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By Root 4302 0

Tensas River forest, but they had been wiped out in the effort to control predators. Only the Louisiana black bears—a threatened species in 2009—remained in the thick tangle of creepers and vines. In the adrenaline rush of the hunt, Roosevelt’s banged-up knees weren’t aching. Eventually the dogs found a she-bear. Leaping up in front of the bear, which was twenty yards away, Roosevelt took aim with his rifle as the animal ran toward him. The shot caught the bear clean in the chest. She moaned as if in surrender or defiance. According to Roosevelt the bear “turned almost broadside” and started walking “forward very stiff-legged, almost as if on tiptoe, now and then looking back at the nearest dogs.” She toppled over “stark dead,” as Roosevelt put it, “slain in the canebreak in true hunter fashion.”57

Dancing a jig, Roosevelt dropped his rifle, pulled Harley Metcalfe off his horse, and gave him a hug. What ecstasy Roosevelt felt at killing a five-foot fully mature she-bear with his 45–70 rifle.58 He had also absorbed the recoil without a bruised shoulder, so the hunt was deemed a complete victory. He talked about it for weeks. Today a lone historical marker commemorating the hunt can be found in the hamlet of Sondheim, Louisiana.

Now the kennel wagon was loaded up. Holt Collier had earned his pay, and he was toasted by the president as an Olympian of the Tensas River. Dr. Lambert apparently took a series of photographs of Roosevelt and Collier on the hunt, but these have never been found. Others have surfaced, however, courtesy of the Parker estate (one shows the men looking like borderland desperados). The press exaggerated the size of the bear, saying that Roosevelt had shot a 375-pound giant; the president said no, it was only 202 pounds. That evening the hunters ate bear steak, with Roosevelt rattling on about his quarry. The president kept an inventory of what his party had shot: the final count was three bears, six deer, and twelve squirrels, and one each of wild turkey, possum, and duck.

And the birding had proved first-class. Long ago John James Audubon had learned what an avian paradise the Louisiana wetlands could be. Audubon had lived in Saint Francisville for on and off twenty-three months from 1821 until 1830, painting eighty of his exquisite folios there. Using Oakley Plantation as his base, Audubon would regularly live among flocks of egrets and herons. In Louisiana, he drew such fine works as Carolina Parrot and Mocking Birds Attacked by Rattlesnakes. Roosevelt had expected to see mockingbirds and half a dozen sparrows perking about in the thick woods and sloughs, but nothing had prepared him for the variety of woodpeckers he observed in the groves of giant cypress. Quite famously in the annals of bird-watching, he recorded seeing three great ivory-billed woodpeckers. And dozens of barred owls “hooted at intervals for several minutes at mid-day”—turning their heads sharply when footsteps were heard. To Roosevelt these owls took on a special mystery at night, their cries seemed “strange and unearthly” like the long hoot of the Southern Pacific headed across the flatlands.59

Roosevelt spent October 20 at the home of a Delta planter. All in all, despite the deprivations, it had been a fine week of hunting and bird-watching. Fully rested, with a bearskin as a memento for a museum, he headed east to Vicksburg, once called the Gibraltar of the Confederacy. Largely owing to the president’s lobbying, the Vicksburg battlefield was being preserved as a 1,800-acre national military park. There was a triumphant procession in the town for the first time since the Civil War, and Roosevelt was given a grand welcome. A new monument was being erected, and the townspeople were excited. Everybody, it seemed, asked Roosevelt about the Louisiana bear hunt—such light conversation helped ease the tension between Democrats and a Republican president. Governor Vardaman of Mississippi, still furious over Roosevelt’s dinner with Booker T. Washington, tried to spoil the special event, which was intended to honor the gallantry of both