American Legend: The Real-Life Adventures of David Crockett Read Free Page A

hunt,” he admitted. The hunt coursed through his veins, so he took one of his younger sons (either Robert Patton, nine, or William, sixteen), with or without Elizabeth’s complete blessing, and headed out for a long hunt. The hunt proved notable because during this winter, in an oft-told story, he killed a massive bear with nothing but a knife.
    One day early in the winter hunt, Crockett came across a downtrodden fellow who he described as “the very picture of hard times.” The man bent over a rough field, hacking away with a heavy implement and trying to clear the ground of roots, stumps, and boulders in a process called “grubbing.” Crockett stopped to chat with him, and commiserating when the other informed him that it wasn’t even his field; he was grubbing for another man, the owner, to get money to buy meat for his family. Crockett struck a deal with the man: if he would go with Crockett and his son and help pack and salt the slain bears, Crockett would provide the man with more meat than he could earn in a month of this backbreaking grubbing. The man retired to his rustic cabin, conferred with his wife, then reappeared with her blessing, and off they went. They killed “four very large fat bears that day,” and in the course of only a week added seventeen more. Crockett relates that he quite happily gave the man “over a thousand weight of fine fat bear-meat,” pleasing both the man and his wife, and when he saw him again the next fall, he learned that the meat had lasted him out the entire year.
    Crockett and his son later hooked up with a neighbor named McDaniel, who also needed a good supply of meat. They struck out to likely ground between Obion Lake and Reelfoot Lake, the brambly “harricane” country some of Crockett’s most coveted and productive, the strewn and tangled timber providing perfect cover for the animals. They followed ridges dense with cane, peering inside the hollows of black oaks in search of hiding bears, using Crockett’s wily techniques of finding treed bears by noting the differentiation of scratch marks on a tree bark. On the third day Crockett and McDaniel left the young boy in camp and headed deep into the cane, but found the going slow “on account of the cracks in the earth occasioned by the quakes.” The deep troughs and fissures forced them to go around in places, and soon they met a bear coming straight at them, and Crockett sent his dogs off and they howled in pursuit. Crockett remembered this bear well, noting that “I had seen the tracks of the bear they were after, and I knowed he was a screamer.” Crockett kept hotly after the bear, the foliage so tight in places that he was reduced to traveling his hands and knees: “The vines and briars was so thick that I would sometimes have to crawl like a varment to get through at all.”
    In time he managed to scramble through, and he found that his dogs had treed the bear in an old dead stump, and shaking with fatigue Crockett just managed to shoulder his rifle and bring the bear down. With McDaniel’s help they butchered and salted the bear, “fleecing off the fat” as they skinned the animal and packed the prepared meat on horses. They rode when they could, but mostly they walked, and they reached the camp around sunset. Crockett called out and his son answered, and as they moved in the direction of camp, the dogs opened up again, baying into the sunset. Never one to forgo a fresh chase, Crockett handed his reins to McDaniel and trotted off after his hounds into the darkening skies.
    The night fell fast under the canopy of cane and Crockett stumbled along, bashing his shins on fallen logs and falling into clefts in the earth left by the quakes. He forded a wide cold creek, then broke from the stream bank to scale a severe incline, clawing his way up the hillside. When he made the summit, he located his dogs and found they had treed the bear in the fork of a tall poplar. It was so dark that all he could see was