MAULED BY A GRIZZLY

Evening Post, Volume CXXI, Issue 84, 8 April 1936, Page 20

MAULED BY A GRIZZLY

TRAPPER TOOK RISK

DESPERATE LIFE STRUGGLE

(From "The Post's" Representative.)

VANCOUVER, March 11.

The Code of the North, to let-the grizzly go his way, was broken by two trappers; incensed at the depredation of the fiercest denizen of the British Columbia backwoods. Maxwell and Odium had erected a winter cabin on the Hache Hiver, and blazed their traplines. Thefreeze-up had started, and, with the need to cache up a food-sup-ply,% they went hunting. Three days later they were rewarded with a fine, young bull.moose. They skinned and cut'up the carcass, and packed it to their cabin.; A blizzard, during the night, drowned out sounds, for which trappers are ever alert. In the morning, their carefully-built cache was a wreckage, of torn and twisted poles. The moose meat was gone. To the book that tells everything to the woodsman—the snow-covered earth—Maxwell appealed. There was no mistaking the tracks. (Grizzly! The pair discussed the situation. A thieving grizzly, they knew, usually, meant an old fellow, who found it easier to steal than to hunt and kill for himself. But, dangerous, and often belligerent, in the whole of Canada there is nothing.less welcome on the -trail —huge, ugly-tempered, often victor in many encounters with. man. Knowing he would return, Maxwell, set off to intercept,him. He followed the tracks, till, towards sundown, they turned at a right angle, and led down the side of a boulder-strewn- gulch. Maxwell, judging the grizzly's lair was •here, began to descend. As he reached the bed of the gulch, he realised that some thing else had started down the other side. ' Aware it had been trailed, the grizzly hurtled, itself towards the man, with a. roar. .-.:.... Maxwell whirled and fired—twice. He heard the bullets. thud. into the huge bulk, but nothing could stay the brute's infuriated onslaught. Even as Maxwell jammed a third cartridge into his'rifle, the animal was on him, the incarnation of savagery.

; The-,hot, gusty breath of the bear, coughing into his face, was laden with blood, proof that the shots had gone home. As the bear seized Maxwell's head in its jaws, the trapper, in despair,, thrust his hand down its throat. Struggling for life, ,Maxwell miraculously recovered his rifle. He rammed it into the' animal's jaws, and, even as the brute's teeth clamped on the> steel, he pressed the trigger.

The charge blew a gaping hole in the grizzly's skull. Gasping and struggling in its death throes, it rolled over, even in death setting its teeth in the man's thigh. They went .down together.

Maxwell was unable to rise. Blood poured from his wounds. Both jaws were broken, his chin hung on his chest. His cheeks were horribly gashed, and his right hand and forearm crushed and useless. But his legs were sound. Binding his wounds by tearing up his sweater, he set out for' camp.

Arrived at the cabin, on the point of exhaustion, Maxwell, in a whisper, warned his partner that he might get a shock.

Odium lit the lamp. With an exclamation of horror, he proceeded to bandage his partner's wounds. Leaving him stretched out on a bunk, he went for help. By dusk he was back with an Indian and dog team, which left next morning, on a 200-mile journey, bearing the wounded man to hospital- Wilderness doctors fought for his life for a month. Operation followed operation. Maxwell matched his indomitable will with their professional skill. His life was saved.