“The season for bar-hunting, stranger,” said the man of Arkansaw, “is generally all the year round, and the hunts take place about as regular. I read in history that varmints have their fat season, and their lean season. That is not the case in Arkansaw: feeding as they do upon the _spontenacious_ productions of the sile, they have one continued fat season the year round: though in winter, things in this way is rather more greasy than in summer, I must admit. For that reason, bar with us run in warm weather, but in winter they only waddle. Fat, fat! it’s an enemy to speed; it tames everything that has plenty of it. I have seen wild turkeys, from its influence, as gentle as chickens. Run a bar in this fat condition, and the way it improves the critter for eating is amazing; it sort of mixes the ile up with the meat, until you can’t tell t’other from which. I’ve done this often. I recollect one perty morning in particular, of putting an old he fellow on the stretch, and considering the weight he carried, he run well. But the dogs soon tired him down, and when I came up with him, wasn’t he in a beautiful sweat—I might say fever; and then to see his tongue sticking out of his mouth a feet, and his sides sinking and opening like a bellows, and his cheeks so fat he couldn’t look cross. In this fix I blazed at him, and pitch me naked into a briar patch if the steam didn’t come out of the bullet-hole ten foot in a straight line. The fellow, I reckon, was made on the high-pressure system, and the lead sort of bust his biler.” “That column of steam was rather curious, or else the bear must have been _warm_,” observed the foreigner, with a laugh. “Stranger, as you observe, that bar was _warm_, and the blowing off of the steam show’d it, and also how hard the varmint had been run. I have no doubt if he had kept on two miles farther, his insides would have been stewed; and I expect to meet with a varmint yet of extra bottom, who will run himself into a skinful of bar’s grease: it is possible; much onlikelier things have happened.” “Whereabouts are these bears so abundant?” inquired the foreigner, with increasing interest.