“I believe, if we’d only thought of it, we might have taught that bear to chop wood; for a bear will handle his paws as well as a man his hands. You throw anything to a bear, and he’ll catch it; and there’s not one man to a hundred can strike a bear with an axe. He will knock it out of his hand with a force that will make his fingers tingle.
“But the greatest amusement was in the summer nights. In the daytime he would lay round and sleep; but as night came on, he grew playful and wide awake. He would chase the dog, and then the cats till they would run up into the red oak at the door, then follow them as far as the limbs would bear him, pull them in, and catch them or shake them off.
“We kept him three years, and then had to kill him. It was a sad day to me. It was the first real trouble I ever had, and I don’t know as I could have felt any worse if it had been a human being. When I found it was determined on, I went over to Uncle Reuben’s, and staid a week. I think all our folks felt almost as bad as I did.”
“But what on earth did you kill him for, Uncle Isaac?”
“Why, we had to. He was always mischievous; but as he grew older, he grew worse. He would dig up potatoes after they were planted in the spring, and also in the fall; and he would break down and waste three or four bushels of corn to get a few ears to eat, when it was in the milk. Did you ever see how a bear works in a cornfield?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, he gets in between the rows, spreads his fore paws, smashes down three or four hills, and then lies down on the heap and eats.
“He wouldn’t kill the hogs, but would chase them all over the pasture, and into the water, and two or three were drowned. You couldn’t put anything out of his reach, for there was no place he couldn’t climb to, a door in the house he couldn’t open, nor scarcely anything he couldn’t break. Though spry as a cat, he wouldn’t climb over a pair of bars, but would take them down, and leave them, go ranging round nights, and let the cattle into the fields. He would steal yarn, that was put out to whiten, to make a bed of. He was the means of our keeping bees. He came home one day in April with his nose all swelled up, and half blind. He had found a swarm of bees in a hollow tree, and tried to get at them; but the hole in the tree was so small that he couldn’t get his paw in, and the bees stung him till he was glad to retreat, finding he could get nothing. We tracked him in the snow that was still in the woods, cut the tree down, and brought it home. He used to plague us to death in sap time, drinking the sap and upsetting the trough, and we had to chain him up. But the crowning mischief, and that which cost him his life, was stealing butter.”
“Stealing butter!” said Charlie.
“Yes: father had long been sick of him, and threatened to kill him; but mother and I begged him off. My sister Mary was going to be married; mother was making and selling all the butter she could, to get her a little outfit: it was hot weather, and she put some butter she was going to send to market in a box, tied it up in a cloth, and lowered it down the well, to keep cool. In the morning I saddled the horse to go to market; mother went to the well to get the butter, but there was no butter there. As soon as she could speak, for grief and anger, she exclaimed, ‘That awful bear!’