PAGE 9
The Big Bear of Arkansas
by
“I raised myself, took deliberate aim, and fired. Instantly the varmint wheeled, gave a yell, and walked through the fence, as easy as a falling tree would through a cobweb.
“I started after, but was tripped up by my inexpressibles, which, either from habit or the excitement of the moment, were about my heels, and before I had really gathered myself up, I heard the old varmint groaning, like a thousand sinners, in a thicket near by, and, by the time I reached him, he was a corpse.
“Stranger, it took five niggers and myself to put that carcass on a mule’s back, and old long-ears waddled under his load, as if he was foundered in every leg of his body; and with a common whopper of a bear, he would have trotted off, and enjoyed himself.
“‘Twould astonish you to know how big he was: I made a bedspread of his skin,and the way it used to cover mybear mattress, and leave several feet on each side to tuck up, would have delighted you. It was, in fact, a creation bear, and if it had lived in Samson’s time, and had met him in a fair fight, he would have licked him in the twinkling of a dice-box.
“But, stranger, I never liked the way I hunted him, and missed him. There is something curious about it, that I never could understand,and I never was satisfied at his giving in so easy at last. Prehaps he had heard of my preparations to hunt him the next day, so he jist guv up, like Captain Scott’s coon, to save his wind to grunt with in dying; but that ain’t likely. My private opinion is, that that bear was an an unhuntable bear, and died when his time come.”
When this story was ended, our hero sat some minutes with his auditors, in a grave silence; I saw there was a mystery to him connected with the bear whose death he had just related, that had evidently made a strong impression on his mind. It was also evident that there was some superstitious awe connected with the affair, a feeling common with all “children of the wood,” when they meet with anything out of their every-day experience.
He was the first one, however, to break the silence, and, jumping up, he asked all present to “liquor” before going to bed, a thing which he did, with a number of companions, evidently to his heart’s content.
Long before day, I was put ashore at myplace of destination, and I can onlyfollow with the reader, in imagination, our Arkansas friend, in his adventures at the “Forks of Cypress,” on the Mississippi.