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Show KMADY fQJS ACTION 7 JJttjA ARPER and I were hunt-XVi hunt-XVi ing coyotes and bears In I " 3 the backwoods of One- J gon, writes Frederick V. Coville In the National f Geographic Magazine. There were seven dogs In our pack. They had been specially selected and trained to hunt bear. Two were pure-bred foxhounds, whose part it was to find the trail and lead the pack on it unerringly un-erringly by their marvelous keenness of scent. Nig, the old one. was scarred and partly crippled from encounters en-counters with bear. Rover, two years old, though with less experience, was in the prime of activity, keenness, was endurance. Ranger, the staghound, was tall and strong and, when the game was In sight, very swift. In the open he could catch and kill a coyote. Tige, the bloodhound, was the heaviest of the pack. His nose was keen, and on a bear trail he was true and tireless, tire-less, and savage in the operations at the finish. In other game he had less Interest, and when he slept he growled and dreamed of bear hunts. Jule was a mixed bloodhound and bulldog, and Bounce and Drum were her two yearling year-ling pups, one yellow, the other brin-dle. brin-dle. For two hours one morning we had followed the dogs without picking up a fresh trail. We were passing from an open ridge into a forest of fir and pine when the young foxhound, first sniffing excitedly with his nose to the ground, raised the coarse hair between his shoulders, bayed sharply and plunged into the timber. The other dogs closed in behind and disappeared. Carper tore after them through the brush, scaling the slippery logs without with-out danger by means of his spiked lumberman's shoes, and I followed as best I could. Approaching a little opening in the timber, I heard the sound of a general fight. Carper yelling, yell-ing, cursing and kicking among the dogs, then a rifle shot, and then another. an-other. When I burst through the chaparral cha-parral Carper was still yelling and kicking the dogs away from the carcass car-cass of a porcupine, grazed by his first bullet and ploughed open by the second. sec-ond. "Well," said he, "we are in for It now." The porcupine had taken a position beneath a log that was raised a little above the ground. As the dogs attacked at-tacked him he turned and struck them terrific blows in the face with his short clubbed tail, almost as muscular muscu-lar as a gorilla's arm, and at every stroke he left a 'mark like a cushion-ful cushion-ful of barbed needles. Dogs less fierce would have quit sooner and suffered suf-fered less, but that bunch of bear-dogs bear-dogs had behind them a thousand years of the fiery passion of the slayer. , The dogs that could reach the porcupine porcu-pine bit him in the back and tail till mouth and tongue were a bloody, quivering mass of barbs. Only by the fiercest onslaught on the dogs themselves them-selves had Carper been able to open them up so that he could shoot the porcupine. The dogs were now pawing their faces and ploughing their noses along the ground in agony, breaking off some of the quills at the surface and driving driv-ing the barbed points deeper into the flesh. The old dogs, who bad been through a similar experience before, would come up and allow the quills to be pulled out as long as they could stand the pain, and then break away to paw and plough again. When the few superficial quillB had |