Clearly he had been simply a schoolmaster at home, and had picked up all his knowledge of wild beasts from books. He had very impressive manners and had come to Oregon with an eye to political promotion, for he more than once hinted to my quiet Quaker father, on whose hospitality he had fastened himself, that he would not at all dislike going to Congress, and would even consent to act as Governor of this far-off and half-savage land known as Oregon. But, as observed a time or two before, Monnehan most of all things desired the name and the renown, like Nimrod, the builder of Babylon, of a “mighty hunter.”
He had brought no firearms with him, nor was my father at all fond of guns, but finally we three little boys, my brother John, two years older than I, my brother James, two years younger, and myself, had a gun between us. So with this gun, Monnehan, under his tall hat, a pipe in his teeth and a tremendously heavy stick in his left hand would wander about under the oaks, not too far away from the house, all the working hours of the day. Not that he ever killed anything. In truth, I do not now recall that he ever once fired off the gun. But he got away from work, all the same, and a mighty hunter was Monnehan.
He carried this club and kept it swinging and sweeping in a semi-circle along before him all the time because of the incredible number of rattlesnakes that infested our portion of Oregon in those early days. I shall never forget the terror in this brave stranger’s face when he first found out that all the grass on all our grounds was literally alive with snakes. But he had found a good place to stay, and he was not going to be driven out by snakes.
You see, we lived next to a mountain or steep stony hill known as Rattlesnake Butte, and in the ledges of limestone rock here the rattlesnakes hibernated by thousands. In the spring they would crawl out of the cracks in the cliffs, and that was the beginning of the end of rattlesnakes in Oregon. It was awful!
But he had a neighbor by the name of Wilkins, an old man now, and a recent candidate for Governor of Oregon, who was equal to the occasion. He sent back to the States and had some black, bristly, razor-backed hogs brought out to Oregon. These hogs ate the rattlesnakes. But we must get on with the bear story; for this man Monnehan, who came to us the year the black, razor-backed hogs came, was, as I may have said before, “a mighty hunter.”
The great high hills back of our house, black and wild and woody, were full of bear. There were several kinds of bear there in those days.
“How big is this ere brown bear, Squire?” asked Monnehan.
“Well,” answered my father, “almost as big as a small sawmill when in active operation.”
“Oi think Oi’ll confine me operations, for this hunting sayson, to the smaller spacies o’ bear,” said Mr. Monnehan, as he arose with a thoughtful face and laid his pipe on the mantel-piece.
A few mornings later you would have thought, on looking at our porch, that a very large negro from a very muddy place had been walking bare-footed up and down the length of it. This was not a big bear by the sign, only a small black cub; but we got the gun out, cleaned and loaded it, and by high noon we three little boys, my father and Monnehan, the mighty hunter, were on the track of that little black bear. We had gone back up the narrow canyon with its one little clump of dense woods that lay back of our house and reached up toward the big black hills.