So the packers and the rest of the party watched and advised.
But, as I have related elsewhere in this narrative, there were no
casualties. The bear, as far as I know, is living to-day, an honored
member of his community, and still telling how he survived the great
war. At last he disappeared into a cave, and we went on without so much
as a single skin to decorate a college room.
We went on.
What odds and ends of knowledge we picked up on those long days in the
saddle! That if lightning strikes a pine even lightly, it kills, but
that a fir will ordinarily survive; that mountain miles are measured
air-line, so that twenty-five miles may really be forty, and that, even
then, they are calculated on the level, so that one is credited with
only the base of the triangle while he is laboriously climbing up its
hypotenuse. I am personally acquainted with the hypotenuses of a good
many mountains, and there is no use trying to pretend that they are
bases. They are not.
Then we learned that the purpose of the National Forests is not to
preserve timber but to conserve it.
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