“By Jingo! he is dead!” said one. “Bully for you, my boy.”
The young pioneer now held up the club with which he had dispatched the bear, and each took it and struck the dead beast on the head in order to say that he had helped to kill the long-lived animal, but no one congratulated Meshack. In fact, several let it be known that they themselves had killed the tough, old fellow.
The question now arose as to how Bruin was to be carried home. Some were for getting two oxen and a cart, but young Browning suggested that they carry him on a pole. This they did, and staggering and tumbling onward, the animal was gradually towed towards the house of Mr. Caldwell. The bear was laid in the kitchen, where the owner of the house came to view him and to taunt the back-trackers and the climbers for their cowardice. When closely examined, it was seen that Captain Morris’s two shots had struck him, one passing through his ear, the other breaking two of his tusks, without doing any serious injury. No ball from Martin’s numerous fusillades had touched him at all.
“Your shot killed the bear, Browning,” said he, turning to Meshack. “If the bear’s backbone had not been weakened by the last shot he would have undoubtedly killed many, if not all of them. As for these fellows who climbed the trees, it was a most cowardly trick, and the same thing would have occurred had they been in a fight with the redskins.”
This was very galling to the back-trackers, and they envied and abused young Meshack whenever they had an opportunity. When the bear was cut up they even did not wish to give Meshack a share of it, but Mr. Caldwell insisted that he should have his just proportion of the game.
“I have no use for the meat, sir,” said the youthful pioneer. “But if you will give me the skin, I shall be glad to have it.”
Mr. Caldwell immediately took up the hide and presented it to him.
“It is justly yours,” said he, “for my dogs treed him, and you killed him. You have a right to the skin, because it has always been a rule among hunters that the first blood drawn takes the skin, be it bear or deer.”
Thus ended the young trapper’s first bear fight. It raised his reputation as a fearless boy, and made him admired and respected by all the stout backwoodsmen of the Blue Ridge. Frequently, thereafter, when he would be seated in the kitchen with the other children, they would induce him to tell the whole tale and would ridicule the back-track huntsmen for their cowardly conduct. One of them, Miss Nancy Lee, said to him one evening:
“Browning, I always thought that you were a great coward, but I do not think so now. And I heard father tell a strange man the other day that if he had you in an Indian fight he knew that you would attack the redskins as fearlessly as you did that bear. Meshack, I have often wished that I had been born a boy, then I would be some day a man and would be able to kill or drive away the red rascals who followed General St. Clair, so that they would never again come back to murder the whites. If you had seen as much of their work as I have, you would feel as vindictively towards them as I, myself, do. Let me tell you a story about them: