Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

When I was little, my dad had a friend named Rod Arbogast. Rod was an artist; he once took down an old barn for my father so he could use the wood for frames. (Dad had that barn taken down, coincidentally, the same exact week I learned I could climb up on the roof. But I digress.) Rod was a talented painter, and he often had his work on the cover of Pennsylvania Game News magazine.

I remember looking at the magazine a bit, sometimes even paging through it. My father was a subscriber. And now, all these years later, I encounter Pennsylvania Game News again, as I write about a local man who had an article in it.

In the spring of 1932, Sugar Valley writer Harvey O. Wren had a piece published in the magazine. The story involved two men, John Fiedler and Newton Snook. It also involved a black bear.

“It was years ago when this story took place,” Wren wrote, also describing Colby Narrows of Sugar Valley as “picturesque, wild, beautiful, and fascinating mountain country.” Fielder and Snook were looking for some cattle that had been roaming around the area, and they’d taken two horses and a buggy, some food, and their equipment on the search.

Snook heard what he thought was a cattle bell, and decided to climb up a small nearby knoll to take a look. When he got to the top, he found himself face to face with a large black bear. The bell sound? That was the chain on a bear trap, improperly set, and dangling from the bear’s foot.

“This trap arrangement impeded the bear’s homeward progress and served to make him sore at humans in general and these two men in particular,” Wren wrote.

The beat, hindered but not fully restrained by the faulty trap, attempted to attack them. The two men fought back, both out of self-defense and because “bear meat looks good to a hunter,” as Wren put it. The problem was that they hadn’t brought along any guns, not having foreseen the need for them.

They gathered up some rocks and branches for clubs. (Not for the first time, I hope PETA isn’t reading my columns.) And they fought the bear—It seems to have been about an even match. Lengthy, however—Wren reported that it took over four hours.

“From 11 o’clock in the forenoon until about 3:30 in the afternoon, Snook and Fielder on one side and the bear on the other, strove for mastery over rocks, briers, brush, fallen timber, and all sorts of impediments and very often to the advantage of the bear, who was a native product of just such a rough country and more or less at home in its environments,” the article said.

The three of them fought, and chased one another, sometimes Snook and Fielder doing the chasing, and sometimes the bear. The whole thing spanned a two-mile radius, and Wren reported that Snook wore out a new pair of shoes that he’d just bought in town the day before.

Finally, the bear became tangled in the roots of a nearby tree, and Snook and Fielder found a long branch to hold it down while they finally killed it. They dragged the bear back to their buggy, and then stopped to eat their food, which had been forgotten in the whole fiasco. Using Snook’s pocketknife, they skinned and butchered the bear, and then loaded it up and returned home with bear meat for their families, which was roughly the early 1900s equivalent of going out for hamburgers and coming back with a steak dinner.

Reading the whole thing brought back childhood memories of my father’s artist friend Rod, and paging through Pennsylvania Game News. I don’t recall ever reading this particular story, however. It’s more of a PG-13 thing.