The hunting season was usually at an end before the New Year, as the bears holed up when the weather became very cold, and remained hidden until the sap started in the woods. Although they have no food or water, they are just as fat as ever in the spring, but as their cubs are born about the time the old ones appear, the mother bears are not hunted then for the sake of meat or fur. The year in which these adventures took place was warm during December, and as the story of Davy’s hunting near the Obion has been read in a thousand school-rooms in the West, it will be given in as nearly his own words as possible. At this time he was everywhere known as Colonel Davy Crockett, and in the middle of the last century, when each scholar used to bring any book he could get to read from in school, the “History of Colonel Crockett” rivalled in the small boy’s favor the “Life of General Francis Marion.” The part most beloved of the young American was the following, which starts in at the time he left the hungry dogs to gnaw the bones of the bears killed the day before:
“I hadn’t gone far when my dogs took a first-rate start after a very large fat old he-bear, which run right plump towards my camp. I pursued on, but the other hunters had heard the dogs coming, and met them and killed the bear before I got up to them. I gave him to them, and cut out for Big Clover Creek, which wasn’t very far off. Just as I got there and was entering a high cane-brake, my dogs all broke and went ahead, and in a little time they raised a fuss in the cane, and seemed to be going every-which-way. I listened a while, and found my dogs was in two companies, and that both was in a snorting fight. I sent my little son to one, and I broke for the other. [The son was nearly eighteen years old.] I got to mine first, and found my dogs had a two-year-old bear down a-wooling away on him, so I just took my butcher, and went up and slapped it into him, and killed him without shooting. There was five of the dogs in my company.
“In a short time I heard my little son fire at his bear. When I went to him, he had killed it, too. He had two dogs in his team. Just at this moment we heard my other dog barking a short distance off, and all the rest at once broke to him. We pushed on, too, and when we got there we found that he had a still larger bear than either of them we had killed, treed by himself. We killed that one also, which made three we had killed in less than half an hour.”
He then goes on to say that the meat was taken care of as on the day before, and that afterwards he came to where a poor fellow who was the very picture of hard times was grubbing in the ground.
“I asked him what he was doing away in the woods by himself. He said he was grubbing [clearing the ground] for a man who intended to settle there, and that he was doing it because he had no meat for his family, and could earn a little.
“I was mighty sorry for the poor fellow, for it was not only a hard but a very slow way to get meat for a hungry family, so I told him if he would go with me, I would get him more meat than he could earn by grubbing in a month. I intended to supply him with meat, and also to get him to assist my little boy in salting and packing up my bears. He had never seen a bear killed in his life. I told him I had six killed then, and that my dogs had just gone after another.
“He went off to his little cabin, which was a short distance in the brush, and his wife was very anxious he should go with me. So we started and went to the place where I had killed my three bears, and made a camp. Night now came on, but no word from my dogs yet. I afterwards found that they had treed the bear they had gone after, about five miles off, near a man’s house, and had barked at it the whole enduring night. Poor fellows! Many a time they looked for me, and wondered why I didn’t come, for they know’d there was no mistake in me, and I know’d they were as good as ever fluttered in the breeze. As soon as it was light enough to see, the man took his gun and went to them, and shot the bear and killed it. My dogs, however, wouldn’t have anything to do with this stranger; so they left him, and came back early in the morning to me.
“We got our breakfast and cut out again, and we killed four large and very fat bears that day. We hunted out the week, and in that time we killed seventeen, all of them first rate. When we closed our hunt, I gave the man over a thousand weight of fine, fat bear-meat, which pleased him mightily, and made him feel rich. I saw him the next fall, and he told me he had plenty of meat to do him the whole year from his week’s hunt. My son and me now went home. This was the week between Christmas and New Year that we made this hunt.
“When we got home, one of my neighbors was out of meat, and wanted me to go back, and let him go with me, to take another hunt. I couldn’t refuse, but told him I was afraid the bears had taken to house by that time, for after they get very fat, in the fall and early part of the winter, they go into their holes, in large hollow trees or into hollow logs, or their cane house, or the harricanes, and lie there till spring, like frozen snakes. And one thing about this will seem mighty strange to many people. From about the first of January till about the last of April, these varments lie in their holes altogether.
“In all that time they have no food to eat; and when they come out they are not an ounce lighter than when they went to house. I don’t know the cause of this, and still I know it is a fact; and I leave it to others who have more learning than I have, to account for it.” (The bears might be suspected of having learned and practised the secrets of the Norwegian stove, or the modern fireless cooker, whereby a little heat is made to last for many hours.) “They have not a particle of food with them, but they just lie and suck the bottoms of their paws all the time. I have killed many of them in their trees, which enables me to speak positively upon the subject.