LITMIR.BIZ

      SHOOTING SEA LIONS

      ​ ​booming in, and prepared to fish for salmon-trout, as they are called; really they are yearling and two-year-old salmon. They will bite at a worm, spoon, or fly, but best at worms. I had hardly put in my hook before a noble fellow made the line fairly hiss through the water for a few minutes. Then we drew him, panting and exhausted with his struggles, alongside the rocks, and with a landing net got him into the boat. He was twenty inches in length, and the handsomest fish I ever caught. Eight-and ten-pounders are common, and they are the most delicious fish for frying or broiling which ever swam the sea. Great crabs came in also with the tide, and we dipped several of them out with our net. In two hours we corralled fourteen salmon-trout, losing several more by hooks breaking, and then, the slack-water coming- on and the fish ceasing to bite with avidity, hoisted sail and went swiftly gliding back up the stream to the hotel. It was, all in all, the best morning's sport I have ever enjoyed in my life, and I have shot and fished from the Red River of the North to the Rio Grande, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

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      CHAPTER IV.

      PESCADERO TO SANTA CRUZ.

      Down the Coast toward Santa Cruz.—The Moss and Shell Beaches of Pescadero.—A Disgusted Hunter.—A Grizzly Bear Procession.—A Mutual Surprise and Double Stampede.—The Bear Fever.—The Buck Fever and Prairie-Hen Fever.—How Jim Wheeler Killed the Buck.—How Old S. killed Three at one Shot. A Spanish-American Gentleman of Scientific Attainments and Undoubted Veracity.—View of the Bay of Monterey and the Valley and Mountains of Santa Cruz.

      Pescadero numbers among its attractions a "Moss Beach," where the ladies who visit the place go to gather the beautiful, delicate, many-hued sea-mosses which are found in such abundance all along the Pacific Coast, but in highest perfection on the shores of Central California. These mosses are torn loose by the storms, and thrown ashore by the tides in great abundance in some localities, this "Moss Beach" being one of them. The ladies gather them at low tide, strip them from the glutinous, leather-like substance to which they are found adhering, and place them in salt water, to be kept fresh until they are ready to dry them. The delicate sprays, with fibers finer than any silk, are with infinite labor spread out with pliers, or other small instruments, upon the open leaves of an old ledger or other book of hard paper, and pressed carefully while ​drying. When fully dried they are taken off the paper carefully, and cleaned with a soft brush to remove any mold or other blemishes, and are then ready for use in the preparation of moss-baskets, pictures, etc., etc. Nothing can be more beautiful than the work thus produced by ladies of taste, and no special teaching or experience is required to enable them to do it well. These mosses, when dried ready for use, readily command high prices at the East and in California, the demand being always large. There is also a "Shell Beach" in the vicinity of Pescadero, where beautiful sea-shells are gathered. The finest shell on the Pacific Coast is the great abalone (pron. "ab-a-lo-ne"), a mammoth univalve, which is found most abundantly and most perfect along the shores of the Bay of Monterey, and thence southwards to San Diego. The inside of the shell is rainbow-hued and very brilliant, and when the rough outside has been ground and polished away they make beautiful ornaments for the mantel and cabinet. Belt-buckles and other jewelry, which would be "perfectly lovely" if not so cheap and common, are made from these shells.

      From Pescadero to Santa Cruz is thirty-six miles, by the road which winds along the coast past Point Año Nuevo and Pigeon Point to the Bay of Monterey, and thence southeastward, through a rich and highly-cultivated farming region, to the old Spanish Mission on the hill, below and around which the modern town, one of the most beautiful and thriving in California, has grown up within the past ​fifteen years. What a glorious gallop we—Chirimoya and I—had over the clean, hard, undulating road on that autumn morning after I left Pescadero! Californians will understand me and pardon my enthusiasm, possibly sympathize with me in it; but you of the older and more staid and conventional East cannot do so, and I pass the description, as you would inevitably pass it if you came upon it in print. Passing over a pine-clad spur of Santa Cruz mountains, which here come close down to the coast, we halted for a time to rest and look about. This is a famous place for gathering the pine-cones, with fragments of which ladies are wont to construct elaborately wrought picture- frames and other "ornamental" work, very ugly, and very effective as dust-catchers, but excellent things for presents to religiously inclined friends, who are thereby brought to a realizing appreciation of the force of the scriptural maxim, "It is more blessed to give than to receive." A hunter, who had followed a deer down from the heights above, toward the coast, but lost him, joined me as I reclined upon the warm, dry ground upon the hill-side, enjoying the delicious sense of quiet and absence of care and life's petty annoyances which comes with solitude, mountain air, and autumn sunshine, and we swapped stories of forest and mountain life and adventure, in this and other lands, for an hour or two. He told me with infinite gusto, and a true frontiersman's rude but hearty appreciation of the grotesquely humorous, how a friend of his, who was, and is, a sort of ​Mr. Toots in sportsmanship and woodcraft, came down here once from San Francisco in pursuit of game, and wandering out into the woods upon this same hill, fell asleep one delicious summer afternoon beneath a shady tree. When he awoke it was almost sunset, and the coolness of evening was coming on. He sat up, looked about aim, rubbed his eyes, wondered like Rip Van Winkle how long he had been lying there, and how long it would take him to walk back, empty-handed as he was, to his hotel. Just then a rustling and cracking noise, from a clump of chaparral about a hundred yards away, attracted his attention. Out walked a grizzly bear, a monarch of his kind, yawned, ran his red tongue lazily over the outside of his jaw, humped his back as if to test the condition and pliability of his vertebrae, then advanced directly toward the tree under which the astonished but hardly delighted San Franciscan sat, evidently without having noticed him and blissfully unconscious of his presence. His grizzly majesty had hardly advanced twenty yards when a female of the same species, and but a little less in size, followed in his wake and went through almost the same calisthenic exercises. The first bear's appearance made the man of "Frisco" gasp for breath, the second sent the blood back to his heart in a torrent, the force of which almost caused that organ to jump out of his breast. It never rains a third bear followed the second, licked his chops, humped his back, gave a half growl, half whine of satisfaction and advanced in the same direction at a slow, shambling pace. Every word he had ever spoken in any ​near or remote sense disrespectful of bald-headed men flashed through our hero's mind in an instant. "Now I lay me down to slee——" the forward bear was already within thirty yards of him, and before the prayer could be half finished would be upon him. Something more energetic and positive had to be done immediately. Springing to his feet in frantic despair, the San Franciscan hunter threw his arms wildly aloft, and uttered one loud, long, terrific, unearthly yell, such as an able-bodied Irish banshee might have given on a particularly rough night, when a particularly bad scion of a particularly noble house was passing in his checks at the termination of a particularly long and infamous life. The effect was instantaneous and striking. The foremost bear, startled out of his seven senses by the yell, sprang about ten feet—more or less—into the air, knocked his nearest companion off her pins as he came down, rolled over her, gathered himself up, and bolted "like forty cartloads of rock going down a chute" straight for the chaparral again, his companions following close at his heels, and never turning to see what it was which had stampeded them. As they went bouncing and crashing away into the undergrowth, our friend, utterly oblivious from the first that he had a gun within reach of his arm, turned and ran the other way with such speed as Jackson or the Deerslayer never achieved, reaching his hotel, some miles from the spot, with his garments soaked with perspiration, hair wildly disheveled, and eyes almost bursting from their sockets, only to tell the marvelous story of his adventure to ​a party of practical hunters, who, with the true California instinct, scouted the entire statement as "too thin," affirmed that there never was a bear seen within ten miles of there, hinted that he had been frightened by a drove of cattle, winding up with an intimation that he had doubtless been drinking a little too freely of late, and if he did not want to have an attack of the "jim-jams" he had better switch off right then and there, turn over a new leaf, and reform his vicious not to say criminal habits at once and forever.

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