Fifty Years a Hunter and Trapper: Autobiography, experiences and observations of Eldred Nathaniel Woodcock during his fifty years of hunting and trapping.Woodcock, E. N. (Eldred Nathaniel)
General
Fifty Years a Hunter and Trapper: Autobiography, experiences and observations of Eldred Nathaniel Woodcock during his fifty years of hunting and trapping.
Woodcock, E. N. (Eldred Nathaniel)
Hunting; Trapping
As it was too late in the day to do any more with the old doe, we
concluded to go to Mr. Foster's and stay over night, and take the
trail early in the morning. It was snowing a little and we thought
that the thicket would be an easy place to find our game, should it
snow enough to cover the tracks. In the morning when we got up, we
found six or eight inches of snow on the ground, that had fallen
during the night. We had an early breakfast, and started out to again
play the game with the broken legged doe.
Before we got to the edge of the woods, we struck the trail of some
animal, that had gone across the field in the early part of the night
before it had snowed much. We were not positive what sort of an
animal it was, whether man or beast. The trail was leading straight
across the field without a curve in it, and was making straight to a
laurel patch that was one and a half miles away on the Taggart farm,
less than a mile below Coudersport.
Mr. Dingman said that it was a bear. I admitted that it was a bear
all right, but replied that I would say it was making for the
Adirondack Mountains in New York, rather than the laurel patch on the
Taggert farm. We did not have far to go to make sure, and a good part
of the distance was across farms, so we concluded to hunt bear a
while, and give the old doe a rest for a short time. As Mr. Dingman
said, the bear made straight for the laurel patch.
There was not more than 15 or 20 acres in the patch, so we thought
that we would circle it and make sure that the bear was still in the
laurel. We found that the bear was there all right, so Mr. Dingman
selected a place where he thought the bear would come out when he was
routed from his nest, while I was to follow the trail and drive out
the bear. I followed until near the center of the patch, when I came
onto a small open place forty or fifty feet square. This open space
was covered with a heavy growth of wild grass which partly held the
snow from getting close to the ground, and I could see the trail of
the bear through this grass and loose snow very plain until nearly
the opposite side of the open space, and there I could see a bunch of
snow. I was sure that it was the bear that made the bunch.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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