passed. Came the summer of 1918, and the Supervisor of the Apache National Forest found himself woefully short of men, and the dreaded fire season coming on. The most of his rangers, fire lookouts, and patrols had gone to the war, and he could not find enough men of the right sort to take their places. When word of this shortage of men reached Greer, the settlers were seriously troubled about it. Said John Butler, George Crosby’s stepfather: ‘‘This is sure bad for us. Fires will be started by the lightning, and by careless travelers, and if there are no lookouts to report them, they will gain such headway that they will burn our whole cattle range. Then we will go broke!”
“Well, I’ll be one of the lookouts if the Supervisor will take me on,” said George.
“Sure! That is the very thing for you to do—” John began, but the good mother broke in: “No! No! George is too young — too inexperienced to undertake that dangerous, lonely work. Away up on one of those peaks by himself, right where the electric storms center — right among those terrible grizzly bears — strange men prowling about in the forest, bad men, of course, or they would make themselves known to us — no, I do not want my boy to be a fireguard.”
“But those mysterious men have gone!” George exclaimed. ‘‘Roy Hall found their deserted camp. If I let the grizzlies alone, they’ll let me alone! And as to the thunderstorms, I know the rules: when they gather, the fireguards must leave the lookout stations and go down to their cabins. Don’t you fear for me, mother. I’ll be safe enough!”
“Sure he will!” John told her. “And just think, wife, of the service he will be to the country in its time of need! And now that he has become a Boy Scout, something big is expected of him. Well, here is his chance to do the big thing!”
The mother sighed. “ I take back my objections,” she said. “I should not have said one word against this. If my own young brother can face the Huns in France, then it is but fair that my young son shall face the lesser dangers in this Apache Forest!”
When Forest Supervisor Frederic Winn, in Springerville, received George’s letter of application for a position as fireguard during the season, he, too, heaved a big sigh, but it was a sigh of relief. He hurried home from the office to tell Mrs. Winn that George Crosby was to be a fireguard, and then he called for his big, black horse, and rode the eighteen miles up across the desert and into the forest to Greer, to give George his necessary instructions, and tell him that his salary would be ninety dollars per month.
But there! I have talked enough. With this introduction, I let George tell his story, a story that I found exciting enough. I find, though, that I have omitted to describe his person. Well, in place of it I give you his photograph. Just note how tall and well-built he is for his age — seventeen years — and what a powerful chest he has. That is what one gets by being born and reared at an elevation of 8500 feet!
Chapter I.
Alone on Mount Thomas
It was the 28th of May when Supervisor Winn rode up to our place from Springerville, and told me that I could be one of his fireguards, and that he would place me on Mount Thomas. That, the highest lookout station in all the forest, was the one I wanted, but had not dared ask for. I thought that it would likely be occupied by some experienced fireguard. Twice in my life I had been on Mount Thomas, but only for an hour or so each time, and it was such an interesting place that I had longed for a chance to spend days up there. At nine o’clock on the morning of June 1, all fireguards in the forest were required to telephone the Supervisor, at Springerville, that they were in their lookout stations, ready for duty, so I had but two days to gather an outfit for my season’s work, and another day in which to move up to the little fireguard cabin just under the summit of Mount Thomas. My mother and my sister, Hannah, packed the clothing that I would need, and the towels, dishcloths, and food, and I, myself, made a good sleeping-bag by sewing a blanket and two quilts together, and slipping them into an outer cover of heavy canvas. Up to this time my one weapon had been a little 22-caliber rifle; good enough for shooting turkeys, squirrels, and even coyotes. But now I needed a real rifle, and my mother said that I could take my Uncle Cleveland’s 30-30 Winchester. I found that it was still well oiled, and the inside of the barrel as bright as a new silver dollar. I promised that I would keep it in that condition.
On the last day of May, right after breakfast. Uncle John — as I call my stepfather — and I packed my outfit upon two stout horses, and then we mounted our saddle animals and took the trail for Mount Thomas. We climbed Amburon Point, at the head of our oatfield, and between the East and West Forks of the river, and threading the seven miles of forest and open park land, struck the East Fork, where, leaving its narrow canyon at the foot of the big mountain, it meanders for a mile or more down through a narrow valley of open meadow land. Here, on the west side of the valley, rising from a narrow, pineclad slope, are the Red Cliffs, or, as some of our mountain people call them, the Painted Cliffs: high upshoots of red lava that have many a hole in them where bears sleep in winter, and where mountain lions have their young, so some of our hunters say.
Well, as we were skirting the timber strip at the foot of these cliffs, ahead of us a couple of hundred yards three coyotes suddenly broke into the open and ran across the meadow so fast that they seemed to be just long, gray streaks in the grass; and they kept looking back as they ran, not at us, but at the timber from whence they had come.
‘‘Something in there has given them a big scare. Let’s.have a look-see,” Uncle John said to me, and I was willing enough to go in. We left the pack-horses to graze about, and had not gone more than fifty yards into the timber, taking as near as we could the back trail of the coyotes, when we came to a spring that had been freshly roiled, and along its edges, deep in the black mud, were the tracks of a big grizzly. We then discovered the partly eaten carcass of a big buck mule deer a few yards beyond the spring. But Uncle John was n’t so much interested in that as he was in the bear tracks: ‘‘Only one bear in these mountains leaves tracks the size of those, and that is old Double Killer,” he said. And just then came a swirl of wind in our faces, strong with the rank odor of bear, and our horses got it, too, and whirled about so suddenly that we nearly lost our seats; nor could we check them as they carried us out of the timber as fast as the coyotes had left it. We finally brought them to a stand at the edge of the creek, and then forced them to return to the pack-horses, quietly feeding and apparently unaware of the proximity of the big bear.
‘‘Now, isn’t this just my usual luck!” Uncle John grumbled, as we again took the trail. “Here is old Double Killer feasting upon a deer carcass — I sure believe he stole it from a mountain lion — and here I am with no time to stop and watch for him to come back to the carcass! Yes, and without a rifle, even if I could take the time!’’
“I’ll let you have my rifle, and you can watch for him this evening,” I proposed.
“Have n’t the time for it! Now that you have left home, it is up to me to milk ten cows every morning and evening,” he answered. “But what a fine chance this would be to kill the old beefeater!”
And then, after some thought, he added: “But ten to one he will not now return to the carcass until night — dusk, anyhow, and I don’t want to tackle him all by myself when it is too dark to be sure of my aim. The man who wounds that bear is going to have a big fight on his hands! Yes, and will probably get the worst of it!”
It was now just seven years that this bear had roamed our part of the country. He had first made his appearance on Escodilla Mountain, doubtless coming there from the Mogollon Range, in New Mexico. Henry Willis, a settler at the foot of Escodilla, was
