The bears were very fat and very plenty, and, for that reason, easily treed. Davy said that he asked no favors of the bears, except civility, as he had eight large dogs, as fierce as “painters” (panthers), that no bear could get away from. The hunt near Reelfoot lasted two weeks, and in that time fifteen bears were killed. Davy then went home, afterwards putting in part of his time with the men who were splitting staves and building the boats. He seems to have been something of a capitalist at this time, or he may have been backed by some one’s money. It was in December that he realized that he “couldn’t stand it without another hunt,” and between Christmas and New Years he and his son crossed the lake where the men were working for him, and turned the dogs loose. Before evening he had killed three bears, which they dressed and salted, putting the meat upon a scaffold built of saplings and brush. This was the only way to save it from the ravenous wolves. The meat being safe overhead, Davy and the boy were eating their breakfast, when a number of hunters appeared with fourteen dogs. The animals were in hard luck, for Davy tells us that they were so poor that whenever they indulged in barking they had to lean against the first tree to rest. They fell on the bones left by the other dogs, and after the men had been given some of the meat from the scaffold, Davy “left them and cut out.” The hunting season was usually at an end before the New Year, as the bears holed up when the weather became very cold, and remained hidden until the sap started in the woods. Although they have no food or water, they are just as fat as ever in the spring, but as their cubs are born about the time the old ones appear, the mother bears are not hunted then for the sake of meat or fur. The year in which these adventures took place was warm during December, and as the story of Davy’s hunting near the Obion has been read in a thousand school-rooms in the West, it will be given in as nearly his own words as possible. At this time he was everywhere known as Colonel Davy Crockett, and in the middle of the last century, when each scholar used to bring any book he could get to read from in school, the “History of Colonel Crockett” rivalled in the small boy’s favor the “Life of General Francis Marion.” The part most beloved of the young American was the following, which starts in at the time he left the hungry dogs to gnaw the bones of the bears killed the day before: