Believed to Be the One Hit by a Locomotive a Year Ago.
One day last fall the locomotive of a passenger train on the Western New York & Pennsylvania railroad, running 40 miles an hour, near Watsonville, Pa., struck a bear that came out of the woods and attempted to cross the track in front of the engine. The bear was tossed more than 40 feet and it fell in the brush beside the track. The train went on, and at Watsonville the engineer told the agent that if wanted some bear meat he might get it by sending someone back a mile or so to get the bear the engine had collided with and killed. Two men went back to get the bear. They found where it had landed in the brush, but the bear wasn’t there. A trail of blood led from the spot. It was followed nearly a mile, and then it was lost in a big laurel patch. Everyone supposed the bear had gone in there to die, and the engineer bragged a good deal about the bear he had killed.
Last week some one came to Watsonville and said there were unmistakable signs of a big bear around Laurel swamp, three miles away. A party of hunters went out. They found the bear and, although it had only three available legs, the right hind leg trailing loosely and helplessly, the bear got away from the hunters and hid in the swamp. That night Ben Samson baited a trap with a big piece of pork in the hope of catching the big cripple. He succeeded. The bear was caught in the trap the next morning by one fore paw, which the bear was deliberately chewing off to liberate itself when Samson appeared and shot the brute in the head. The bear’s right hind leg was out of joint at the hip, and was broken in two other places, although the wounds had long been healed. The bear the locomotive hit nearly a year ago was struck about where the bear’s injuries were, and it is the general belief that this is the same one. The bear was very old and weighed 350 pounds.
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