HUNTING AND TRAPPING IN CAMERON Co., PA. 135 



We were a little afraid that they might return and do us some 

 dirt, but they did not. They went farther down the run and built 

 a sort of a shelter out of boughs and pieces of bark where they 

 stayed about two weeks, when they went home, leaving the field 

 to Bill and myself. 



We put in two days cutting wood and calking and mudding 

 the shanty wherever the chinking and mud had been worked out 

 by squirrels and other small animals. . As soon as we had this 

 work done we put in our time setting our bear traps. We also 

 built two bear pens. After we had the bear traps all set, we then 

 began putting out small traps, setting the most of the small steel 

 traps for fox and building more deadfalls and repairing those 

 that we had made the year before for marten on the ridges, and 

 along the creek for mink and coon. 



After this work was done we gave more time to bear hunting. 

 We had a good deal of freezing weather without much snow for 

 tracking. Being very noisy under foot, we were compelled to hunt 

 for several days by driving the deer, that is, one of us would 

 stand on the runways in the heads of basins or hollows and in the 

 low places on the ridges where it was natural for deer to pass 

 through when jumped up. In going from one ridge to another, we 

 would get a deer in this way nearly every day, and one day we 

 had the good luck to get three bears while driving, an old bear and 

 two cubs. We were also having fairly good luck with the traps. 



The first snow that fell to make good tracking was a damp 

 one, and hung on the underbrush so much that it was impossible 

 to see but a few yards unless in very open timber. Here I wish 

 to relate an incident that nearly caused my hair to turn white in 

 a very short time. I am not given very much to superstitions or 

 alarmed at unnatural causes, but in this case I will confess that 

 I felt like showing the white feather. 



I was working my way very cautiously along the side of a 

 ridge and down near the base of the hill in low timber, as that 

 is the most natural place to find deer in a storm of this kind. I 

 had just stepped out of the thicket into the ed^e of a strip of 

 open timber where I could see for several rods along the side of 

 the hill. I had barely stepped into the open when I caught sight 



