1990 
43 
A Honeymoon With Three Bears 
Uncle Jimmy Spencer, an old hunter 
of Powell Mountain, has had over 80 
years’ experience as a hunter and trap¬ 
per in the forests and along the streams 
of the Alleghany Mountains in Virginia 
and West Virginia, and is to-day as 
straight as an arrow and as hardy as one 
of the mighty oaks under whose 
branches he has slain hundreds of wild 
animals, and whose leafy umbrage has 
sheltered him from the storms of Winter 
and heat of Summer. A short time ago 
I stopped a few days with Uncle Jimmy 
and, as heavy rains made it impossible 
to travel, I passed the time around the 
pleasant fire of an old-fashioned fire¬ 
place, listening to the old hunter’s 
stories of his experiences, and making 
mental notes of many of the most in¬ 
teresting. One story which he told of 
his early married life struck me as par¬ 
ticularly unique and interesting, and I 
will give it just as it came from the lips 
of the old man himself. 
“It was ’way Lack in the early ’40s, 
when these woods war alive with the 
finest game in the world, that I settled 
down on this spot. My wife and I had 
been married only about a week, and we 
were looking around for a suitable spot 
on which to build our future home, it 
is true that I’ve always been a hunter, 
but, then, I always had a hankering for 
a home—some place in which I could de¬ 
pend upon comfortable shelter and a 
resting place during warm weather, 
when there was no hunting to be done, 
and during the cold blisis of our moun¬ 
tain Winters. Well, we arrived here, 
after several days’ search, and brought 
with us all our earthly possessions, 
which consisted of a bed and bedstead, a 
few kitchen utensils and inree or four 
split bottom chairs. There wa’n’t a 
stove within 30 miles, and for that mat¬ 
ter there’s not very many much nearer 
now. As soon as we got here I un¬ 
hitched the horses ana tied them up un¬ 
der a tree and, while Nancy was getting 
dinner, I began work in cutting down 
trees with which to build our cabin. By 
the evening of the second day i had cut 
enough logs to make a small, one- 
roomed cabin as a beginning. The next 
morning I started out on a hunt for 
fresh meat, thinking that I would be 
able to get a deer in the course of an 
hour; but, somehow, tne deer seemed 
mighty wild, and I didn’t get a shot for 
a couple of hours after I left camp, when 
I knocked over a fine doe. As soon as 
possible I was on my way back with the 
deer swung over my shoulders and along 
I went leisurely until I got within a 
couple of hundred yards of camp, when 
I heard somebody screaming and yelling 
for me. I listened only long enough to 
find out that the screaming came from 
the camp, when I dropped the doe and 
broke into a run, and it didn’t take me 
long to reach camp, I tell you, and what 
do you suppose I found when I got 
there? It was a comical sight; and if I 
hadn’t been afraid that something seri¬ 
ous might happen I'd a had to lay down 
and laugh. There was the camp, sure 
enough, and there were two big black 
bears right in the middle of it, but where 
the dickens was Nancy? The darned 
bears was a upsetting everything and 
pokin’ their noses into every corner of 
the sled. One of ’em tossed up a bed- 
quilt and it fell over the head of the 
other, an’ then there was a scramble to 
git out. Both of the bears was enjoyin’ 
their fun. Then one of them knocked a 
basket out of the sled and, as it went 
rollin’ down hill, the other ran after it 
an’ hit it a clip, knockin’ the basket 10 
feet into the bush, spatterin’ eggs all 
’round. About this time I saw that thar 
was somethin’ up in the tree close by the 
sled, and that somethin’ looked to me 
very much like a badly skeered woman. 
I didn’t have ter look a second time, for 
the object give a scream and yelled: 
‘Hurry up, Jim, there’s a big bear climb¬ 
in’ up the tree.’ 
THE RURAL NEW-YORKER: 
"Sure enough, just then I saw the big 
black head of a tremendous bear just 
risin’ ’bove the limb away out on which 
Nancy was a settin’ holdin’ on an’ yellin’ 
like a house afire. I soon got a bead on 
the bear’s head,- an’ shot him an’ down 
he tumbled. The bear wa’n’t killed, but 
he was hurt too bad to get away, and 
I turned my attention to the others. 
There wa’n’t no breech-loaders in them 
days, an’ I had to reload my gun, which 
it didn’t take me long to do. When I 
had rammed home the bullet and primed 
the gun I took aim at one of the bears 
on the ground and let him have it, but 
I must have been a little excited, I guess, 
for I only shot off the end of his nose. 
The bear give a roar of rage an’ pain an’ 
come gallopin’ right at me, an’ I didn’t 
have time to reload or git out of the way, 
an’ as the bear got on his hind feet right 
in front of me I took him a whack on the 
head an’ knocked him down on all fours, 
but he was up quick as litnin’ an’ at me 
again. I give him a ripper over the 
eyes an’ he struck me a belt on the side 
which nearly knocked the wind out of 
me. Just then old Caesar, my dog, who 
had been out huntin’ on his own hook, 
come runnin’ through the brush an’ with 
a yell caught the bear by a hind leg. 
Olu Caesar, mebby, saved me from gif¬ 
tin' wiped out, for it give me a minit’s 
time—just enough to inrow in a charge 
of powder an’ drop in a wet bullet, with¬ 
out waddin’. I throwed open the pan 
an’ dropped in a few grains of powder 
an’ brought the gun to my face just as 
the third bear come up to his comrade’s 
assistance. One good shot behind the 
foi’eleg an’ he was my meat. By this 
time the bear Caesar had tackled had 
knocked the old dog 10 feet away an’ 
was cornin’ agin. We had skirmished, 
fust an’ last, over considerable groun’, 
an' when the bear come up I found my¬ 
self in front of the fire Nancy had built 
before the bears chased her up the tree. 
In less’n a second I had a firebrand in 
my hand, an’ when the bear got up I 
just jammed that hot brush into his 
face. Jerusalem, jimminy! how that 
bear did growl an' sneeze! He’d got it 
hot, an’ it must have burnt him bad, for 
he laid down an’ rolled over an’ over 
an’ yelled an’ whined while ole Cese 
chawed him, first on one leg an’ then on 
the t’other. Of course I didn’t wait to see 
how it would wind up between ’em, but 
began to load my gun as fast as I 
could. Before I was done, howsomever, 
Nancy jumped down out of the tree an’ 
picked up the ax, an’ Great Scott! how 
that woman did light into that bear! 
She hit him over the head an’ then 
whacked him on the foreleg, nearly cut- 
tin’ it off; an’ then she hit him on the 
neck, an’ I do believe if I hadn’t yelled 
to her to stop she’d have made sausage 
meat of him before she’d have let up. 
She was the maddest woman I ever saw, 
an’ I really believe if I had joked her 
then ’bout bein’ so badly skeered she’d 
have given me a lick or two, wouldn t 
you. Mother?” said Uncle Jimmy, turn¬ 
ing toward the old lady, who laughed 
and replied: 
“Now, Father, I thought you promised 
never to tell that story again.” 
“Well, I won’t,” said the old man. 
“Well, there were three bears, all of ’em 
dead; but you should -ave seen the muss 
things were in. There wa’n’t a bedquilt 
in the lot big enough to cover old Caesar, 
an’ beside, the bears had knocked and 
banged most everything else into smith¬ 
ereens. We had to make tue best of it, 
though, an’ so we went to work an’ 
skinned an’ dressed the bears an’ the 
doe, which I had brung in, an’ hung ’em 
up in the trees. We then got supper an’ 
went to bed in the sle~, after buildin’ up 
a big fire. In a couple of days after the 
rumpus we had finisned our cabin an’ 
moved in, after which Nancy began to 
feel safe, but it was a mighty long time 
before Mother could bear to hear any¬ 
thing said about our first day in camp.” 
—Brooklyn Eagle. 
A Crop of Boys and Girls. 
To have a family and no means of sup 
port is a serious predicament, says E. S. 
Martin, in Harper’s Magazine, and it is 
not bettered by the fact that the family 
i3 large. A family with a bad physical 
or mental inheritance, or in the hands of 
incompetent parents, is not likely to be 
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one of the very best things going. The 
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