All the day, and during the long wintry night, the freezing blasts blew fiercely, and the weather grew more severely cold.  The next morning his friends urged him to remain another day.  They all knew that the water would be frozen over, but not sufficiently hard to bear his weight, and this would add greatly to the difficulty and the danger of his return.  It seemed impossible that any man could endure, on such a day, fording a swollen stream, a mile in breadth, the water most of the way up to his waist, in some places above his head, and breaking the ice at every step.  The prospect appalled even Crockett himself.  He therefore decided to remain till the next morning, though he knew that his family would be left in a state of great anxiety.  He hoped that an additional day and night might so add to the thickness of the ice that it would bear his weight.

He therefore shouldered his musket and again went into the woods on a hunt.  Though he saw an immense bear, and followed him for some distance, he was unable to shoot him.  After several hours’ absence, he returned empty-handed.

Another morning dawned, lurid and chill, over the gloomy forest.  Again his friends entreated him not to run the risk of an attempt to return in such fearful weather.  “It was bitter cold,” he writes, “but I know’d my family was without meat, and I determined to get home to them, or die a-trying.”

We will let Crockett tell his own story of his adventures in going back: 

“I took my keg of powder and all my hunting tools and cut out.  When I got to the water, it was a sheet of ice as far as I could see.  I put on to it, but hadn’t got far before it broke through with me; and so I took out my tomahawk, and broke my way along before me for a considerable distance.

“At last I got to where the ice would bear me for a short distance, and I mounted on it and went ahead.  But it soon broke in again, and I had to wade on till I came to my floating log.  I found it so tight this time, that I know’d it couldn’t give me another fall, as it was frozen in with the ice.  I crossed over it without much difficulty, and worked along till I came to my lodged sapling and my log under the water.

“The swiftness of the current prevented the water from freezing over it; and so I had to wade, just as I did when I crossed it before.  When I got to my sapling, I left my gun, and climbed out with my powder-keg first, and then went back and got my gun.  By this time, I was nearly frozen to death; but I saw all along before me where the ice had been fresh broke, and I thought it must be a bear struggling about in the water.  I therefore fresh-primed my gun, and, cold as I was, I was determined to make war on him if we met.  But I followed the trail till it led me home.  Then I found that it had been made by my young man that lived with me, who had been sent by my distressed wife to see, if he could, what had become of me, for they all believed that I was dead.  When I got home, I wasn’t quite dead, but mighty nigh it; but had my powder, and that was what I went for.”