256 The Wilderness Hunter. 



his corn and melons. Its meat is good and its fur often 

 valuable ; and in its chase there is much excitement, and 

 occasionally a slight spice of danger, just enough to 

 render it attractive ; so it has always been eagerly fol- 

 lowed. Yet it still holds its own, though in greatly 

 diminished numbers, in the more thinly settled portions 

 of the country. One of the standing riddles of American 

 zoology is the fact that the black bear, which is easier 

 killed and less prolific than the wolf, should hold its own 

 in the land better than the latter, this being directly the 

 reverse of what occurs in Europe, where the brown bear 

 is generally exterminated before the wolf. 



In a few wild spots in the East, in northern Maine 

 for instance, here and there in the neighborhood of the 

 upper Great Lakes, in the east Tennessee and Kentucky 

 mountains and the swamps of Florida and Mississippi, 

 there still lingers an occasional representative of the old 

 wilderness hunters. These men live in log-cabins in the 

 wilderness. They do their hunting on foot, occasionally 

 with the help of a single trailing dog. In Maine they are 

 as apt to kill moose and caribou as bear and deer ; but 

 elsewhere the two last, with an occasional cougar or wolf, 

 are the beasts of chase which they follow. Nowadays as 

 these old hunters die there is no one to take their places, 

 though there are still plenty of backwoods settlers in all of 

 the regions named who do a great deal of hunting and 

 trapping. Such an old hunter rarely makes his appear- 

 ance at the settlements except to dispose of his peltry and 

 hides in exchange for cartridges and provisions, and he 

 leads a life of such lonely isolation as to insure his indi- 



