or hugged to death for their pains. The curs yelp
after him, bite his rump, and make him tree, where
he can be shot. The bear of Canada is seldom
dangerous. He is always ready to enter into a
treaty, similar to what my Lord Brougham negotiated
lately with Lord Londonderry, viz. let-be for
let-be—but if wounded, he is dangerous in
the extreme. You should always, therefore, hunt
him in couples, and have a shot in reserve, or a goodly
cudgel, ready to apply to the root of his nose, where
he is as vulnerable as Achilles was in the heel.
Some ludicrous stories are told of bear-hunting; for
Bruin is rather a humorist in his way. A friend
of mine, with his surveying party, ten men in all,
once treed a very large one; they immediately cut
clubs, and set to work to fell the tree. Bruin
seemed inclined to maintain his position, till the
tree began to lean, when he slid down to about fifteen
feet from the ground, and then clasped his fore-paws
over his head and let himself tumble amongst them.
Every club was raised, but Bruin was on the alert;
he made a charge, upset the man immediately in front,
and escaped with two or three thumps on the rump,
which he valued not one pin. When once they have
killed a pig, if you do not manage to kill the bear,
you will never keep one hog; for they will come back
till they have taken the last of them;—they
will even invade the sacred precincts of the hog-sty.
An Irishman in the Newcastle district once caught a
bear flagrante delicto, dragging a hog over
the walls of the pew. Pat, instead of assailing
the bear, thought only of securing his property; so
he jumped into the sty, and seized the pig by the tail.
Bruin having hold of the ears, they had a dead pull
for possession, till the whillilooing of Pat, joined
to the plaintive notes of his protege, brought
a neighbour to his assistance, who decided the contest
in Pat’s favour by knocking the assailant on
the head.—A worthy friend of mine, of the
legal profession, and now high in office in the colony,
once, when a young man, lost his way in the woods,
and seeing a high stump, clambered up it with the
hope of looking around him. While standing on
the top of it for this purpose, his foot slipped, and
he was precipitated into the hollow of the tree, beyond
the power of extricating himself. Whilst bemoaning
here his hard fate, and seeing no prospect before
him, save that of a lingering death by starvation,
the light above his head was suddenly excluded, and
his view of the sky, his only prospect, shut out by
the intervention of a dense medium, and by and by
he felt the hairy posteriors of a bear descend upon
him. With the courage of despair he seized fast
hold of Bruin behind, and by this means was dragged
once more into upper day. Nothing, surely, but
the instinct of consanguinity could have induced Bruin
thus to extricate his distressed brother.
* * * * *