THE GREAT BEAR-HUNT
The hair-raising story that the young squirrel-hunter told, created
quite an excitement among villagers near by, but on second
consideration the older and wiser heads were inclined to discredit it.
The imaginative Nimrod had probably seen a black stump or dark
moss-covered rock, which, in the excitement of the moment, he did not
stop to investigate. He had fired upon the instant and then fled
without taking further inventory of the place. It was doubtless one of
those hallucinations that are so common in the woods. Bears had not
been plentiful in the region for several years, so at first the story
was discredited.
About a week later Grandpa Hezekiah Butterfield, one of the old men of
the village, went about a mile into the country to a farmhouse to take
supper with an old crony and to talk over old times.
As is usual when two grandpas get to talking over old times, Grandpa
Butterfield stayed much later than he intended, starting for home at
about eight o'clock. But when he went, he felt well repaid for his
visit, because he had completely out-talked his companion and moreover
was carrying back a present of five pounds of honey, which, as the old
man had a sweet tooth, the only tooth he had, was most acceptable.
Just after leaving the farmhouse, the way led through a deep woods
which overhung the road, making it quite dark in places.
It happened that on this same evening Black Bruin went forth on one of
his nightly prowls.
It was a moonlight night and the wood-mice were out in force,
scampering about and squeaking, having the finest kind of a play. In
the course of his stalking this small game, Black Bruin came to within
a few rods of the road. He was sniffing about an old log which smelled
strongly of mice when a fresh puff of the wind brought him a strong
man-scent.
At this dread odor the hair rose upon his neck and fear told him to
slip quietly away in the opposite direction from which the scent came.
He was about to obey this instinct when the wind again freshened and a
new odor filled his nostrils. It was not as strong as the man-scent
and it did not fill him with fear, but with delight. It made his mouth
drip saliva and filled him with an insatiate craving for something, he
could not remember just what.
Then the old sweet smell, that was to him what whisky is to the
drunkard, brought back a familiar picture. It was of a farmhouse with
barns and many out-buildings. There were hens, ducks and turkeys in
the yard and back of the house was a row of beehives that always
emitted this ravishing odor.
It was honey, and at the realization Black Bruin could almost hear the
low droning of the hive, or the angry zip, zip of the bees about his
ears as he robbed them.
Again the night-wind brought the man-scent and the smell of honey. The
former filled him with fear and the latter with delight. Again and
again he tested the wind, weighing the two odors, and at last the honey
conquered.
The man might fill him with thorns and prickers from his thunder and
lightning stick, but he must have some of that honey.
Grandpa Butterfield was walking leisurely along humming a psalm tune,
as was his wont when well pleased with the world, when he thought he
heard something behind him in the road.
He stopped and listened, but all was still. Only the usual
night-sounds came to his ears. But when he moved on, he felt sure that
the footsteps again followed.
At last he reached a point where the moonlight fell across the road.
He now felt quite sure that something was coming after him but what, he
could not imagine. Feeling curious, and a bit uneasy, for the road was
a lonely one, he turned and looked behind and there, in the full
moonlight, not forty feet away, he beheld a huge black bear following
surely in his footsteps.
There was no deceiving his eye. He had seen too many bears in days
gone by.
Grandpa Butterfield quickened his walk to a trot, which in a dozen
steps he increased to as lively a run as a man of seventy years could
muster.
Black Bruin, feeling, now that the man was running, he was afraid of
him, and seeing his precious honey rapidly moving away down the road,
went in hot pursuit.
By the time the old man had covered a hundred feet, his breath came in
quick asthmatic gasps. Craning his stiff neck to see if he had
distanced his pursuer, he saw to his horror that the bear was not
twenty feet behind him. Terror now lent wings to his rheumatic old
legs, and he sprinted another hundred feet in much quicker time than he
had the first.
But Black Bruin now felt sure that the honey was his. The man creature
was clearly afraid of him, so he too increased his pace.
Poor Grandpa Butterfield could almost feel the bear's hot breath upon
his back as he ran. Ten seconds more, he told himself, and he would be
in the clutches of this brute. His obituary and the account of his
tragic death would surely be in the county paper next week.
Suddenly his half-paralyzed brain was electrified by a thought. It was
the honey that the bear was after, and not him. Who ever heard of a
bear wanting to eat an old dried-up man, who was as tough as leather?
Without a second's delay he pitched the honey into the road behind him,
and continued his frantic flight.
A few rods farther on, feeling that he was no longer pursued, he
glanced back just long enough to see the bear tearing the paper from
the package and licking out the honey.
That evening at the country grocery the bear-story of the
squirrel-hunter was amply corroborated by Grandpa Butterfield, who was
so winded and spent with running that he could barely gasp out his
disconnected account of the chase through the woods.
The next morning, with Grandpa Butterfield as a guide, several men went
over the ground, where there was plenty of evidence to substantiate the
old man's story. The empty honey-frames were there, and the
bear-tracks told as plainly as words that a bear, of unusual size, had
given the old man the run of his life through the woods.
Grandpa Butterfield was the hero of the village, both for that day and
several following, and the long-talked-of bear-hunt was at once
organized.
There was but one rifle in the village, and that was a 38-55
Winchester, the property of the young hunter from the city, who had
filled Black Bruin's coat with squirrel-shot. So old rusty shotguns
were got out and cleaned up in readiness for the fray. Some of them
had not seen service recently, with the exception of once or twice a
year, when they were used to scare off the crows or to frighten a
woodchuck which was making too free with the beans.
Boys hunted up old rusty bullet-moulds and ran bullets, and the
shotguns were loaded with slugs and buckshot.
Those who were not fortunate enough even to possess a disreputable old
gun, armed themselves with pitchforks, so that altogether it was a
motley armed party that started out one early October morning to
annihilate Black Bruin.
The dogs comprising the pack were half-breed hounds and beagles, with
two or three pure-blood foxhounds.
By rare good fortune a farmer, coming into town early, had seen the
bear crossing the road ahead of his team, so that the dogs could be
shown the trail at once.
But when the hunters pointed out the hand-shaped track in the road and
said "seek," the hair rose upon the dogs' backs and they stuck their
tails between their legs and interpreted "seek," as meaning that they
were to seek their own homes by the shortest path. This new rank
animal scent had no attraction for them. They had not lost any bear.
In other words, they would not follow.
Here was a difficulty that the hunters had not foreseen, and for a time
it looked as though the hunt was doomed to end then and there.
Finally some one in the party said, "We ought to have taken along Ben
Holcome's Growler. Growler ain't afraid of the devil himself."
Growler was a mongrel, half-hound and half-bulldog. He had not nose
enough to follow alone, but as had been said, he wasn't afraid of
anything. So as there was nothing else to do, a boy was sent
cross-lots after Growler, while the hunters waited impatiently.
Growler and the boy at last put in an appearance, and the mongrel was
shown the bear-track in the road.
Growler's hair likewise rose up on his neck, but his lips also parted
in a snarl and he started off on the fresh track, uttering excited
yelps. Growler thought he scented a good fight ahead, and he would
rather chew on a good adversary any day than upon a piece of beefsteak.
Seeing what was expected of them, and made courageous by Growler's
example, the pack followed at full cry, and the great bear-hunt was on
in earnest.
Black Bruin heard them almost at the outset, where he was digging roots
in the deep woods, and for some reason the sounds annoyed him. He knew
they were made by dogs, for he had often heard the old hound Hecla at
the farmhouse running rabbits in the near-by swamp.
But here, there were half-a-dozen hounds instead of one, and their
baying was fairly clamorous.
Finally, the pack entered the woods not forty rods away, and Black
Bruin began to get uneasy. At last it dawned upon him, as the pack
drew still nearer and nearer, that; they were upon his track. This
thought filled him with both fear and rage. What did these curs want
of him? Had he not killed a dog that was worrying him, while with
Pedro, with a single blow?
So he crouched in a thicket and waited expectantly. He had not long to
wait, for in fifteen seconds the pack came up. When they discovered
the bear so near at hand, however, and saw what menacing game they had
been running, the hounds all slunk back to a safe distance, and sat on
their tails. But not so Growler.
Here was the scrap of his life with an animal three times as large as
the big Newfoundland, whom he was in the habit of worrying. So he
rushed into the thicket and sprang at Black Bruin's throat.
[Illustration: GROWLER SPRANG AT BLACK BRUIN'S THROAT]
But quick as he was, he was not as quick as his adversary, who ripped
open the side of his head with a lucky blow, and stretched him gasping
upon the ground. Black Bruin then reached down and biting the kicking
dog through the neck, finished his troubles in short order.
Growler uttered one agonized cry, and stretched out dead. This was
enough for the rest of the pack, all of whom stuck their tails between
their legs and ran for their respective masters.
Hearing the cries of men near at hand, Black Bruin slunk out of the
thicket and off into the deep woods, but not soon enough to escape a
fusillade of buckshot which whizzed about him as he ran, a few of them
biting deep into his flesh.
But he was soon lost to sight, and as the pack would not follow, now
that Growler was no more, the hunt was finally abandoned for that day.
The next day a bulldog and a bull terrier were procured to take the
place of Growler, and the hunt was resumed. But being made wary by
this experience, Black Bruin "laid low" and they could not start him.
Each morning for three days they scoured the country, beating the woods
and loosing the hounds at all points where the bear had been recently
seen, but without success.
The fourth morning a farmer came to town in great haste. The bear had
killed a calf the night before and he had discovered the partly eaten
carcass buried in the woods near by. Here was the bait that would lure
the thief into their hands.
So hunters and hounds went at once to the carcass, where a rather fresh
trail was found. Half an hour's pursuit again routed out the bear.
Once he took to the open, and the young hunter from the city with the
Winchester sent a bullet through his paw, laming him considerably.
This would never do, so he doubled back to the woods.
He did not fear this yelping, baying pack as he did the men that were
also following him. He now knew that the thunder and lightning that
they carried could bite and sting as nothing else could.
For half an hour Black Bruin ran hither and thither, doubling in and
out. Finally he remembered his tree-climbing habit and in an evil
moment clambered up a tall spruce. In five minutes' time after he
scratched up the tree, men and dogs had surrounded his foolish refuge,
and his fate seemed sealed.
The last of the party to arrive was the young man with the Winchester,
for whom all had been waiting. One shot from him would end the hunt.
They discovered Black Bruin about thirty feet from the ground in a
thick whorl of limbs.
The young rifleman was much excited. This would be his first bear.
His name would be in the local paper, and he would have a great story
to tell when he got back to the city.
Experience would have taught him to draw his bead finer than he did,
and also to have lowered his rear sight, which was set for two hundred
yards; but taking careless aim, and thinking he could not miss at such
short range, he pressed the trigger.
There was a sharp crack from the rifle, and the bullet ploughed a deep
wound in Black Bruin's scalp, but glanced from his thick skull and went
singing through the tree-tops.
The blow of the bullet upon the skull dazed the bear for a moment, and
he loosed his hold and came tumbling down through the interlaced limbs.
But the hard bump that he got at the foot of the tree, brought him to
his senses with a jerk. Right among the yelping, snarling pack he had
fallen, and in sheer desperation he struck out right and left.
Two of the hounds went yelping to the rear. Then an excited boy
leveled a double-barreled shotgun at the bear and discharged both
barrels.
At the same instant the best hound in the pack jumped into range and
rolled over kicking upon the ground. He had received the full charge.
Half-blinded and dazed by the blow upon his head, and made frantic by
the yelping of the pack, the shouts of the men and the roar of their
thunder, Black Bruin put all his remaining strength into flight.
Not knowing or seeing which way he went, he fled straight toward the
hunter with the Winchester with mouth wide open.
Horrified at the sight, which the hunter interpreted as a desperate
charge upon the part of the bear, the city Nimrod delivered one wild
shot and then fled for his life, as he thought.
This stampeded the entire hunt, and the terrified men fled as fast as
their legs could carry them until they left the spot far behind.
It was a question whether the frantic beast tried harder to get away
from the hunters, or they from him.
In the village grocery the stories that were told that night made the
small boy's hair stand up with fright and his blood run cold with fear.
As for Black Bruin, with his wounded paw upon which he limped
painfully, and with his bleeding scalp, he concluded that the part of
the country in which he had made his home for several months, was no
place for him, so before another sunrise he put many miles between
himself and the scene of his narrow escape from the hunters.
Nor did this one night's journey calm his fear. Night after night he
fled, always going in the same direction, which, as he fled northward,
carried him farther and farther into the wilderness.
At last in a wild country of rugged mountains and deep, thickly wooded
valleys, where the habitat of man seemed far distant, he ceased his
flight.
There in the wilderness, where lumbermen alone penetrated, Black Bruin
denned up and slept away his fifth winter. His bed was made deep under
the top of a fallen hemlock, where the snow drifted above him and
covered him with soft white blankets. The only evidence that the outer
world had that a bear was sleeping beneath was a small hole in the snow
kept open by the warm breath of the sleeper.