I heard Don bark.  Turning the corner of the cliff wall I saw him on a narrow shelf.  He was coming toward me and when he reached me he faced again to the wall and barked fiercely.  The hair on his neck bristled.  I knew he did not fancy that narrow strip of rock, nor did I. But a sudden, grim, cold something had taken possession of me, and I stepped forward.

“Come on, Don, old fellow, we’ve got him corralled.”

That was the first instance I ever knew of Don’s hesitation in the chase of a lion.  I had to coax him to me.  But once started he took the lead and I closely followed.

The shelf was twenty feet wide and upon it close to the wall, in the dust, were the deep imprints of the lion.  A jutting corner of cliff wall hid my view.  I peeped around it.  The shelf narrowed on the other side to a yard in width, and climbed gradually by broken steps.  Don passed the corner, looked back to see if I was coming and went on.  He did this four times, once even stopping to wait for me.

“I’m with you Don!” I grimly muttered.  “We’ll see this trail out to a finish.”

I had now no eyes for the wonders of the place, though I could not but see as I bent a piercing gaze ahead the ponderous overhanging wall above, and sense the bottomless depth below.  I felt rather than saw the canyon swallows, sweeping by in darting flight, with soft rustle of wings, and I heard the shrill chirp of some strange cliff inhabitant.

Don ceased barking.  How strange that seemed to me!  We were no longer man and hound, but companions, brothers, each one relying on the other.  A protruding corner shut us from sight of what was beyond.  Don slipped around.  I had to go sidewise and shuddered as my fingers bit into the wall.

To my surprise I soon found myself on the floor of a shallow wind cave.  The lion trail led straight across it and on.  Shelves of rock stuck out above under which I hurriedly walked.  I came upon a shrub cedar growing in a niche and marveled to see it there.  Don went slower and slower.

We suddenly rounded a point, to see the lion lying in a box-like space in the wall.  The shelf ended there.  I had once before been confronted with a like situation, and had expected to find it here, so was not frightened.  The lion looked up from his task of licking a bloody paw, and uttered a fierce growl.  His tail began to lash to and fro; it knocked the little stones off the shelf.  I heard them click on the wall.  Again and again he spat, showing great, white fangs.  He was a Tom, heavy and large.

It had been my purpose, of course, to photograph this lion, and now that we had cornered him I proposed to do it.  What would follow had only hazily formed in my mind, but the nucleus of it was that he should go free.  I got my camera, opened it, and focused from between twenty and twenty-five feet.

Then a growl from Don and roar from the lion bade me come to my senses.  I did so and my first movement after seeing the lion had risen threateningly was to whip out my revolver.