General Hampton always hunted with large packs of hounds, managed
sometimes by himself and sometimes by his negro hunters. He occasionally
took out forty dogs at a time. He found that all his dogs together could
not kill a big fat bear, but they occasionally killed three-year-olds,
or lean and poor bears. During the course of his life he has himself
killed, or been in at the death of, five hundred bears, at least two
thirds of them falling by his own hand. In the year just before the war
he had on one occasion, in Mississippi, killed sixty-eight bears in five
months. Once he killed four bears in a day; at another time three,
and frequently two. The two largest bears he himself killed weighed,
respectively, 408 and 410 pounds. They were both shot in Mississippi.
But he saw at least one bear killed which was much larger than either of
these. These figures were taken down at the time, when the animals were
actually weighed on the scales. Most of his hunting for bear was done
in northern Mississippi, where one of his plantations was situated, near
Greenville.
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