ter, and
sufficiently cool, will use every effort to strike him there. A blow
upon the snout has often caused the black bear to let go his hold, and
retreat terrified!

The log trap is sometimes tried with success. This is constructed in
such a way that the removal of the bait operates upon a trigger, and a
large heavy log comes down on the animal removing it--either crushing it
to death or holding it fast by pressure. A limb is sometimes only
caught; but this proves sufficient.

The same kind of trap is used throughout the northern regions of America
by the fur trappers--particularly the sable hunters and trappers of the
white weasel (_Mustela erminea_). Of course that for the bear is
constructed of the heaviest logs, and is of large dimensions.

Redwood related an adventure that had befallen him while trapping the
black bear at an earlier period of his life. It had nearly cost him his
life too, and a slight halt in his gait could still be observed,
resulting from that very adventure.

We all collected around the blazing logs to listen to the trapper's
story.

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO.

THE TRAPPER TRAPPED.

"Well, then," began Redwood, "the thing I'm agoin' to tell you about,
happened to me when I war a younker, long afore I ever thought I was a
coming out hyar upon the parairas. I wan't quite growed at the time,
though I was a good chunk for my age.

"It war up thar among the mountains in East Tennessee, whar this child
war raised, upon the head waters of the Tennessee River.

"I war fond o' huntin' from the time that I war knee high to a duck, an'
I can jest remember killin' a black bar afore I war twelve yeer old. As
I growed up, the bar had become scacer in them parts, and it wan't every
day you could scare up such a varmint, but now and then one ud turn up.

"Well, one day as I war poking about the crik bottom (for the shanty
whar my ole mother lived war not on the Tennessee, but on a crik that
runs into it), I diskivered bar sign. There war tracks o' the bar's
paws in this mud, an' I follered them along the water edge for nearly a
mile--then the trail turned into about as thickety a bottom as I ever
seed anywhar. It would a baffled a cat to crawl through it.

"After the trail went out from the crik and towards the edge o' this
thicket, I lost all hopes of follerin' it further, as the ground was
hard, and covered with donicks, and I couldn't make the tracks out no
how. I had my idea that the