The bear cub just wandered out into the trail, so what he did next was so not much planned as a moment of quick and decisive action based on an old desire. He spurred the paint and held onto the rope he had braided into her mane, leaning just a few feet above the thick choke cherry brush and snagged the cub by the loose skin around its neck, throwing it up into his lap and urging the horse into a full run.
    The cub started biting, clawing, both at him and the paint horse. The horse laid her ears back and gave one quick buck, but somehow he stayed on and kept the cub by leaning into the horses neck and wrapping himself around the bear and letting go the reins.
    After that, the horse put everything into running. Somehow she knew there was something much scarier than the cub about to come up behind them.
    The cub hooked a claw in his right side, at the lowest rib. He flinched, but worked fast to undo the hook. He caught up the cub's front and back left paws in his left hand, took off his hat with his right and covered the bears muzzle, clamping down around the hat with both hands while also holding the cub's front paws.
    The cub started to scream, and his hat didn't muffle the noise as much as he'd hoped. He and the horse heard the willow and choke cherry brush a few hundred yards behind them crunching and charging their way. He felt his skin pull taught, his every cell turn alert. He thought about throwing the cub away then and there.
    But he let go with his right hand instead and undid his belt. He put the belt in his mouth, looped the leather back through the buckle and dropped the loop over the top of the hat, cinching the hat tight. The cub screamed again, but this time all that penetrated his muzzle was a kind of angry moan, so it redoubled its efforts at clawing its way free. He grabbed up the front and back paws and managed to keep the cub on its back by pushing its legs apart into an unnatural angle whenever it struggled.
    He held the bear against the paint and guided the horse off the trail with his knees into a stand of lodge pole pine. The mother bear behind them was a huffing frieght train breaking through the brush to the trail.
    The horse ran through the trees, knocking his knees into branches and dodging the half fallen widowmakers. They cut a long arc through the forest, the snapping branches and huffing behind them driving them forward faster than he had ever imagined a horse could go through woods like this. The cub had worn itself out struggling and he moved its front paws into his right hand and took up the reins again with his left. He thought about trying to turn the horse, to shoot the bear with the shotgun but decided against it. He'd heard that grizzlies could smell a dead bear on it's killer for the rest of his life. They could tell whether that bear died for the right reasons, and they hunted the men who killed their kind for sport in their dreams, clawing up the little joy they might find in life and burrying it under piles of rotting fallen logs far from where the men could ever find it.
    He didn't know if this counted as sport but he wasn't willing to take the chance. He turned the horse back for the trail. If he rode back over his old scent he might be able to loose the bear by cutting back off the trail after a while, then crossing over to one of the old logging roads that riddled the mountains a few miles west.
    They cleared the lodgepoles and pushed through some brush back onto the trail. The trail was wide and free of any sharp dips or rocky ground for the next mile. The sound of breaking limbs had grown softer, but he knew she was out there, running down their scent. If the paint could keep up a steady run, they could out pace the bear and have a chance.