Sometimes, however, the hunter uses the knife.  General Wade Hampton, who has probably killed more black bears than any other man living in the United States, frequently used the knife, slaying thirty or forty with this weapon.  His plan was, when he found that the dogs had the bear at bay, to walk up close and cheer them on.  They would instantly seize the bear in a body, and he would then rush in and stab it behind the shoulder, reaching over so as to inflict the wound on the opposite side from that where he stood.  He escaped scathless from all these encounters save one, in which he was rather severely torn in the forearm.  Many other hunters have used the knife, but perhaps none so frequently as he; for he was always fond of steel, as witness his feats with the “white arm” during the Civil War.

General Hampton always hunted with large packs of hounds, managed sometimes by himself and sometimes by his negro hunters.  He occasionally took out forty dogs at a time.  He found that all his dogs together could not kill a big fat bear, but they occasionally killed three-year-olds, or lean and poor bears.  During the course of his life he has himself killed, or been in at the death of, five hundred bears, at least two thirds of them falling by his own hand.  In the year just before the war he had on one occasion, in Mississippi, killed sixty-eight bears in five months.  Once he killed four bears in a day; at another time three, and frequently two.  The two largest bears he himself killed weighed, respectively, 408 and 410 pounds.  They were both shot in Mississippi.  But he saw at least one bear killed which was much larger than either of these.  These figures were taken down at the time, when the animals were actually weighed on the scales.  Most of his hunting for bear was done in northern Mississippi, where one of his plantations was situated, near Greenville.  During the half century that he hunted, on and off, in this neighborhood, he knew of two instances where hunters were fatally wounded in the chase of the black bear.  Both of the men were inexperienced, one being a raftsman who came down the river, and the other a man from Vicksburg.  He was not able to learn the particulars in the last case, but the raftsman came too close to a bear that was at bay, and it broke through the dogs, rushed at and overthrew him, then lying on him, it bit him deeply in the thigh, through the femoral artery, so that he speedily bled to death.

But a black bear is not usually a formidable opponent, and though he will sometimes charge home he is much more apt to bluster and bully than actually to come to close quarters.  I myself have but once seen a man who had been hurt by one of these bears.  This was an Indian.  He had come on the beast close up in a thick wood, and had mortally wounded it with his gun; it had then closed with him, knocking the gun out of his hand, so that he was forced to use his knife.  It charged him on all fours, but