36 THE BLACK BEAR OF PENNSYLVANIA 



a hunter from Dauphin, met a she-bear with two cube- 

 on the Second Mountain, killing the old bear and bring- 

 ing the cubs in triumph to town. The Second Moun- 

 tain is considerably less than ten miles from Harris- 

 burg. So early as the seventies they were rare in 

 about the mouth of the Juniata, as per the following 

 quotation from Silas Wright's excellent "History of 

 Perry County." 



"In 1871, an old bear ajnd cub crossed through 

 Pfoutz's Valley, over the Forge Ridge into Wildcat 

 Valley, where some hunters frightened them to return, 

 which they did, and were killed in Juniata County. 

 They ha'd been driven from Shade M'ountain by the 

 fires which were burning over them at that season of 

 the year." They have long since disappeared from 

 the vicinity of Pittsburg, and about Erie; they are 

 gone from the South Mountains and the Poconos. 

 Migratory though rhey are, they are also timorous, 

 and will not venture into regions where they are per- 

 sistently molested. Flavius J. David, veteran sur- 

 veyor of Lock Haven, who died in 1920. said that 

 once, about 181)8, he was surveying on a mountain in 

 Union County, when he suddenly came upon four 

 bears. He shouted at them and waved his hat, and 

 they started down the mountains at a furious rate, 

 overturning flat stones, and logs, in their haste to reach 

 a place of safety. Bears have been hunted many ways 

 in Pennsylvania, traps, (the writer has a collection 

 of steel bear traps, including one used by Seth I. Nel- 

 son, the premier Clinton County bear hunter, who died 



