e encounters
save one, in which he was rather severely torn in the forearm. Many
other hunters have used the knife, but perhaps none so frequently as he;
for he was always fond of steel, as witness his feats with the "white
arm" during the Civil War.

General Hampton always hunted with large packs of hounds, managed
sometimes by himself and sometimes by his negro hunters. He occasionally
took out forty dogs at a time. He found that all his dogs together could
not kill a big fat bear, but they occasionally killed three-year-olds,
or lean and poor bears. During the course of his life he has himself
killed, or been in at the death of, five hundred bears, at least two
thirds of them falling by his own hand. In the year just before the war
he had on one occasion, in Mississippi, killed sixty-eight bears in five
months. Once he killed four bears in a day; at another time three,
and frequently two. The two largest bears he himself killed weighed,
respectively, 408 and 410 pounds. They were both shot in Mississippi.
But he saw at least one bear killed which was much larger than either of
these. These figures were taken down at the time, when the animals were
actually weighed on the scales. Most of his hunting for bear was done
in northern Mississippi, where one of his plantations was situated, near
Greenville. During the half century that he hunted, on and off, in
this neighborhood, he knew of two instances where hunters were
fatally wounded in the chase of the black bear. Both of the men were
inexperienced, one being a raftsman who came down the river, and the
other a man from Vicksburg. He was not able to learn the particulars
in the last case, but the raftsman came too close to a bear that was at
bay, and it broke through the dogs, rushed at and overthrew him, then
lying on him, it bit him deeply in the thigh, through the femoral
artery, so that he speedily bled to death.

But a black bear is not usually a formidable opponent, and though he
will sometimes charge home he is much more apt to bluster and bully than
actually to come to close quarters. I myself have but once seen a man
who had been hurt by one of these bears. This was an Indian. He had come
on the beast close up in a thick wood, and had mortally wounded it with
his gun; it had then closed with him, knocking the gun out of his hand,
so that he was forced to use his knife. It charged him on all fours, but
in the grapple, when it had failed to throw him down, it ra