26 THE BLACK BEAR OF PENNSYLVANIA 



ground. At the opposite side of the little clearing 

 s'tood a large chestnut tree, and beyond it loomed a 

 dank forest of great hemlock trees, 30,000 acres, the 

 last great tract of hemlock in Pennsylvania. 



Mr. Grimes had always been a still-hunter, and his 

 four-score years made the most passive form a ne- 

 cessity. So he sat 'dozing on the log, recalling legends 

 of the past : that Jim Jacobs had said his grand- 

 mother (generic name of ancestral female line) was 

 an educated girl of the Eriez, his grandfather a white 

 man; both were Senecas by adoption ; that Mary 

 Gleason, his wife, was* half-white; they had lived on 

 the East Branch of Fishing Creek until Aaron Rob- 

 bins settled there ; then at the head of Webster Hol- 

 low ; later by the river, north of the source of Free- 

 man's Run; that Jacob was dead since 1886, and 

 his two sons and a daughter only remained of his 

 family. 



With eyes wide open the dream passed through his 

 reminiscent faculties. W^ould the two bears he de- 

 sired never come? He dozed again, ears alert. That 

 mossy stump of an old-growth pine yonder shows 

 how deep snow caused the chopper to cut high above 

 the ground; that white pine stood there when Colum- 

 bus unrolled the map of a western world which the 

 eastern hemisphere had hardly dreamed of ; the red 

 populations he had known in a lifetime spent near 

 the forest ; the red pilots and raftsmen on the rivers ; 

 the red hunters he had known; the wolves he had 

 killed; the deer 800 of them thalt he had killed; 



