A big man, broad of shoulder and narrow at the hips, he sat tall in the saddle. He spotted the bear when it came out of the thick woods onto the trail and stopped. Fargo quickly drew rein. He wasn’t too concerned. He had a Colt strapped around his waist, over his buckskins. In a sheath in his boot nestled a razor-edged Arkansas toothpick. The splash of white and black under him was an Ovaro. Fargo had been riding the stallion for years now and would go on riding it until it died or he did. He’d never had a horse so dependable. Fargo waited for the bear to move on. That it was a black bear and not a griz was in his favor. Black bears rarely attacked people. This one was big, though, as big as any he ever came across. But then, the bears were like everything else in the colony of British Columbia. Fargo didn’t know what it was—the land, the water, the soil, the fact there were so few people—but the wildlife and the plant life all seemed to be bigger north of the border. An old-timer once told Fargo that was the way it had been in the States back in the old days.
