THE BLACK BEAR 291 



pleasure, that he refused with something very like scorn 

 to put the finishing bullet into it." 



Mr. Denison thus describes the ground where the 

 hunt took place : " Leaving the plantations, the road 

 wound through four miles of open forest, carpeted with 

 a brier tangle, knee high, which made travel anywhere 

 out of the trodden trail almost impossible. Here all 

 the trunks were much darker in color, for fifteen feet 

 from the ground, than they were above, showing the 

 effect of the annual flood, which about Smedes is re- 

 ferred to only as the ' Yazoo back water.' Explaining 

 the marks on the trees, Jim, the guide, waxed eloquent 

 in describing the prowess of a Mr. Hamilton, who used 

 to hunt bears through these woods in boats in the 

 back-water season. 



" Then came Coon Bayou, a four-mile-long mud 

 gully, where the flood water caught and lay stagnant 

 through all the summer and fall, attracting bear and 

 deer and raccoons. A deer went trotting back into the 

 bushes as we slid down the slimy incline into the bed 

 of the bayou. A flock of mallards rose with a roar of 

 wings and a flash of white, fifty feet beyond. Scram- 

 bling up the other side, we were in the real delta 

 swamp. Briers and creepers were knit together be- 

 tween tree trunks and saplings, so that it seemed as 

 though a sickle or a scythe must have been necessary 

 for one who would leave the trail. There were banks 

 of brier tangle twenty and thirty feet high, and from 

 fiftv feet to an eighth of a mile in length, looming up 

 in the forests on either side. Time and again there 

 were places where the trail had been cut with axes, 

 like a tunnel, through the jungle." 



