March 2, 1895. 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
163 
Bobo and his friend, Mr. Felix Payne, Mr. Bobo's son 
Horace and his nephew, Mr. Frank Harris, son of the 
county sheriff, and myself. Three colored boys of expe- 
rience in bear hunting with Mr. Bobo, went along, Tom, 
Pete and Bill. These latter had been scouring the set- 
tlement the night before to get the dogs together, and 
complained they could not get them all, one valuable dog 
especially being missing, thought to be about eight miles 
up the railroad. I tried to count the pack as they 
swarmed around us, but I could not do so. The boys told 
ting the face as we went at a run down the trail and cut- 
into the old tramway. Of course we could not go into 
the cane. We pulled up together on the tram. "It'll 
cross near here if it head" this way,' said Mr. Bobo. 
"Keep still now. Don't let your horse charge at the cane. 
Jerk his head off, jerk him! Keep everything still while 
I listen to the dogs. That bear ought to come right 
through here — oh, bang it! there's the pack split, and 
the young dogs are running a, deer. Get after them, there, 
boys, get 'em off that deer! Raphael's alone, and he' 
' OK THE TRAIL. 
Grassy Meadows and Open Glades. 
us there were fifty-three in all with us. I imagine there 
are no larger or better bear packs in the country than the 
one we had, though Mr. Bobo complained that most of 
the dogs we had were young and inexperienced. 
"We might kill more bear by taking the six or eight 
best ones," he said, "but we have to be continually train- 
ing the young ones to keep up the pack." 
TRAINING THE PACK. 
*' We had hardly gone half mile from the house before 
some of the puppies began to trail a deer, stringing out at 
cry. At once the process of training began, and it was a 
rough one. The young men, Mr. Horace and Mr. Frank 
rode in at speed, followed by Tom, Pete and Bill, and us- 
ing clubs, rifle barrels, anything at hand, pounded the 
dogs back off the trail amid much doleful lamentation on 
the part of the dogs. For my part, I wish this need not 
have happened, for about half of the dogs bad given 
tongue, and tne music of it was enough to make one's 
shoulder blades creep. I noticed one old ginger-colored, 
big-headed half-breed, a stas: and fox hound cross, with 
long white whiskers about his face, who did not stir from 
the path, and who looked with disdain at the noisy pup- 
pies as they came back. 
"That's old Henry," said Mr. Bobo, "the best bear dog 
we've got. He won't open on anything but bear, and if 
he does open, you can bet it is bear." 
I saw a slim, slit-eared, peaked-nosed fox hound go out 
and snuff at the trail the puppies had raised such a row 
over, then turn around and came back to the horses. 
"That's Raphael," said Mr.Bobo,"he's got a colder nose 
than Henry, and Henry knows it. Raphael won't run 
anything but bear either, and if he opens, Henry will go 
to him. He won't go to the puppies. If Raphael opens, 
and Henry goes to him and opens too. you can bet all you 
have that it's bear, and pretty fresh, for old Henry's 
nose isn't cold enough to run a very faint trail. That's 
how we work one dog with another. When we get a bear 
trail lined out, we lay all the dogs on to it we can, and 
let 'er roll. I'm afraid we're going to have trouble with 
the puppies, but that's part of the game." 
ON THE EDGE OP A CANE BRAKE. 
We now rode through the magnificent timber of oak, 
ash, hickory and gum, and about eight miles from home 
came to a heavy cane brake, cut across by an old wooden 
tramway, once used in lumbering at that point. We now 
began to strike the bear country. The trees grew as large, 
but not so closely together. In the opens there were 
shrubs with tough, interlocking limbs.- The brake itself 
was like a million cane fish poles set on end, so densely 
that it seemed a mouse could not crawl between. It was 
a thicket, a jungle, such as I had never seen in all my life 
before. Over the narrow tram road, whose loose and 
treacherous boards clattered complainingly under the 
horses' hoofs, the delicate green fringes of the cane met 
and interlocked. Nature was rapidly eating up the trace 
of man. Some of the boards of the tram were rotten, 
some wei*e gone. The brake was swallowing the path. 
Into the dark multiplicity of the reiterant slender shafts 
of green, \> e sought to look, but fifteen feet from the 
eye the green was black, and the black was a wall. I 
had seen my first cane brake, and then at once I could 
understand why there were bears in this country. No 
riding, but foot over this country, and no stalking it, foot 
. by foot, and no' trapping over it, and no putting out of 
bait on it. The cover was the harborage of the game ; 
everywhere in that cover the game could find its food. 
Why should a bear come out into the open and invite a 
bullet? 
THE START. 
But man, the great hunter, had invented for this 
country precisely the best way of killing the game de- 
sired, and this I was now to see in. operation. There was 
a whimper from a puppy, a confused burst of twenty 
mingled tongues, and at length a tenore-robusto note 
from Raphael, answered by a deep "Boo-boo-boo-oo!" 
from Henry, as he sprang into the cover, and then — ah, 
me! but that was a glorious sound. I tingled. 
£ "Come on!" cried Mr. Bobo, and off he went, I follow- 
ing, a thousand punishing switches of fine boughs cut- 
right away off in there to the left of us; don'tjyou hear 
him?" 
I could hear ^what seemed to me a hundred thousand 
dogs, but they all sounded much alike, and ihey all made 
me feel one way; I wanted to shoot something right 
away. 
'It's too bad about that deer," said Mr. Bobo. 
"Raphael's running a bear, but if he hear i those others 
he may get jealous and cut over to them, thinking 
they've got his trail closer up. If he does that we're out 
of it. Hallo! here's Henry com? back." 
Old Henry walked deliberately out of the brake, looked 
up in his master's face, wagged an intelligent stump of a 
tail, and then taking his accustomed place at the heels of 
his master's horse, curled himself up for a nap. as if to 
say that he didn't care a cent what those fool puppies 
were doing. 
"Too cold for your nose, eh, Henry? 'said Mr. Bobo, 
and resumed his listening. "It looks bad for us," said he, 
"unless the boys can get the dogs over on to Raphael's 
trail. He's running the bear still, don't you hear?" 
It was all my ears could do to catch the faint "ow! ow! 
ow-ow!' ' which was dying off in the distance, but Mr. 
Bobo knew which way the dog was going, and apparently 
what he was thinking about. I began to see something 
about where the skill in this sort of bear hunting was. It 
wasn't in the shooting, by a long ways. 
Mr. Bobo and 1 sat on our horses at the tram for nearly 
and one by one for an hour the panting dogs came crawl- 
ing in on the tram road out of the cane. Mr. Bobo was 
chagrined. "It wouldn't happen once in a hundred 
times," said he, "but I think they've lost the right trail, 
on account of the young dogs, and the deer divided the 
pack leaving Raphael alone. We mightas well goon." 
So we went on, passing. along deer trails between great 
bodies of cane, down winding, dry bayou bfds, through 
faint "hacks" (or trails cut through the cane) around and 
around, every way, till it puzzled me to tell what direc- 
tion we had had or were about to have. It was plain to 
me that his was the easiest country to get lost in I had 
ever seen. Road, there was none. We simply were thread- 
ing the brakes at the only thin places. Miss those, and— 
well, I don't know what then. But Mr. Bobo kept on 
with the instinct of the natural woodsman and the knowl- 
edge of the blind ways of the wilderness which years in 
these same woods had given him. The rest of us didn't 
know where we were going, only I knew I wasn't going 
to catch any train that night, sure. 
THE SUNFLOWER WILDERNESS. 
A couple of hours before dark we came out into open 
woods, and on the left could see the dark and sluggish 
waters of the Sunflower River. This stream was deep and 
narrow, and lay at the bottom of a great trough cut 
deep down into the allurium of that ancient valley. As 
we skirted along its banks, the surface of the water 
seemed a hundred feet below us, and we must have 
scrambled down that far from the top of the bluff to the 
point where we made our fording of the stream. 
It was a pretty picture, that one at the ford. The deep 
banks, shaded thick with its many tints of green, were lit 
up by the evening sun which made bright the broken 
water. The horsemen, each with a rifle across his saddle 
bow, were scattered from one bank to the other of the 
stream. Upon the further bank one raised a horn to his 
lips and. called long and loud to the dogs, some of which 
hesitated about taking to the water. A long line of swim- 
ming hounds crossed the river, while some were upon the 
further shore shaking themselves, many others, pursued 
by the whippers-in, ran up and down the hillier side of 
the stream crying to be carried over and afraid to make 
the plunge. A more spirited hunting scene would be hard 
to find than that presented us here in the heart of the 
great Sunflower wilderness, and I thought at the time 
that the artist who could paint it could achieve a lasting 
fame. 
TIMBER POR BEAR. 
"We are now," said Mr. Bobo,"getting into the wildest 
country in the Mississippi valley. Below here I can show 
you a strip of country 40 miles by 60 or 75 miles, without 
a house on it, and it is full of game. All this land is as rich 
as any that lives out of doors, and some day it will be 
farmed, I suppose, though I hope I will never see that day. 
The valuable timber is just beginning to attract attention, 
and the first of the logging operations are now going on. 
The great market for this timber is in Europe, and a 
European firm is now operating below here. The finest 
ash timber in the world is in these bottoms, and no better 
oak ever grew than you see around you in these woods. 
Eventually the gum wood will come to be used for furni- 
ture and other purposes, and is a wood not yet appreciated 
as it will be. Very much of the European demand is for fine 
oak staves for use in wine casks. A stave piece of oak four 
feet long and eight inches wide, cut with the proper curve 
and about four inches thick, is worth $1.80 for each piece 
as it lies here on the ground, and it has to go all the 
way to Europe by water down the Sxmflower to the 
railroad and. thence out. This timber industry is one 
which will grow. As it does grow, the game will get more 
and more crowded out. It is not so abundant now as it 
once was, but it will be a long time before it is killed out 
ON THE TRAIL. 
Ready to Break Camp After a Snowstorm. 
two hours, and still the chase did not head our way. 
Horace and Frank came back, bringing a number of the 
dogs. They had seen a big buck lying within two feet of 
them behind a log, but obeyed orders and did not shoot. 
They reported that the colored boys had gone up to the 
head of the break, to try to turn the dogs there. After a 
while Bill came back, and said he heard"cane a-poppin' 
ahead of Raphel," and he thought it was the bear.^ 
Finally Raphael seemed to have headed over to some^ of 
the younger dogs, and the chase frayed out into nothing 
definite. Then everybody blew lustily^ upon his horn, 
You may say that from here down to Vicksburg, and 
all along theHatchee bottom is a big hunting ground yet. 
BEAR WISDOM. 
"I suppose you know that a bear is bound to go where 
the feed is. They will travel any distance to get to feed. 
All this in here is bear country. In the summer time 
the bear can get plenty of feed all over the country, poke 
berries and pawpaws, and all that sort of thing, up 
to about October. Then its summer feed dies down, and 
the bear'go on to the mast, acorns and nuts. If there is 
