When Hank was about to start with another load of supplies up the mountain, Jack had phoned down for all of the newspapers, magazines and novels which Forest Supervisor Ross could buy or borrow; also a double supply of smoking tobacco and a box of gum.  When his tongue smarted from too much smoking, he would chew gum for comfort And he read and read, until his eyes prickled and the print blurred.  But the next week he diffidently asked Ross if he thought he could get him a book on astronomy, explaining rather shame-facedly that there was something he wanted to look up.  On his third trip Hank carried several government pamphlets on forestry.  Which goes to prove how Jack was slowly adapting himself to his changed circumstances, and fitting himself into his surroundings.

He had to do that or go all warped and wrong, for he had no intention of leaving the peak, which was at once a refuge and a place where he could accumulate money; not much money, according to Jack’s standard of reckoning—­his mother had often spent as much for a gown or a ring as he could earn if he stayed all summer—­but enough to help him out of the country if he saved it all.

When his first four days vacation was offered him, Jack thought a long while over the manner of spending it.  Quincy did not offer much in the way of diversion, though it did offer something in the way of risk.  So he cut Quincy out of his calculations and decided that he would phone down for a camp outfit and grub, and visit one or two of the places that he had been looking at for so long.  For one thing, he could climb down to the lake he had been staring into for nearly a month, and see if he could catch any trout.  Occasionally he had seen fishermen down there casting their lines in, but none of them had seemed to have much luck.  For all that the lake lured him, it was so blue and clear, set away down there in the cupped mountain top.  Hank had advised him to bait with a salmon-roe on a Coachman fly.  Jack had never heard of that combination, and he wanted to try it.

But after all, the lake was too near to appeal to him except by way of passing.  Away on the next ridge was the black, rocky hump called Grizzly Peak on the map.  Hank spoke of it casually as Taylor Rock, and sometimes called it King Solomon.  That was where the bears had their winter quarters, and that was where Jack wanted to go and camp.  He wanted to see a bear’s den, and if the bears were all gone—­Hank assured him that they never hung out up there in the summer, but ranged all over the mountains—­he wanted to go inside a den and see what it was like.  And for a particular, definite ambition, without which all effort is purposeless, he wanted to kill a bear.

Hank brought him all the things he needed, talked incessantly of what Jack should do and what he shouldn’t do, and even offered to pack his outfit over to the Peak for him.  So Jack went, and got his first taste of real camping out in a real wilderness, and gained a more intimate knowledge of the country he had to guard.