It was amusing to hear Smith relate the manner of capturing the bear, the glory of which achievement he had won by the tossing up of a dollar; how he had started out alone in one of the boats with his rifle to look into a little bay half a mile below the shanty, where be left the rest of us sleeping after dinner; and how, as he was floating along under the shadow of the hills, at the base of a wall of rocks some forty feet high, rising straight up from the water, he heard something walking just over the precipice; and how he picked up his rifle that lay in the bottom of the boat, to be ready for any emergency; and then how astonished he was to see a great black bear walk out into view along the edge of the rocks above, and how carefully he sighted him; and how, at the crack of his rifle, the animal came tumbling down the cliff, and how quick he reloaded and gave trim a settler in the shape of a second bullet; and how he tugged, and strained, and lifted to get him into the boat, and how astonished we all were when he returned with his prize to camp.  While relating this wonderful achievement, he winked at the Doctor, as much as to say, “fair play; remember our compact; stand by me now.”  And the Doctor did stand by him, boldly endorsing, with a gravity that was refreshing, every invention of Smith’s prolific imagination, on the subject of his slaughtering the bear.

We left our new friends in the afternoon; they to start in the morning for our old camping-ground on the lake above, and we down the stream on our retreat from the wilderness.  We came back to our tents, after securing a string of trout from the mouth of the little stream across the bay.  Our evening meal was over, and we sat around our campfire just as the sun was hiding himself behind the western highlands, when, from a little hollow in the forest behind us, and but a short way off, we heard the call of a raccoon.  Martin started over the ridge with the dogs, and in five minutes he hallooed to us to come with our rifles for he had the animal “treed,” and ready to be brought down at “a moment’s warning.”  We went over to where he was, and sure enough, away up in the top of a tall birch, sat his coonship, looking quietly down upon the dogs that were baying at the foot of the tree.

“Gentlemen,” said Spalding, “we will not all fire at this animal as we did at Smith’s bear.  One bullet is enough for him, and if he gets down among us, I think six men will be a match for one ‘coon,’ so we need not be inhuman through a sense of danger.  Whose shot shall he be?”

“I move that Spalding have the first shot,” said Smith; and the motion was carried.

“Do I understand you, gentlemen,” Spalding inquired, adjusting himself, as if preparing to bring down the game, “that I am to have this first shot, and that no one is to fire until I have taken a fair shot at him?”

We all answered, “Yes.”

“Are you perfectly agreed in this, and do you all pledge yourselves to abide the compact?” Spalding inquired again, bringing his rifle to a present, and looking up at the game.