VI.  The Broken Dam

 VII.  The Freshet

VIII.  Roaring in the Canon

  IX.  Fire and Water

   X. The Eddy

  XI.  The Ford

 XII.  Swirl and Pool and Growing Flood

XIII.  The Deepening Channel

 XIV.  The Cataract

  XV.  The Foaming Flood

 XVI.  Landlocked

FOREWORD

The story of Monarch is founded on material gathered from many sources as well as from personal experience, and the Bear is of necessity a composite.  The great Grizzly Monarch, still pacing his prison floor at the Golden Gate Park, is the central fact of the tale.

In telling it I have taken two liberties that I conceive to be proper in a story of this sort.

First, I have selected for my hero an unusual individual.

Second, I have ascribed to that one animal the adventures of several of his kind.

The aim of the story is to picture the life of a Grizzly with the added glamour of a remarkable Bear personality.  The intention is to convey the known truth.  But the fact that liberties have been taken excludes the story from the catalogue of pure science.  It must be considered rather an historical novel of Bear life.

Many different Bears were concerned in the early adventures here related, but the last two chapters, the captivity and the despair of the Big Bear, are told as they were told to me by several witnesses, including my friends the two mountaineers.

I. THE TWO SPRINGS

High above Sierra’s peaks stands grim Mount Tallac.  Ten thousand feet above the sea it rears its head to gaze out north to that vast and wonderful turquoise that men call Lake Tahoe, and northwest, across a piney sea, to its great white sister, Shasta of the Snows; wonderful colors and things on every side, mast-like pine trees strung with jewelry, streams that a Buddhist would have made sacred, hills that an Arab would have held holy.  But Lan Kellyan’s keen gray eyes were turned to other things.  The childish delight in life and light for their own sakes had faded, as they must in one whose training had been to make him hold them very cheap.  Why value grass?  All the world is grass.  Why value air, when it is everywhere in measureless immensity?  Why value life, when, all alive, his living came from taking life?  His senses were alert, not for the rainbow hills and the gem-bright lakes, but for the living things that he must meet in daily rivalry, each staking on the game, his life.  Hunter was written on his leathern garb, on his tawny face, on his lithe and sinewy form, and shone in his clear gray eye.