It’s the first day of rifle hunting here in the Northwoods of Wisconsin. The snow is settling upon the birch and maples as percussive announcements are made. Deer are on the move, and the hunters are huddled in their stands, with tags from Fleet Farm and Cabela’s still hanging from a few pairs of gloves and long johns. Thermoses full of coffee steam the glasses while reinvigorating old bones that forgot the discomfort of one’s choice roost in the past year.
A syntax gamesman, I dwell in the warmth of the family cottage as sticky buns rise in the oven and the trusted German shorthair is nosing about under the table, hot on the trail of a week-old cheerio. It’s a good life; one made all the better knowing that so many nearby find delight in this weekend and its offer of fraternal companionship and accomplishment.
Later, when the hunters traipse into the shacks, cabins, and trailers that dot this here glacier-defined land, there will be tales told the like of which have passed between men since time immemorial. Amidst the brandy and cigars, the racks enlarge in the telling; the wide misses move close enough to shave the antler velvet from the target like a straight razor, and the woods become more forbidding and hostile. If one took these stories as gospel, there’d have to be a 30-point buck behind every conifer and grizzly bears up every ash. The stories may be hogwash, but camaraderie thrives on a generous helping of baloney with mustard.
With this tradition in mind, I introduce Thomas Bangs Thorpe’s “The Big Bear of Arkansas,” published in 1841. A relic of antebellum America, it’s an account one cannot help but love. Aboard a Mississippi steamboat, an Arkansas huntsman treats his new acquaintances to a humdinger.
Bangs Thorpe writes:
A steamboat on the Mississippi, frequently, in making her regular trips, carries between places varying from one to two thousand miles apart; and, as these boats advertise to land passengers and freight at “all intermediate landings,” the heterogeneous character of the passengers of one of these up-country boats can scarcely be imagined by one who has never seen it with his own eyes.
Starting from New Orleans in one of these boats, you will find yourself associated with men from every State in the Union, and from every portion of the globe; and a man of observation need not lack for amusement or instruction in such a crowd, if he will take the trouble to read the great book of character so favorably opened before him.
Here may be seen, jostling together, the wealthy Southern planter and the pedler of tin-ware from New England the Northern merchant and the Southern jockey a venerable bishop, and a desperate gambler the land speculator, and the honest farmer professional men of all creeds and characters Wolvereens, Suckers, Hoosiers, Buckeyes, and Corncrackers, beside a “plentiful sprinkling” of the half-horse and half-alligator species of men, who are peculiar to “old Mississippi,” and who appear to gain a livelihood by simply going up and down the river. In the pursuit of pleasure or business, I have frequently found myself in such a crowd . . .
You can view the rest here. Whether you’re reading this from a recliner or a blind, may the stories you hear this weekend be half as good again as the one told by the Arkansas man about that biblically big bear.