THE BLACK BEAR. 89 



ster to the tender mercies of my friend, who finished it 

 with a shot in the heart. 



Our guns were kept busy at intervals for several hours 

 on both fur and feather ; but no plantigrade presented 

 itself to receive our compliments until near four o'clock, 

 when we came in sight of a burly male which was munch- 

 ing berries in a patch of buckthorn. We commenced 

 stalking him by retreating as rapidly as possible for three 

 or four hundred yards, then crawling carefully up from the 

 leeward, so as not to give him our wind. After groping 

 about among wet shrubbery and dodging behind trees for 

 half an hour, we came to within fifty yards of our intended 

 victim, and were getting ready to open fire on him, when a 

 vine tripped me up, as I was trying to get a little nearer, 

 and sent me sprawling headlong into a mass of apparently 

 unfathomable briers that tore small lanes of blood through 

 my face. When I fell, the bushes caught my gun so strong- 

 ly that it was discharged within an inch of my nose ; but 

 I, fortunately, escaped any greater injury than having my 

 mouth and eyes partially filled with fine grass, leaves, and 

 particles of clay that were scattered about by the shot. By 

 the time I had extricated myself from my thorny couch 

 and picked out enough of the stuff in my eyes to enable 

 me to gaze around, the bear and my companion had disap- 

 peared, and I was left to my own emphatic thoughts and 

 exasperated feelings. Not knowing which w r ay to move 

 to find either quarry or friend, I started straight ahead, 

 Avhere I heard the dogs giving tongue, and in the course 

 of twenty minutes reached the bank of a stream that was 

 both deep and rapid. I tried to cross this in several places, 

 as the dogs were yelping in the loudest manner on the op- 

 posite side, but I found the water too deep to wade and 

 too turbulent to swim ; so I was compelled to make a raft 

 of two small trees which extended far out into the river, 

 and whose branches were so closely entwined that they 

 could not be easily separated. By pressing off the heavy 

 ends with a lever made of a large bough, I got my rude 

 bark afloat, and tried to push it across the stream ; but the 



