the bright light in the cavern and the heavy shadows in the
room was Rembrandtish. Big Tom sat with us before the fire and told bear
stories. Talk? Why, it was not the least effort. The stream flowed on
without a ripple. "Why, the old man," one of the sons confided to us
next morning, "can begin and talk right over Mount Mitchell and all the
way back, and never make a break." Though Big Tom had waged a lifelong
warfare with the bears, and taken the hide off at least a hundred of
them, I could not see that he had any vindictive feeling towards the
varmint, but simply an insatiable love of killing him, and he regarded
him in that half-humorous light in which the bear always appears to
those who study him. As to deer--he couldn't tell how many of them he
had slain. But Big Tom was a gentleman: he never killed deer for mere
sport. With rattlesnakes, now, it was different. There was the skin of
one hanging upon a tree by the route we would take in the morning,
a buster, he skinned him yesterday. There was an entire absence, of
braggadocio in Big Tom's talk, but somehow, as he went on, his backwoods
figure loomed larger and larger in our imagination, and he seemed
strangely familiar. At length it came over us where we had met him
before. It was in Cooper's novels. He was the Leather-Stocking exactly.
And yet he was an original; for he assured us that he had never read the
Leather-Stocking Tales. What a figure, I was thinking, he must have
made in the late war! Such a shot, such a splendid physique, such
iron endurance! I almost dreaded to hear his tales of the havoc he had
wrought on the Union army. Yes, he was in the war, he was sixteen months
in the Confederate army, this Homeric man. In what rank? "Oh, I was a
fifer!"

But hunting and war did not by any means occupy the whole of Big Tom's
life. He was also engaged in "lawin'." He had a long-time feud with a
neighbor about a piece of land and alleged trespass, and they'd
been "lawin'" for years, with no definite result; but as a topic of
conversation it was as fully illustrative of frontier life as the
bear-fighting.

Long after we had all gone to bed, we heard Big Tom's continuous voice,
through the thin partition that separated us from the kitchen, going on
to his little boy about the bear; every circumstance of how he tracked
him, and what corner of the field he entered, and where he went out, and
his probable size and age, and the prospect of his coming again; these
w