Jack went striding away in peace.  He passed over the ridge, and finding berries, ate the first meal he had known since killing his last sheep.  He had wandered on, gathering fruit and digging roots, for an hour or two, when the smoke grew blacker, the smell of fire stronger.  He worked away from it, but in no haste.  The birds, deer, and wood hares were now seen scurrying past him.  There was a roaring in the air.  It grew louder, was coming nearer, and Jack turned to stride after the wood things that fled.

The whole forest was ablaze; the wind was rising, and the flames, gaining and spreading, were flying now like wild horses.  Jack had no place in his brain for such a thing; but his instinct warned him to shun that coming roaring that sent above dark clouds and flying fire-flakes, and messengers of heat below, so he fled before it, as the forest host was doing.  Fast as he went, and few animals can outrun a Grizzly in rough country, the hot hurricane was gaining on him.  His sense of danger had grown almost to terror, terror of a kind that he had never known before, for here there was nothing he could fight; nothing that he could resist.  The flames were all around him now; birds without number, hares, and deer had gone down before the red horror.  He was plunging wildly on through chaparral and manzanita thickets that held all feebler things until the fury seized them; his hair was scorching, his wound was forgotten, and he thought only of escape when the brush ahead opened, and the Grizzly, smoke-blinded, half roasted, plunged down a bank and into a small clear pool.  The fur on his back said “hiss,” for it was sizzling-hot.  Down below he went, gulping the cool drink, wallowing in safety and unheat.  Down below the surface he crouched as long as his lungs would bear the strain, then slowly and cautiously he raised his head.  The sky above was one great sheet of flame.  Sticks aflame and flying embers came in hissing showers on the water.  The air was hot, but breathable at times, and he filled his lungs till he had difficulty in keeping his body down below.  Other creatures there were in the pool, some burnt, some dead, some small and in the margin, some bigger in the deeper places, and one of them was close beside him.  Oh, he knew that smell; fire—­all Sierra’s woods ablaze—­could not disguise the hunter who had shot at him from the platform, and, though he did not know this, the hunter really who had followed him all day, and who had tried to smoke him out of his den and thereby set the woods ablaze.  Here they were, face to face, in the deepest end of the little pool; they were only ten feet apart and could not get more than twenty feet apart.  The flames grew unbearable.  The Bear and man each took a hasty breath and bobbed below the surface, each wondering, according to his intelligence, what the other would do.  In half a minute both came up again, each relieved to find the other no nearer.  Each tried to keep his nose and one eye above the water.  But the fire was raging hot; they had to dip under and stay as long as possible.