IN THE LOUISIANA CANEBRAKES 369 



the dogs. It is only in exceptional cases, however, that 

 these black bears, even when wounded and at bay, are 

 dangerous to men, in spite of their formidable strength. 

 Each of the hunters with whom I was camped had been 

 charged by one or two among the scores or hundreds of 

 bears he had slain, but no one of them had ever been in- 

 jured, although they knew other men who had been in- 

 jured. Their immunity was due to their own skill and 

 coolness; for when the dogs were around the bear the 

 hunter invariably ran close in so as to kill the bear at once 

 and save the pack. Each of the Metcalfs had on one 

 occasion killed a large bear with a knife, when the hounds 

 had seized it and the men dared not fire for fear of shoot- 

 ing one of them. They had in their younger days hunted 

 with a General Hamberlin, a Mississippi planter whom 

 they well knew, who was then already an old man. He 

 was passionately addicted to the chase of the bear, not 

 only because of the sport it afforded, but also in a certain 

 way as a matter of vengeance; for his father, also a keen 

 bear-hunter, had been killed by a bear. It was an old he, 

 which he had wounded and which had been bayed by the 

 dogs; it attacked him, throwing him down and biting 

 him so severely that he died a couple of days later. This 

 was in 1847. Mr. W. H. Lambeth sends the following 

 account of the fatal encounter: 



" I send you an extract from the Brother Jonathan, 

 published in New York in 1847: 



" ' Dr. Monroe Hamberlin, Robert Wilson, Joe Brazeil, 

 and others left Satartia, Miss., and in going up Big Sun- 



