David Crockett_ The Lion of the West - Michael Wallis [7]
Over the years, he came to understand his quarry and its ways in almost an existential way. He knew adult male bears, or boars, weighed as much as six hundred pounds and females, or sows, usually weighed no more than four hundred pounds. He learned that black bears could live twenty-five years or more and were solitary except during mating time, and that a cub weighed only about as much as an apple when born but quickly grew on its mother’s fat-rich milk. He understood, as his fellow pioneers did, that an angry sow with cubs, just like a “he-bear” when cornered, was a formidable adversary. He never forgot that the only thing predictable about black bears is that they are unpredictable.
Crockett’s remarkable woodsmanship saved his life many times. On a moonless January night in the rough country near Reelfoot Lake, in far western Tennessee, Crockett, thirty-nine, soaked to the bone and freezing, found himself locked in combat with a fully grown black bear. “I made a lounge [sic] with my long knife, and fortunately stuck him right through the heart,” he later explained in his autobiography.2 Exhausted from the struggle, he calmed his pack of panting hounds and managed to pull the bear from the crevice in the frozen ground where they had fought. After butchering the animal, he tried to kindle a fire but could find nothing dry enough to burn. His moccasins, buckskin breeches, and hunting shirt were frozen to his numb body and he knew that unless he kept moving he would die.
“So I got up, and hollered a while, and then I would jump up and down with all my might and throw myself into all sorts of motions,” Crockett wrote. “But all this wouldn’t do; for my blood was now getting cold, and the chills coming all over me. I was so tired, too, that I could hardly walk; but I thought I would do the best I could to save my life, and then, if I died, nobody would be to blame.”3
He found a stout tree about two feet in diameter without any limbs on it for thirty feet. Crockett locked his arms and legs around the trunk and shinned up the tree until he reached the limbs, and then he slid back down to the ground. “This would make the insides of my legs and arms mighty warm and good,” he wrote. “I continued this till daylight in the morning, and how often I clomb [sic] up my tree and slid down I don’t know, but I reckon at least a hundred times.”4
As the sun rose, Crockett set out to find his camp, where one of his sons and another hunting companion waited. After breakfast they salted all the dressed bear meat and secured it atop a high scaffold. Then they followed the dogs into the thick canebrake on the trail of more bear. By his own count, during that seven-month hunting season spanning 1825–1826, Crockett had killed 105 bears, including 47 in just one month.5
Crockett, like the other good hunters of the day, stalked bears by finding tracks fresh enough for dogs to follow and by reading signs. He looked for claw marks or hair on tree bark and checked the freshness of scat to see how long ago the bear had passed through the area. If the scat was dried out and colonized with insects it meant the bear was long gone. Scat also revealed what the bears had eaten. That diet included almost anything: carrion, animal matter, insects, wild honey, snakes, and plenty of vegetation, like squawroot in the spring, berries in the summer, and nuts and acorns in autumn. If the droppings