Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 221, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 September 1915 — BEARS THICK AS SQUIRRELS [ARTICLE]

BEARS THICK AS SQUIRRELS

‘GRAND OLD MAN OF THE WOODS' TELLS OF THE TIME IN MAINE. PELTS SOLD HI DOLLAR APIECE Veteran Hunter, Now 98, Chats of Early Days and Doughnuts Fried In Bear’s Grease. Bangor, Maine.—Uncle Greenleaf Davis, the hermit of Shin Pond, bear hunter, nature lover and philosopher, is the “grand old man of the woods.** On the-death of his father sixty years or more ago he inherited a log house, a primitive sawmill driven by water power, and a township of timberland containing about 23,000 acres of spruce and pine. But of all this he has little or nothing left save a camp on the shores of Shin Pond and a few acres surrounding it; for he never was a business man, his tastes running rather to poetry and the study of nature.

For many years he has spent most of his time at Shin Pond, which is near the town of Patten, in the northern tip of Penobscot county, whpre he kept bachelor hall and followed his natural bent of seeking companionship with birds and animals and fishes rather than with men. In mid-winter it has been his habit to seek greater comfort in the village of Patten, but by far the greater part of the last sixty years has been spent apart from mankind.

Henry D. Thoreau, the famous American naturalist, visited Mount Katadin in 1843, and Davis, then only twentysix, accompanied him on several weeks’ tour of the forests of that region, assisting him in gathering material for his book "The Maine Woods.” Besides being a hunter and fisherman, Davis is something of * naturalist. It was he who made tho discovery that the beautiful markings of birdseye maple are caused by woodpeckers seeking the sweet sap of the tree, the dents of their sharp bills leaving scars that in time assume a reddish hue.

'•he old man’s memory goes back to the days when game, Instead of being scarce, was rather too plentiful, and when the Tarratines, original proprietors of this part of Maine, had not taken to wearing “store clothes” and living in frame houses, but were real Indians without an idea in the world outside of hunting and eating, and a little fighting between times. "When I was young,” he says (he has killed more than 250 bears in his time), “fat bears were almost as thick among the old growth beeches plong the slopes of Mount Katadin as red squirrels are today. In the fall, after the early frosts had loosened the beechnuts, I could go out with an old smoothbore gun and shoot two or three ’most any day. Every fall father used to call us boys and get up a bear hunt to get meat to roast through the winter. Sometimes the hunt lasted a week, sometimes longer, but we never quit tiU we had put by the carcasses of eight or ten fat bears. “In the days when "Tippecanoe’ ran for president there was no railroad within 100 miles of where we lived, and if any one had told us about Chicago dressed beef coming through to Maine in refrigerator cars we would have locked him up as crazy. The hindquarters of a fat bear that had fed on beechnuts, when hung on a spit, roasted before a hardwood fire and basted in its own fat until ft was whiny brown, made eating good enough for the minister or the first selectman.

The kidney fat of bears, which was oily and soft, like lard, was used for frying doughnuts and for bread shortening* while the harder belly fat was run into candles. I have eaten thousands of brown doughnuts that were fried in bears’ grease. That same grease today I could sell to druggists tor $5 a quart. ”A« for the skins of the bears, we rubbed them ofi the fleshy side with powdered alum and salt and used them for rugs, bed coverings and sleigh robes. Nobody placed any great value on the pelt of a bear In those days. It was the meat we were after, and as the skin had to come off before we could get at the meat, we considered it merely a by-product. Sixty or seventy years ago one could buy all the bear pelts he wanted for a dollar apiece. Now they are sls to $25, and many of them poor at that. “See this wipe?” pointing to a long white mark across his cheek. “A mother bear gave me that when I caught one of her cubs. She caught me ‘with the goods,’ as they say now. A mother bear can lick anything in creation when defending her young.' -