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
I thought no more of the bear. I only thought of reaching the wagon
road. I began one of the worst battles of my life, but after a
struggle of three hours I got to the road more dead than alive. But
here fortune favored me for soon after a man by the name of White
(one of the county commissioners who had been in the southern part of
the county on business) came along. He took me home where the doctor
soon got me on my feet again.
I told my oldest brother where he would find the trap, so he took a
man and team and went early the next morning and got the bear all
right. It was four or five days before I felt able again to go into
the woods and look at the traps, but when I did, I found a small
bear, (a cub) dead and the skin nearly worthless. This was 45 years
ago, but I am still working at the same old trade, in a small way.
At another time and previous to the time mentioned, I, with a
partner, was trapping on the headwaters of Pine Creek. We had been in
camp about a week, when one day we had been setting a line of traps
about three miles from camp. It was in November and the weather was
very disagreeable, yet we were hustling for we knew that the snow
would soon be on us, and then we wished to put in all the time we
could hunting deer.
On the day in question Orlando (that was my partner's name) long
before noon was complaining of a bad headache, and said that it
seemed as though every bone in his body ached. I tried to persuade
him to go to camp but he insisted on setting more traps. About three
o'clock in the afternoon he was obliged to give up, and said he would
sit down where he was and wait until I could go further up the stream
and set a couple more traps. I said no, we will go to camp, so we
started. We were about three miles from camp, but Orlando could only
go a few steps when he would be obliged to rest. He soon became so
weak that I could only get him along by partly carrying him. He was
several years younger than I, but he was somewhat heavier, so he was
rather more of a load than I could well manage.
I kept tugging away with him, and about 9 o'clock in the evening I
got him to camp, where I fixed him as comfortable as I could, then I
began a race of about eleven miles to Orlando's father's house. The
distance was about one-half of the way through the woods and it took
me until 12 o'clock to make it, but we soon had a team hitched to the
wagon and were on the way back to the camp where we arrived about 3
o'clock in the morning. We could only get within about one and a
fourth miles of the camp with a wagon, so we had to leave it there
and go on with only the horses. When we got to the camp we found
Orlando no better, so we got him on to one of the horses and by
steadying him the best we could, managed to work our way back home.
We arrived there about 8 o'clock in the morning and found a doctor
already waiting.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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