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“But mosquitoes is natur, and I never find fault with her. If they ar large, Arkansaw is large, her varmints ar large, her trees ar large, her rivers ar large, and a small mosquito would be of no more use in Arkansaw than preaching in a cane-brake.”

This knock-down argument in favor of big mosquitoes used the Hoosier up, and the logician started on a new track, to explain how numerous bear were in his “digging,” where he represented them to be “about as plenty as blackberries, and a little plentifuller.”

Upon the utterance of this assertion, a timid little man near me inquired, if the bear in Arkansaw ever attacked the settlers in numbers.

“No,” said our hero, warming with the subject, “no, stranger, for you see it ain’t the natur of bear to go in droves; b
ut the way they squander about in pairs and single ones is edifying.

“And then the way I hunt them the old black rascals know the crack of my gun as well as they know a pig’s squealing. They grow thin in our parts, it frightens them so, and theydo take the noise dreadfully, poor things. That gun of mine is a perfect epidemic among bear: if not watched closely, it will go off as quick on a warm scent as my dog Bowieknife will: and then that dog whew! why the fellow thinks that the world is full of bear, he finds them so easy. It’s lucky he don’t talk as well as think; for with his natural modesty, if he should suddenly learn how much he is acknowledged to be ahead of all other dogs in the universe, he would be astonished to death in two minutes.

“Strangers, that dog knows a bear’s way as well as a horse-jockey knows a woman’s: he always barks at the right time, bites at the exact place, and whips without getting a scratch.

“I never could tell whether he was made expressly to hunt bear, or whether bear was made expressly for him to hunt; anyway, Ibelieve they we’re ordained to go together as naturally as Squire Jones says a man and woman is, when he moralizes in marrying a couple. In fact, Jones once said, said he, ‘Marriage according to law is a civil contract of divine origin; it’s common to all countries as well as Arkansaw, and people take to it as naturally as Jim Doggett’s Bowie-knife takes to bear.'”

“What season of the year do your hunts take place?” inquired a gentlemanly foreigner, who, from some peculiarities of his baggage, I suspected to be an Englishman, on some hunting expedition, probably at the foot of the Rocky Mountains.

“The season for bear hunting, stranger,” said the man of Arkansaw, “is generally all the year round, and the hunts take place about as regular. I read in history that varmints have theirfat season, and their lean season. That is not the case in Arkansaw, feeding as theydo upon the spontenacious productions of the sire, they have one continued fat season the year round; though in winter things in this way is rather more greasy than in summer, I must admit. For that reason bear with us run in warm weather, but in winter they only waddle.

“Fat, fat! its an enemy to speed; it tames every thing that has plenty of it. I have seen wild turkeys, from its influence, as gentle as chickens. Run a bear in this fat condition, and the way it improves the critter for eating is amazing; it sort of mixes the ile up with the meat, until you can’t tell t’other from which. I’ve done this often.