Yet when I was a boy in Indiana there were people within three miles of us who talked that way. And I have cousins back home (nice people too) who say “you-uns” and “we’uns” and “ketched.” I don’t have to go out of the family to dig up a little picturesque grammar. In fact, I don’t even have to go out of the room.
GATLINBURG, Tenn., Nov. 4, 1940—
A GOOD BEAR STORY
Copyright 1947 by Wm. Sloane Associates, Inc.
Special permission to re-print this bear story was granted by Wm. Sloane Associates, Inc., of New York City, Publishers of “Home Country”, by Ernie Pyle, which book contains this story.
Uncle Steve Cole lives on at his old home place, right in the park. He is a typical mountain man of the old school—a good mountain man, the kind who lives right and does right.
I dropped in one afternoon to talk to him. Uncle Steve lit a fire, and sat down beside it and began spitting in the fireplace. He wasn’t chewing tobacco, but he spit in the fireplace all the time anyhow.
Uncle Steve had killed more bears than any man in these mountains. He says so himself, and others say so too. He hasn’t the remotest idea how many he has killed. But he has killed bears with muzzle-loaders, modern rifles, deadfalls, clubs, axes, and he even choked one to death with his bare hands.
I got him to tell me that story. He and a neighbor went out one night. The dogs treed a bear. The way Uncle Steve tells it would take half an hour, and that’s too long for us. But the essence of it was that they built a fire, the bear finally came down the tree. Uncle Steve stood there until the bear’s body was pressing on the muzzle of the gun, and then he pulled the trigger. “I figured I couldn’t miss that way,” Uncle Steve laughs.
He didn’t miss, but the shot didn’t kill the bear. He ran 50 yards or so, and then the dogs were on him. And the first thing Uncle Steve knew the bear had clenched his great jaws right down on a dog’s snoot, and was just crushing it to pieces.