FOREST AND STREAM. 
- - i--. r --. 
a great wild here. I have seen poplars seven' foot 
through on these ridges J walnuts, oaks arid chesttluts 
which would be worth more than the land they stood oil 
is, now. I used to kill a good deal of garrie on these 
mountains. I preferred to hunt foxes, and many a race 
I've run them over these hills, red and gray both. Deer 
lived here then, too, but they are all gone now. Squir- 
rels are scarce, varmin — 'coons, 'possums and the like — 
have departed. But I am getting old now. I couldn't 
get many of them even though there were plenty." Pork, 
potatoes, corn and wheat bread, sorghum cane molasses and 
fruit piled the table at dinner time. After dinner he 
showed me a persimmon tree a few rods up the gully on 
my road, and I ate the novel, soft, sweetish fruit with 
relish. Then the road lead me on through Pumpkin 
Valley again*. I thought little more of the ambushes. I 
was pretty well beyond the danger line — if danger there 
had been, which is doubtful. At Cal Cope's I stopped for 
the night, pretty tired with the work I had done, but 
feeling that I'd done as much as possible. 
All the folks were going to revival meeting, so I went 
too. The church was a low, school house-like building 
nearly half a mile away in a clump of trees. Saddle 
horses were hitched along rails and to trees. Within was 
a gossiping gathering of a hundred, which crowded the 
place. Boots, broad-brimmed hats, blue pokes (sunbon- 
nets) were the chief features. It was a clean, bright-eyed, 
cheerful gathering. It was a higher grade of people than 
the court crown — perhaps it would be better to say they 
were in better spirits there than when at court, for many 
of them were of the sort that go to courts as witnesses 
and principals. In fact, when a feud is raging, both 
parties sometimes attend a church like this, and wage a 
battle beyond the church precincts of a Sunday, but not 
in the church. 
Suddenly a voice raised in song, a sharp scuffling ensued, 
and then with a rustle and scrape the congregation settled 
on the long board benches, except two newcomers, who 
stood by the stove to warm their feet first. It was vigor- 
ous, earnest, but not harmonious. A prayer followed. 
Then I discovered the preachers one by one. They were 
the Rev. Trents. One was tall, booted, with gray 
whiskers and mustache, with a bearing of the Ace Jones 
type. This was John Trent. He began to preach in a 
low voice, which increased in volume till it made the 
flames of the lamps — it was "early candlelight" — flicker. 
At this juncture a short, clumsy, brown-whiskered man 
came up from the dimly seen gathering with a thunderous 
"Amen." He walked tip and down across the front, call- 
ing, "Praise the Lord !" in a loud voice, while John 
reared his voice' higher and higher to the thread of his 
discourse upon the text, "I am not ashamed of Jesus." 
■Their enthusiastic sincerity was edifying, and one must 
[needs pay it the respect due to sincerity. The, sermon was 
[simple in its wording — no pompous phrases or high- 
sounding words, but marred for my ears by the repetition 
pf the sound "ah" at the end of various words : 
[ "And — ah the Lord is good — ah. He will save — ah. 
He has the power — ah. Oh, you sinners, repent! Re- 
pent—ah !" 
A tall young man appeared then, towering,' physically, 
above the other two speakers, but there was nothing in 
his bearing, in his words or in his eyes to inspire en- 
thusiasm or confidence. His behavior was that of forced 
rather than forceful enthusiasm. 
Up popped a little old man, white-whiskered and mus- 
tached, through' which his red lips and even eyes seemed 
to force themselves. His eyes were round and inclosed 
in circles. He came down the aisle, thrusting both his 
hands out in front of him, calling aloud. I had to choke 
down a splutter of laughter, for he was "the King" in 
Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn" to the very gestures — 
so far as appearance was concerned. Later the Reverend 
Bob Trent proved to be as sincere as Ho Law Bob Trent 
and John. 
The sisters on the right side and the brothers on the 
left of the pulpit began to rise from their seats with ex- 
clamations and cries. Several came down the line shaking 
hands with everybody. When the Reverend John got 
to me he stopped. 
"You're a stranger, I" reckon?" he said. "B'long to 
any church?" 
"No." 
"You're lost!" he shouted above the din. Oh, Lord, 
save this po' strangah !" 
Here and there the sobbing of a penitent girl or boy ' 
could be heard in a lull of the exclamations. Songs and 
preaching and prayers succeeded one another in rapid 
succession from standing* on their tiptoes to bowing their 
heads to the floor. Suddenly the session came to an end. 
The voices stopped abruptly, leaving my ears humming, 
as they have hummed after a day in an express train. 
We went home to supper. It was 8 o'clock. Three 
hours had passed like an hour. The brown-whiskered 
preacher and "the King" went to Mr. Cope's for the 
night. Like all of Mrs. Cope's and her daughter, Mrs. 
Clara Brown's (a pleasing Avidow) work, it was a fine 
neal of at least six varieties of fruit, two sorts of bread, 
neats and coffee, sweet and sour milk, etc. We ate much 
IVilh great relish, then went to the sitting room. 
"What did I think of their meeting?" I replied that 
my sincere religion deserved respect. What did I be- 
ieve? It was satisfactory "as far as it went," but didn't 
t "feel better after their sort of meeting?" 
Then they began to throw out covert suggestions as 
:o my reformation, till I felt that the equality I had 
found among man hunters was more to my taste. I de- 
fended myself as well as I could by switching the talk to 
neutral heathens — Indians and such like. They had 
never heard that the Indians had held a belief as sincere 
is their own. Their ideas of the old-time barbarians 
were gathered from the Bible untempered by mythology 
md tradition. 
"Ho Law !" said Ho Law Bob at intervals, while "the 
King" sat back in his chair and listened to the broadside 
ibout Iroquois, Yahgan and Greek — all news to them. 
• At 11:30 o'clock I looked at my watch and gasped at 
he hour; 9:30 o'clock is a late hour in that region. I 
Ipologized. 
"We like to hear those things," said the brown-whis- 
icered man. "We have lived here all our lives. We never 
traveled anywhere. We have no education. Our eyes 
JT<? old, so we cannot read very much excepting in our 
3ible, and even there we must stop to rest." 
Mr. Cope took its three upstairs to a large, wood-ceiled 
room. They were reluctant even then to go to bed, but 
drew their chairs around the hearth of the fireplace and 
plied question after question about the people I had 
seen or heard about. 
After breakfast I started for Rogersville, pausing at 
Tip's house, thirty yards from Cope's, to see a "little 
writing" he had. He handed me some letters Ace had 
written while in jail on the charge of murdering Barry. 
He had, too, a diary that he had kept for many months 
while he was "scouting" or hiding on the mountains a 
fugitive. I couldn't get it, but I could copy it. So I 
sat down to copy 15,000 words, and did it. Every day 
had a paragraph— half a page of a z x A by 4 inch note book. 
For instance : 
"Oct. 7, Tuesday (1890), I went up to John Price's and 
me and him went a-hunting. We went over to Quil Mams, 
came back on this side of the mountain. We caught one 
opossum. Came back to John Price's and stayed on night. 
I am at home now. I been here most all day." 
Again : "Oct. io, Friday morning. I left Stoke about 
day. I come up on the mountain. The hounds started a 
fox; run about half an hour. I shot it and came off 
home. I have been home ever since. I don't know where 
I will be next." 
Wherehe ranged, where he stayed, whom he saw was set 
down with a lack of detail, but still comprehensible. 
From Choptack to Jim Wright's, twenty-odd miles, this 
man crept and lurked, seeing pursuers from hilltops, see- 
ing a chicken stolen by a woman, hunting squirrels and 
quail, running foxes, once fleeing by night in his un- 
derwear fcom raiders, sleeping in barns and at friends'. 
Sometimes he was alone, again he had a fellow scouter — 
his brother or one of the other fugitives of his clan, get- 
ting news of his brother Ace through his wife. 
By "candlelight" I was more than two-thirds done, but 
tired out. I went to meeting again that night. One 
girl whose cries for it were clear above the other voices, 
got "religion." Her joy was manifested as her penitence 
had been. She came to a young man, evidently her sweet- 
heart, and prayed for him in a low voice, with her plump 
arms around his neck. He bowed his head, and I fancy 
that he joined her soon in the happy fellowship of the 
hardshell religion. 
Ho Law Bob and the tall preached came to Mr. Cope's 
that night. My exhaustion due to ten hours at the pen 
was mistaken' for the preliminary signs of conversion to 
their belief, but the talk ran to general topics, aside from 
the direct question: 
"Don't you feel better after the meeting to-night?" 
The affirmative caused some sidelong glances of tri- 
umph, and an expression that seemed to say, "If we can 
get him there ain't many we couldn't get, and here he's 
coming !" 
A morning at the pen again, and then I started on for 
Rogersville once more on the steep, short-cut path, which 
was white with snow, as was the long wooded ridge over 
which it led, tired out mentally, but not unhappy. 
Raymond S. Spears. 
♦ 
The Siberian Mammoth. 
Prof. Henz, of the St. Petersburg Zoological Museum, 
who discovered last September near the Ebrosowka, 
Siberia, the remains of a mammoth, states in a recent 
letter sent from' Snedni Salymsk, Siberia, that the mam- 
moth is on the road to St. Petersburg on a 100-pack 
sledge escorted by a troop of Cossacks, and will probably 
reach its destination about the first of May. It is un- 
doubtedly the most perfect specimen ever discovered. 
He describes his great find as follows : 
"Above all, it is all there; for, while the bears and 
wolves tore some of the minor bones from their moorings, 
they were powerless or unwilling to carry them off. I 
am certain I got away with all the bones, being more 
fortunate in that respect than Mr. Adams, whose fossil 
mammoth, now in the Imperial Museum, lacks one hind 
foot. Aside from the bones, I collected enough of the 
flesh and coat to allow the most thorough scientific inves- 
tigation. I believe that it is the most perfect specimen 
of fossil flesh and skin ever shown in a scientist's labora- 
tory, and after our authorities have passed on it we will 
be able to decide, approximately, at least, whether the 
story that the Alaska Indians greased their boats with 
mammoth fat attached to a skeleton found on the bank 
of the Yukon can be credited or not. I say right here 
that it is not impossible, even though I found no traces 
of fat on or about the carcass I dug up myself. 
"I secured large portions of the skin of this monster, 
aside from that attached to the one' perfect leg— the 
fragments show that the creature was so clothed as to 
be able to withstand the utmost cold — that does away with 
the theory that the bones were swept to this place by the 
deluge. The hairy coat is extremely thick, thicker than 
that on the neck of a bull buffalo. Its average length 
is seven inches, but the mane must have been five or six 
times as long. It is thicker than horse hair, of dark 
brown color, lighter at the hoofs. At that point, too, it 
grows luxuriously, as is sometimes the case with horses 
of coarse breed. 
"The hair described belongs to the outer coat and is 
stiff and wiry, calculated to throw off wet and wind. 
Under this grows a wool, very closely, and from five to 
ten centimeters thick. Like the covering of a young 
camel, the wool is of a light yellow color. It would be 
impossible for an animal so protected to feel even the 
extremest cold. 
"Up to now we had absolutely nothing to guide us in 
searching for the period when the mammoth became ex- 
tinct, particularly as regards Siberia and North America, 
where the theory that this giant was exterminated by 
early man obviously doesn't apply, as in both hemispheres 
there were, and are, vast territories never trodden by 
man's foot. I am now inclined to think that the mam- 
moth perished of starvation, when overtaken by a period 
of ice and flood. This, however, did not happen to my 
mammoth, as we will presently see. 
"As already stated, foxes, bears and wolves relieved me 
of the necessity of carting away the greater poftsoii of 
flesh and skm, but, happily, they left the stomach undis- 
turbed, permitting me to secure this important organ in- 
tact Seeing that, curiosity got the best of me-— I 
couldn t resist the tempatioh to investigate. Let scien- 
tists rejoice; the stomach is full of undigested food— now 
we will learn positively whether or not the mammoth 
could live in prehistoric Siberia, Europe, and North 
America. The food in the stomach will settle the ques- 
tion once and for all. It is very considerable in quantity, 
and more is found on the tongue and between the teeth' 
"My mammoth undoubtedly died during the pleasant 
occupation of feeding. He probably rolled off a preci- 
pice while reaching out for a coveted branch or plant, 
the position of his forelegs shows that almost to a cer- 
tainty The left one is bent into a semi-curve, indicating 
that the ponderous and unwieldy animal tried in vain to 
climb upward, while his right foot was struggling to 
maintain a hold, but the soil or rock, presumably was 
slippery or . too steep to afford a safe foothold for so 
large a beast. In gliding down the mountainside, the 
animal s hmd legs were forced into a horizontal position 
and got under his body, which circumstance made it 
completely impossible for the mammoth to raise himself 
by his own efforts. 
"The impromptu grave into which the animal plunged 
was made of sand and clay, and his fall probably caused 
masses of neighboring soil to loosen and cover him 
completely. This happened in the late fall, or at the be- 
ginning of winter, to judge by the vegetable matter found 
in the stomach; at any rate, shortly afterward the grave 
became flooded, ice following. This completed the cold 
storage, still further augmented by vast accumMlations 
of soil all around— a shell of ice, hundreds of feet thick 
inclosed by yards upon yards of soil, that remained frozen 
for the greater part of the year. Thus the enormous 
carcass was preserved for how long no one knows. 
"As to measurements, exact figures cannot be' given 
at the present time. I am inclined to think that my mam- 
moth, when mounted, will exceed in height the most 
famous specimens known, that at St. Petersburg and the 
other in Chicago. The first measures 9 feet 3 inches the 
latter 9 feet 8 inches." 
The Guilty 'Possum. 
Long Island City, April 14.— Editor Forest and 
Stream: In reply to your inquiry, in last week's Forest 
and Stream, whether the opossum eats poultry or game 
birds, I beg to say that I know of one instance where a 
'possum that had been kept as a pet by a saloon keeper 
got loose, and in a night killed fifteen or twenty fowl and 
ducks. The poultry shed was in the rear of a- private 
school, which I attended. One morning, while some 
other boys and I were waiting for school to open, we 
heard a noise in the poultry house. We opened the door 
and saw the floor strewn with feathers and dead birds. 
We entered, and from a dark corner jumped an animal, 
which made for the door and escaped over the fence. 
Some of us had seen the saloon keeper's 'possum and 
recognized the animal that ran out of the shed as one 
like it. It was subsequently caught in the neighborhood 
and returned to its owner. ' There had been fifteen, or 
twenty chickens and ducks in the shed, the owner told 
us. and every one had been killed. Some had been torn 
to pieces ; others had their heads torn off, and some merely 
had their throats torn open. This happened twenty years 
ago, but I remember the gory sight that met our view, and 
the scare the 'possum gave us when he made his break 
for liberty, as if it were only a month ago that it hap- 
pened. There was no chance for a mistake being made in 
identifying the animal, as we had a good opportunity to 
observe it as it ran across the yard and scrambled over a 
high board fence. 
Two or three years ago several geese were killed near 
here under circumstances that led me to believe that a 
'possum was guilty. It was at night, and the owner of 
the geese, who heard the noise and went out to see what 
the trouble was, saw a large, dark-colored animal climb- 
ing over the fence. As 'possums are plentiful in the 
neighborhood, and I know of no other animal- existing in 
the vicinity that would be likely to do such a deed, it is 
probable that Mr. 'Possum was the guilty one in this 
instance also. w. F. H. 
New Iberia, La. — Editor Forest and Stream: In reply 
to Didelphys' question about the opossum eating chickens, 
I wish to state that I have caught them quite often in my 
hen house at night. 
After killing one or two fowls and eating the best 
part, they leave as quietly as they came, but will return 
again until every fowl is killed. You are quite right about 
Hie opossum being a very slow-moving animal, and that 
it could never catch a chicken in the daytime, and their 
resorting to night to do their prowling. One strange thing 
is that they never make any attempt to escape when dis- 
covered, but stay blinking at the light as if charmed. 
They grow very large, sometimes weighing 9 pounds. 
I have heard of some weighing more, but have never 
seen any. L. F. LallaNde. 
Editor Forest and Stream: 
As a sufferer from the deceptive, sly and omnivorous 
'possum, I wish to give some testimony in support of the 
indictment against him in Forest and Stream of April 
12. I have had many years' experience with this animal, 
and will state a few facts in regard to his bad habits. 
Once on a time I was a chicken fancier, and had birds 
which cost me all the way from two to ten or more dol- 
lars. When the beautiful light Brahma was my then 
pet, I had quite a large flock, of which I was missing one 
or two night after night. The door of their house had a 
square opening into the yard, through which only small 
animals could squeeze themselves. But my fowls began 
to disappear, and some were found dead in the house, so 
much so that I -.went on the watch. One night there 
was a row in the house, and with a lantern I went to in- 
vestigate. Nothing wrong appeared, and I was at a loss 
to determine what was the matter. The fowls for want of 
ability to fly had perches near the floor, and in one 
corner of the house I found the fowls crowded together, 
Examining the cause of it, I found a 'possum on the 
