after the deer amongst the
hills? We've got some cartridges loaded with buckshot. And, my word!
we might get a grizzly."
"All right," I said, "I'm on, as far as deer are concerned, but hang your
grizzlies. I'm not going to tackle them with a shot-gun."
So it was arranged that next morning, before daylight, we should go,
with a boy to guide us, up one of the numerous cañons in the mountains,
to a place where we were assured deer came down to drink.
It was a cold, clear, frosty morning when we started, the stars throbbing
and winking as they seem to do only during frost, and we toiled, not
particularly gaily, up the bed of a creek, stumbling in the darkness and
barking our shins over more boulders and big stones than one would
have believed existed in all creation. Just before dawn, when the grey
light was beginning to show us more clearly where we were going, we
saw in the sand of the creek fresh tracks of a large bear, the water only
then beginning to ooze into the prints left by his great feet, and