People's Pilot, Volume 4, Number 26, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 December 1894 — A BEAR’S FUN WITH 'MANDY. [ARTICLE]

A BEAR’S FUN WITH 'MANDY.

It Made Mrs. Jim Messier Think She Was Hemmed In by Bears In the Woods. Everybody in the hemlock belt knows that bears are full of tricks and like to i have fun with folks now and then, but | nobody supposed that bears could think of carrying a joke as far as one did in the Alma neighborhood in Pennsylvania. Jim Messier’s wife started to go on an errand to a neighbor’s a mile away, and half an hour later came home all put out because she had been stopped by three bears. Not all ! at once, but three different times. The road she had to take runs all the way through the woods. Another road forks from it, also through the woods, half way to the house she was going to, and passes the same house, but with a field between it and the house. When Mrs. Messier got to the fork of the road a bear rose up on its hind feet in the middle of the main road one hundred yards beyond. Mrs. Messier knew quite a little about bears, and so she quietly turned into the other road and went on her way, altnough it was a good deal further. She had not gone a quarter of a mile when a bear rose up in front of her in that road, ten rods or so ahead. “The ■woods are a little too full of bear, I guess,” she said, “so I’ll go back home and go to Jane’s to-mor-row.” She turned and walked back to the main road and headed for home. Before she had gone one hundred yards, right in the middle of the road ahead of her, a big bear got up on its hind feet and pranced a little. This was too much even for Mrs. Jim Messier, j The indications were that she was | hemmed in by bear, so she opened her I lungs and let go a few yells that made those woods sound as if wildcats were holding forth in them. If the bear was having fun those yells spoiled it in short order, for Mrs. Messkvr had scarcely started in on them when the bear almost tumbled over itself to get to the woods, and ■ Mrs. Messier says she could hear the I brush snap and crack in the bear’s • path for a quarter of a mile. So she came home to get some one to go out and bag those three audacious bears. Jim Messier and two others went out right away. There was a light snow on the ground. They went to where Mrs. Messier had seen the first bear. Its track led them diagonally into the woods and out into the forking road. There the bear had stopped. Then the track took a cut diagonally back toward the main road and out into it There the bear had stopped ■ again. And when Bruin had quit that’ spot he had gone into the woods so fast that the snow was torn up as if a steam shovel had struck it Jim Messier and the two men just laid down and howled. “Three bears!” roared Jim. “Jist one jolly old cuss havin’ fun with ’Mandy.” And they never went another step on the rollicking bear’s track, but went home to jolly ’Mandy about the way she was surrounded by one bear. —Philadelphia Press.