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gullies and unruly thickets for hours. Eventually, convinced that the hounds had lost the scent, Roosevelt and Hunger Foote returned to camp on horseback for a late lunch. Collier continued the pursuit, and around three-thirty PM his dogs caught up with an old 235-pound giant. (Collier said that the bear would have weighed 500 pounds but for a drought that had reduced its food supply.) Immediately Collier bugled for the president to take part in the kill; chasing the exhausted bear into a slough or watering hole, the dogs plunged in after it and refused to let up. Before long the pack had surrounded the doomed bear, lunging at it with their fangs and yelping nonstop in a frenzy. Desperate for its life, with the sweep of a mighty forepaw, the bear seized one of the dogs by the neck and crushed it to death. Collier, irate at the loss—and under strict instructions not to kill the bear but to save the first kill for Roosevelt—leaped from his mount to protect his remaining dogs from the attack. As the bear was at bay with the dogs, Collier lurched close enough to strike the bear’s head with a swing of the barrel, stunning the beast. He struck the bear so hard, in fact, that he bent the barrel of his rifle, rendering it useless. With a dog still gnawing at its hind legs, Collier carefully lassoed the bear around the neck and tied it to an oak tree.

Summoned by others with Collier, President Roosevelt and Foote rushed to the slough. The president was dismayed when he took in the gruesome scene: a dog lying dead in the dirt, two others seriously hurt, and a badly stunned, immobile bear tied to a tree, groaning for air. A light rain had become heavier, bringing a chill of evening. The whole scene had a macabre look, or a look of something gone tragically wrong. Seemingly in unison, the hunters cried, “Let the president shoot the bear.” For a second, or perhaps a second and a half, a blank-faced Roosevelt thought about what to do. It was an I-Ching moment: I cannot go backward…I cannot go forward…Nothing serves to further. Humility fell over Roosevelt. To shoot that bear would be akin to rape, a travesty of the sportsman’s ethos. Eventually he shook his head “no” and refused to draw his Winchester. “Put it out of its misery,” he ordered, tossing his knife—a gift from the emperor of Japan—to Parker. “I declined to use that knife,” Parker recalled in 1924, “but John McIlhenny threw his hunting knife, and I used that, sticking the bear under the ribs while the dogs were in front of him.”17

After walking away from the scene, Roosevelt later called the afternoon “a most unsatisfactory experience.”18 At best Roosevelt went through the superficial motions of a good guest but, in truth, he was insulted at the roping stunt. According to Minor Ferris Buchanan, a hesitant Parker, following instructions from Collier, plunged the knife into the bear’s side; but he failed in his effort to kill it in a single stab, and an obliging Collier had to finish the job, on a very angry animal. The bear’s carcass was slung over a horse and brought back to camp by Collier. The whole episode made Roosevelt feel downcast. The bear hunt in the wilderness had turned into an embarrassment.

Hidden for years in the Roosevelt Collection at Harvard University was a photograph of the dead bear strapped to a horse. It is a black eye to Rooseveltian folklore. The president’s great-grandson, Tweed Roosevelt, unearthed the photo in 1989 when he was researching the November 1902 hunt in preparation for an address to the Teddy Bear Society of America, a toy collectors’ group, in Boston. It’s unclear who took the photo—probably Parker. “I told them the truth,” Tweed Roosevelt recalls. “I didn’t gussy it up. There never was a bear cub, and the bear with T.R. wasn’t shot but was knifed to death. They didn’t like hearing it.”19

Nevertheless, by not shooting the bear, Roosevelt stayed true to the “sportsmen’s code,” the aristocratic European tradition. As the historian Louis S. Warren explained in The Hunter’s Game, the code frowned on killing young deer or young bears. Some