"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!
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