MONARCH
The BIG BEAR of Tallac
With 100 Drawings
by Ernest Thompson Seton
Author of
Wild Animals I have known
Trail of the Sandhill Stag
Biography of a Grizzly
Lives of the Hunted.
Two Little Savages. Etc.
Published by Charles Scribner's Sons. New York, 1919.
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED
To the memory of the days in Tallac's Pines, where by the fire I heardthis epic tale.
Kind memory calls the picture up before me now, clear, living clear: Isee them as they sat, the one small and slight, the other tall andbrawny, leader and led, rough men of the hills. They told me thistale—in broken bits they gave it, a sentence at a time. They wereready to talk but knew not how. Few their words, and those they usedwould be empty on paper, meaningless without the puckered lip, theinterhiss, the brutal semi-snarl restrained by human mastery, the snapand jerk of wrist and gleam of steel-gray eye, that really told thetale, of which the spoken word was mere headline. Another, a subtlertheme was theirs that night; not in the line but in the interline itran; and listening to the hunter's ruder tale, I heard as one may hearthe night bird singing in the storm; amid the glitter of the mica Icaught the glint of gold, for theirs was a parable of hill-born powerthat fades when it finds the plains. They told of the giant redwood'sgrowth from a tiny seed; of the avalanche that, born a snowflake,heaves and grows on the peaks, to shrink and die on the level landsbelow. They told of the river at our feet: of its rise, a thread-likerill, afar on Tallac's side, and its growth—a brook, a stream, alittle river, a river, a mighty flood that rolled and ran from hillsto plain to meet a final doom so strange that only the wise believe.Yes, I have seen it; it is there to-day—the river, the wonderfulriver, that unabated flows, but that never reaches the sea.
I give you the story then as it came to me, and yet I do not give it,for theirs is a tongue unknown to script: I give a dim translation;dim, but in all ways respectful, reverencing the indomitable spirit ofthe mountaineer, worshiping the mighty Beast that nature built amonument of power, and loving and worshiping the clash, the awfulstrife heroic, at the close, when these two met.
In this Book the designs for
cover, title-page, and general
make-upwere done by
Grace Gallatin Seton.
