old hunters. They were more plentiful than the bison and elk even in
the long vanished days when these two great monarchs of the forest still
ranged eastward to Virginia and Pennsylvania. The wolf and the cougar
were always too scarce and too shy to yield much profit to the hunters.
The black bear is a timid, cowardly animal, and usually a vegetarian,
though it sometimes preys on the sheep, hogs, and even cattle of the
settler, and is very fond of raiding his corn and melons. Its meat
is good and its fur often valuable; and in its chase there is much
excitement, and occasionally a slight spice of danger, just enough to
render it attractive; so it has always been eagerly followed. Yet it
still holds its own, though in greatly diminished numbers, in the more
thinly settled portions of the country. One of the standing riddles of
American zoology is the fact that the black bear, which is easier killed
and less prolific than the wolf, should hold its own in the land better
than the latter, this being directly the reverse of what occurs in
Europe, where the brown bear is generally exterminated before the wolf.

In a few wild spots in the East, in northern Maine for instance, here
and there in the neighborhood of the upper Great Lakes, in the
east Tennessee and Kentucky mountains and the swamps of Florida and
Mississippi, there still lingers an occasional representative of the old
wilderness hunters. These men live in log-cabins in the wilderness.
They do their hunting on foot, occasionally with the help of a single
trailing dog. In Maine they are as apt to kill moose and caribou as bear
and deer; but elsewhere the two last, with an occasional cougar or wolf,
are the beasts of chase which they follow. Nowadays as these old hunters
die there is no one to take their places, though there are still plenty
of backwoods settlers in all of the regions named who do a great deal of
hunting and trapping. Such an old hunter rarely makes his appearance at
the settlements except to dispose of his peltry and hides in exchange
for cartridges and provisions, and he leads a life of such lonely
isolation as to insure his individual characteristics developing into
peculiarities. Most of the wilder districts in the eastern States still
preserve memories of some such old hunter who lived his long life alone,
waging ceaseless warfare on the vanishing game, whose oddities, as well
as his courage, hardihood, and woodcraft, are laughingly remembered by