While it was in progress, after nine o'clock, Big Tom arrived, and, with a simple greeting, sat down and attacked the supper and began to tell about the bear.There was not much to tell except that he hadn't seen the bear, and that, judged by his tracks and his sloshing around, he must be a big one.But a trap had been set for him, and he judged it wouldn't be long before we had some bear meat.Big Tom Wilson, as he is known all over this part of the State, would not attract attention from his size.He is six feet and two inches tall, very spare and muscular, with sandy hair, long gray beard, and honest blue eyes.He has a reputation for great strength and endurance; a man of native simplicity and mild manners.He had been rather expecting us from what Mr.Murchison wrote; he wrote (his son had read out the letter) that Big Tom was to take good care of us, and anybody that Mr.Murchison sent could have the best he'd got.
Big Tom joined us in our room after supper.This apartment, with two mighty feather-beds, was hung about with all manner of stuffy family clothes, and had in one end a vast cavern for a fire.The floor was uneven, and the hearthstones billowy.When the fire was lighted, the effect of 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 were the details of real everyday life, and worthy to be dwelt on by the hour.The boy was never tired of pursuing them.And Big Tom was just a big boy, also, in his delight in it all.
Perhaps it was the fascination of Big Tom, perhaps the representation that we were already way off the Big Ivy route, and that it would, in fact, save time to go over the mountain and we could ride all the way, that made the Professor acquiesce, with no protest worth noticing, in the preparations that went on, as by a natural assumption, for going over Mitchell.At any rate, there was an early breakfast, luncheon was put up, and by half-past seven we were riding up the Caney,--a half-cloudy day,--Big Tom swinging along on foot ahead, talking nineteen to the dozen.There was a delightful freshness in the air, the dew-laden bushes, and the smell of the forest.In half an hour we called at the hunting shanty of Mr.
Murchison, wrote our names on the wall, according to custom, and regretted that we could not stay for a day in that retreat and try the speckled trout.Making our way through the low growth and bushes of the valley, we came into a fine open forest, watered by a noisy brook, and after an hour's easy going reached the serious ascent.
>From Wilson's to the peak of Mitchell it is seven and a half miles;we made it in five and a half hours.A bridle path was cut years ago, but it has been entirely neglected.It is badly washed, it is stony, muddy, and great trees have fallen across it which wholly block the way for horses.At these places long detours were necessary, on steep hillsides and through gullies, over treacherous sink-holes in the rocks, through quaggy places, heaps of brush, and rotten logs.Those who have ever attempted to get horses over such ground will not wonder at the slow progress we made.Before we were halfway up the ascent, we realized the folly of attempting it on horseback; but then to go on seemed as easy as to go back.The way was also exceedingly steep in places, and what with roots, and logs, and slippery rocks and stones, it was a desperate climb for the horses.