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

the outline of a large lump in the fork of the tree, and aiming by guess-work, he fired. He missed, but the bear obliged by venturing out onto a limb where Crockett could see him better and he reloaded fast and fired again. He didn’t see the bear drop so he began a third reloading. Suddenly there was the bear, down on the ground with the dogs all about him in a snarl of teeth and claws. Crockett was too close for comfort, so he pulled out his big butcher knife as protection and waited while the roaring roll and tumble of flesh and fur went on and on, his one white dog showing as an occasional flash amid the brown and black of the bear and other dogs, the whirl of animals coming at times within a rifle length of Crockett.
    Finally the dogs forced the bear into a large crevasse in the earth and Crockett could tell “the biting end of him by the hollering of my dogs.” He pushed his rifle into the crack, felt around, and when he thought he had it pressed against the bear’s body he fired, but he only wounded its leg, and the bear, injured and enraged, broke from the hollow and went another round with the dogs before they drove him back into the crevasse again. After spearing the bear with a long cut pole, Crockett determined to risk crawling in after him, hoping the bear would remain still long enough for him to “find the right place to give him a dig with my butcher.” He sent the dogs in first to keep the angry bear’s head occupied, and he snuck around behind, placing his hand bravely on the bear’s great rump, feeling for the shoulder. “I made a lounge with my knife, and fortunately stuck him right through the heart; at which he just sank down.”
    Crockett quickly got out of the crack, and when his dogs backed out too, bloody and panting, he knew the bear was finished. It had been a tremendous fight, and now Crockett had the difficult task of getting the massive animal out of the hollow, which he managed with great effort, dragging the bear a few feet at a time until he had him up on the ground and could butcher him. Exhausted, Crockett slumped on the ground to sleep, but his fire was too feeble to warm him, and he was wet through from sweat and the river he’d crossed. Soon he was shivering and shaking, his teeth chattering, his core body temperature plunging dangerously low. He tried to find dry wood to burn but it was all green or wet, and he knew he was in trouble. He began leaping and hollering in the air, hurling himself “into all sorts of motions,” but hypothermia began to set in: “for my blood was now getting cold, and the chills coming all over me.” At last he was so spent that he could barely stand, and he understood that he absolutely must get warmer or else he would perish:
     
So I went to a tree about two feet through, and not a limb on it for thirty feet, and I would climb up it to the limbs, and then lock my arms together around it, and slide down to the bottom again. This would make the insides of my legs and arms feel mighty warm and good. I continued this till daylight in the morning, and how often I clomb up my tree and slid down I don’t know, but I reckon at least a hundred times. 7
     
    His ingenuity having kept him alive, Crockett hung his bear and headed back to camp, where his boy and McDaniel were very happy to see him. They ate breakfast, and Crockett told them about the tough night he’d been through. Then he led them back to retrieve the big bear. McDaniel wanted to see the crack where Crockett had slain the bear with only his knife, and after he looked it over he came out shaking his head and exclaimed that he’d never have gone in there with a wounded bear, not “for all the bears in the woods.” McDaniel would certainly have told that story at taverns, and to visitors, time and time again.
    They concluded this hunting trip by bagging a few more bears, then salting and loading all the meat on their five pack horses and heading home. McDaniel went home with meat enough