The animal we had ingloriously won was undersized, weighing scant 175 pounds. The average weight of Smoky Mountain bears is not great, but occasionally a very large beast is killed. Matt Hyde told us that he killed one on the Welch Divide in 1901, the meat of which, dressed, without the hide, weighed 434 pounds, and the hide “squared eight feet” when stretched for drying. “Doc” Jones killed a bear that was “kivered with fat, five inches thick.”
Afterwards I took pains to ask the most famous bear hunters of our region what were the largest bears they had personally killed. Uncle Jimmy Crawford, of the Balsam Mountains, estimated his largest at 500 pounds gross, and the hide of another that he had killed weighed forty pounds after three days’ drying. Quill Rose, of Eagle Creek, said that, after stripping the hide from one of his bears, he took the fresh skin by the ears and raised it as high as he could reach above his head, and that four inches of the butt end of the hide (not legs) trailed on the ground. “And,” he added severely, “thar’s no lie about it.” Quill is six feet one and one-half inches tall. Black Bill Walker, of the middle prong of Little River (Tennessee side), told me “The biggest one I ever saw killed had a hide that measured ten feet from nose to rump, stretched for drying. The biggest I ever killed myself measured nine and a half feet, same way, and weighed a good four hundred net, which, allowin’ for hide, blood, and entrails, would run full five hunderd live weight.”
Skinning a frozen bear
Within the past two years two bears of about 500 pounds each have been killed in Swain and Graham counties, the Cables getting one of them. The veteran hunters that I have named have killed their hundreds of bears and are men superior to silly exaggeration. In the Smoky Mountains the black bear, like most of the trees, attains its fullest development, and that it occasionally reaches a weight of 500 pounds when “hog fat” is beyond reasonable doubt, though the average would not be more than half that weight.
We spent the evening in debate as to where the next drive should be made. Some favored moving six miles eastward, to the old mining shack at Siler’s Meadow, and trying the headwaters of Forney’s Creek, around Rip Shin Thicket and the Gunstick Laurel, driving towards Clingman Dome and over into the bleak gulf, southwest of the Sugarland Mountains, that I had named Godforsaken—a title that stuck. We knew there were bears in that region, though it was a desperately rough country to hunt in.
But John and the hunchback had found “sign” in the opposite direction. Bears were crossing from Little River in the neighborhood of Thunderhead and Briar Knob, coming up just west of the Devil’s Court House and “using” around Block House, Woolly Ridge, Bear Pen, and thereabouts. The motion carried, and we adjourned to bed.
We breakfasted on bear meat, the remains of our Thanksgiving turkey, and wheat bread shortened with bear’s grease until it was light as a feather; and I made tea. It was the first time that Little John ever saw “store tea.” He swallowed some of it as if it had been boneset, under the impression that it was some sort of “yerb” that would be good for his insides. Without praising its flavor, he asked what it had cost, and, when I told him “a dollar a pound,” reckoned that it was “rich man’s medicine”; said he preferred dittany or sassafras or goldenrod. “Doc” Jones opined that it “looked yaller,” and he even affirmed that it “tasted yaller.”
“Waal, people,” exclaimed Matt, “I ’low I’ve done growed a bit, atter that mess o’ meat. Le’s be movin’.”