ett mine, where you live. Not fur from
where we are now, he stepped into a bear trap that was hid in the
leaves, like this one. It broke his leg, and he starved to death in it."

Despite our indignation meeting, it was decided to carry the trapped
bear's hide to Hensley, and for us to use only the meat as recompense
for trouble, to say nothing of risk to life and limb. Such is the
mountaineers' regard for property rights!

The animal we had ingloriously won was undersized, weighing scant 175
pounds. The average weight of Smoky Mountain bears is not great, but
occasionally a very large beast is killed. Matt Hyde told us that he
killed one on the Welch Divide in 1901, the meat of which, dressed,
without the hide, weighed 434 pounds, and the hide "squared eight feet"
when stretched for drying. "Doc" Jones killed a bear that was "kivered
with fat, five inches thick."

Afterwards I took pains to ask the most famous bear hunters of our
region what were the largest bears they had personally killed. Uncle
Jimmy Crawford, of the Balsam Mountains, estimated his largest at 500
pounds gross, and the hide of another that he had killed weighed forty
pounds after three days' drying. Quill Rose, of Eagle Creek, said that,
after stripping the hide from one of his bears, he took the fresh skin
by the ears and raised it as high as he could reach above his head, and
that four inches of the butt end of the hide (not legs) trailed on the
ground. "And," he added severely, "thar's no lie about it." Quill is six
feet one and one-half inches tall. Black Bill Walker, of the middle
prong of Little River (Tennessee side), told me "The biggest one I ever
saw killed had a hide that measured ten feet from nose to rump,
stretched for drying. The biggest I ever killed myself measured nine and
a half feet, same way, and weighed a good four hundred net, which,
allowin' for hide, blood, and entrails, would run full five hunderd live
weight."

[Illustration: Skinning a frozen bear]

Within the past two years two bears of about 500 pounds each have been
killed in Swain and Graham counties, the Cables getting one of them.
The veteran hunters that I have named have killed their hundreds of
bears and are men superior to silly exaggeration. In the Smoky Mountains
the black bear, like most of the trees, attains its fullest development,
and that it occasionally reaches a weight of 500 pounds when "hog fat"
is beyond reasonable doubt, though the average wo