[ "Up a Tree" ]
This anonymous story appeared in the July 9, 1870, issue of All the Year Round, the weekly literary and cultural magazine founded, edited, and owned by Charles Dickens.
In this comic story, three friends tell their stories of having been chased up a tree: one man by a grizzly, another by a Native American war party, and one man, with his friend Doc, by something very like a bear. As this last men tells it, he and Doc were walking through the woods when they suddenly heard a strange noise:
Bless my heart! what's that?' And before we could say Jack Robinson there was old Doc takin' a header through the bush for an oak-tree close by, and me after him, and after both a something mighty like a bear, bounding and crushing through the chapparal. If you ever saw two men make for one tree quicker than did Doc and I, I would feel obliged by the particulars. Doc swore I think, and I know I did, as we scrambled up the lower branches of that black oak, and then at our leisure up higher still, while the bear kept watch beneath. It was too dark to make it out, but Doc declared it was about the largest he had ever seen in that part of the country; 'in fact, a full-grown, rampageous, chaw-me-up grizzly, sir,' were Doc's very words, as we sat there on the branches of that black oak,feeling rather chilly and slightly foolish.
. . . . [ The two men spend the night in the tree, as the bear never leaves the foot of it. ]
For my part, I couldn't sleep, and watched the bear at the foot of the tree, whining in a peculiar manner. By this time I began to smell a very big rat, and when the first rays of the sun came to my help, I saw that I was not far off the mark. Laughing heartily in my sleeve, I dropped off to Doc's corner of the tree, and awoke him, mighty ill-natured, out of a sonorous snore, by informing him that the bear was harmless. I thought I would face it out, I said, and pointing down below, we saw, not a very fierce grizzly, but only Doc's big black Newfoundland dog, which had broken loose and followed us! 'What, darn me! if that ain't my dorg! Reiver, ho!' and the affectionate animal began to whine, just as the bear had done all night! To be treed up all night by his own dog was too much for a fellow with Doc's grizzly experience, and accordingly he began to argue that it had been really a bear, and that the dog had only frightened it away: in fact, he had seen the bear not five minutes before I woke him. I assured him that he must be mistaken, for to my certain knowledge the dog had been there for three hours at least. Even he pretended not to be convinced when his disconsolate wife and children informed him that it had left not ten minutes after us. 'It was nonsense,' he said; 'nonsense, and he knew it too!' Anyhow, I observed that, after we came own the tree, he called the dog to him, in that hypocritical way men will be cruel enough to call dogs to them, when he thought I warn't looking, give it a kick which sent it howling home ahead
of us! (IV, new series: 130 - 131)