268 
FRANK FORESTER^ FIELD SPORTS. 
incidents are, however, uncommon, and rarely take place with 
grown-up men; though children and young lads are not un- 
frequently thus annoyed in the hack settlements. 
In the Northern and Midland States, it cannot he said that the 
Bear is anywhere scientifically hunted. If the haunt of one is 
discovered in the vicinity of any town or village, a levy en masse 
takes place, weapons of all kinds are prepared and polished, 
up, and all the dogs of high and low degree, are forthwith 
pressed into the service ; then after a hurly-burly sort of skir¬ 
mish of perhaps two or three days’ duration, bruin is fairly 
worried to death, and after being shot at by platoons enough to 
decimate an army, he is borne in triumph into the village, and 
his hide displayed as a trophy by the rustic cockneys, who have 
accomplished his “ taking off.” 
Otherwise the woodsmen, and the few who hunt by profes¬ 
sion as it were and for a livelihood, either stumbling on him by 
accident while in pursuit of other game, or falling on his tracks 
and hunting him out with one or two old steady hounds, 
shoot him at a single shot as a matter of business. Occa¬ 
sionally when they have found his watering places, such men 
lie in wait for him in the afternoon, and shoot him from ambush 
to leeward of his path. Still, I may say, that eastward of Loui¬ 
siana, Mississippi, and Arkansas, there is no such thing as Bear¬ 
hunting proper, as a regular sport. Many are killed, it is true, 
to the north-eastward, in New Brunswick and the Canadas, 
many in Hamilton County, Chatauque, and Cataraugus in New 
York, and yet more in Northern and Western Pennsylvania; 
but in all these places the mode of killing them is casual, rather 
than systematic, and for profit rather -than for sport. 
In all the northern regions, the Bear lies up regularly in some 
den among the crags during the winter season, and remains in a 
state of almost total torpidity, which is properly termed hiber¬ 
nation, takes neither food or water until the return of spring. 
It has been vulgarly believed that during this period, the animal 
subsists itself by suction of its own paws. This absurd and fa¬ 
bulous tale has been completely exploded by the researches of 
