“I hadn’t gone far when my dogs took a first-rate start after a very large fat old he-bear, which run right plump towards my camp. I pursued on, but the other hunters had heard the dogs coming, and met them and killed the bear before I got up to them. I gave him to them, and cut out for Big Clover Creek, which wasn’t very far off. Just as I got there and was entering a high cane-brake, my dogs all broke and went ahead, and in a little time they raised a fuss in the cane, and seemed to be going every-which-way. I listened a while, and found my dogs was in two companies, and that both was in a snorting fight. I sent my little son to one, and I broke for the other. [The son was nearly eighteen years old.] I got to mine first, and found my dogs had a two-year-old bear down a-wooling away on him, so I just took my butcher, and went up and slapped it into him, and killed him without shooting. There was five of the dogs in my company. “In a short time I heard my little son fire at his bear. When I went to him, he had killed it, too. He had two dogs in his team. Just at this moment we heard my other dog barking a short distance off, and all the rest at once broke to him. We pushed on, too, and when we got there we found that he had a still larger bear than either of them we had killed, treed by himself. We killed that one also, which made three we had killed in less than half an hour.” He then goes on to say that the meat was taken care of as on the day before, and that afterwards he came to where a poor fellow who was the very picture of hard times was grubbing in the ground. “I asked him what he was doing away in the woods by himself. He said he was grubbing [clearing the ground] for a man who intended to settle there, and that he was doing it because he had no meat for his family, and could earn a little. “I was mighty sorry for the poor fellow, for it was not only a hard but a very slow way to get meat for a hungry family, so I told him if he would go with me, I would get him more meat than he could earn by grubbing in a month. I intended to supply him with meat, and also to get him to assist my little boy in salting and packing up my bears. He had never seen a bear killed in his life. I told him I had six killed then, and that my dogs had just gone after another.