You see it war when I war young I went to massacree the buffaloes on the head of Little Great Small Deep Shallow Big Muddy River, with my nigger b’y Doughboy, what I give three hundred dollars for. I’d been all day, till now, vagabondizing about the prairie, without seeing an atom of a buffalo, when I seed one grazing in the rushes, on the edge of a pond, and a crusty old batchelder he was. He war a thousand year old at least, for his hide were all kivered with skars, and he had as much beard as would do all the dandies I’ve seen in Broadway for whiskers and mustashes a hull year. His eyes looked like two holes burnt in a blanket, or two bullets fired into a stump; and I see he was a cross cantankerous feller, what coodent have no cumfort of his life bekays he war too quarrelsome. If there’s ennything Davy Crockett’s remarkable for, it’s for his tender feelings, speshally toward dum creturs; and I thort it would be a marcy to take away his life, seeing it war onny a torment to him, and he hadent no right to live, no how. So I creeps toward him like a garter snake through the grass, tralein Kill-devil arter me. I war a going to tickle him a little about the short ribs, jest to make him feel amiable, when out jumps a great bear, as big as Kongress Hall, out of the rushes, and lights upon the old Jew like a grey-winged plover. He only hit him one blow, but that war a side winder. I wish I may be kicked to death by grasshoppers, if he didn’t tare out five of his ribs, and laid his heart and liver all bare. I kinder sorter pitted the old feller when I see him brought to such an untimely eend, and I didn’t somehow think the bear done the thing that war right, for I always does my own skalping, and no thanks to interlopers. So, sez I: “I’m a civil man, Mr. Bear, saving your presence, and I won’t come for to go to give you no insolatious language; but I’ll thank you, when we meet again, not to disremember the old saying, but let every man skin his own skunks.” And with that I insinnivated a ball slap through his hart. By the ghost of the great mammoth of Big Bone Licks, you’d have thort, by the way he nashed his teeth, I’d a spoken sumthing onpleasant to him. His grinders made a noise jest as if all creation war sharpening cross-cut saws by steam-power, and he war down upon me like the whole Missouri on a sand-bar. There’s no more back out in Davy Crockett than thar ar go-ahead with the Bunker Hill Monument, and so I give him a sogdologer over his coco-nut with the barrel of old Kill-devil that sot him a konsidering, and he thort better on it, and sot off after Doughboy as if the devil had kicked him on eend. It’s true Doughboy slipped a ball into his ampersand jest as I struck him; but that war not what turned him; I grinned him out a countenance, so he thort it war safer to make his breakfast on Doughboy than me, which war a thing oncreditable to his taste, seeing I war a white man and he only a nigger.