e setting from one and a half miles to four miles of the
wagon road, and about nine miles from any house.

The time in question was the last days of October or the first of
November, and the day a very warm one for that time of the year. I
had been walking very fast, in fact where the ground was favorable, I
would take a dog trot. I wished to make the rounds of the traps and
get out of the woods that day. When I came to where the second trap
had been set, I found it gone, clog and all. The place where the trap
was setting was in the head of a small ravine and near the edge of a
windfall, just on the lower side of the bait pen, and but a few feet
from it lay the partly decayed trunk of a large tree. I jumped on to
this tree to get a good look down into the windfall to see if bruin
was anywhere in sight. I had scarcely got on the log when I received
a reception which I think was something equal to that the Russian
Naval Fleet met with in the Corean Straits. I had jumped square into
a colony of large black hornets, and they did punish me terribly in
three minutes' time. My feet were swollen so that I was obliged to
remove my shoes and my entire body was spotted as a leopard with
great purple blotches and the internal fever which I had was most
terrible. I thought that every breath that I drew was my last. I was
two miles from the wagon road and nine or ten miles in the
wilderness. No one knew where I was, nor where the traps were set.

I thought no more of the bear. I only thought of reaching the wagon
road. I began one of the worst battles of my life, but after a
struggle of three hours I got to the road more dead than alive. But
here fortune favored me for soon after a man by the name of White
(one of the county commissioners who had been in the southern part of
the county on business) came along. He took me home where the doctor
soon got me on my feet again.

I told my oldest brother where he would find the trap, so he took a
man and team and went early the next morning and got the bear all
right. It was four or five days before I felt able again to go into
the woods and look at the traps, but when I did, I found a small
bear, (a cub) dead and the skin nearly worthless. This was 45 years
ago, but I am still working at the same old trade, in a small way.

At another time and previous to the time mentioned, I, with a
partner, was trapping on the headwaters of Pine Creek. We had been in
camp about a week, when one day