“At last I thought I could shoot by guess, and kill him; so I pointed as near the lump as I could, and fired away. But the bear didn’t come, he only clumb up higher, and got out on a limb, which helped me to see him better. I now loaded up and fired again, but he didn’t move at all this time. I commenced loading for a third fire, but the first thing I know’d, the bear was down among my dogs, and they were fighting all around me. I had my big butcher-knife in my belt, and I had a pair of dressed buckskin breeches on. So I took out my knife, and stood, determined, if he should get hold of me, to defend myself in the best way I could. I stood there for some time, and could now and then see a white dog I had, but the rest of them, and the bear, I couldn’t see at all, it was so miserable dark.
“They still fought around me, and within three feet of me; but at last the bear got down into one of the cracks that the earthquake had made in the ground, about four feet, and I could tell the biting end of him by the hollering of my dogs. So I took my gun and pushed the muzzle of it about till I thought I had it against the main part of his body, and fired; but it happened to be only the fleshy part of his foreleg. With this he jumped out of the crack, and he and the dogs had another hard fight around me, as before. At last, however, they forced him back into the crack again, as he was when I had shot.
“I then began to hunt for my gun, which I had laid down in the dark; and, while hunting, I got hold of a pole, and I concluded I would punch him with it awhile. I did so, and when I would punch him, the dogs would jump in on him, when he would bite them badly and they would jump out again. I concluded, as he would take punching so patiently, it might be that he would lie still enough for me to get down into the crack, and feel slowly along till I could find the right place to give him a dig with my butcher. So I got down, and my dogs got in front of him and kept his head towards them, till I got along easily up to him; and, placing my hand on his rump, felt for his shoulder, just behind where I intended to stick him. I made a lunge with my long knife, and fortunately struck him right through the heart, at which he just sank down, and I crawled out in a hurry.”
Davy had to stay all night at the place where he had killed the bear, and nearly froze to death before morning. To avoid this, he hit upon a plan that would be impossible for most men to carry out. He found a two-foot tree near-by, without limbs for thirty feet, and by climbing it as far as the forks, and then sliding back to the ground, he managed to keep his blood in circulation.
When McDaniel afterwards saw what Davy had done, he said he wouldn’t have gone down into the place with the bear for all the bears in the woods.
The two men worked and hunted all the next day, and at night were glad to rest. They had gone to sleep as near the fire as they dared, when something happened; as Davy says, “About ten o’clock there came a most terrible earthquake, which shook the earth so that we were rocked about like we had been in a cradle. We were very much alarmed; for though we were accustomed to feel earthquakes, we were now right in the region which had been torn to pieces by them in 1812, and we thought it might take a notion and swallow us up, as the big fish did Jonah.”
When the hunt ended, and the meat had been packed to their homes, both McDaniel and Davy had enough and to spare. Davy says that during the fall and up to January, he killed fifty-eight bears, thus adding to his already great renown as a bear-hunter.