My mom had lots of stories from her family farm, located north of New London, in the little unincorporated hamlet of Sugarbush WI. Named way back in the day for a large grove of sugar maple trees in the area.
In my moms writings and in some of my own memories and stories you will hear about ‘the farm in Sugarbush’ quite often.
This one also is from The Guides Journal, Fall Edition, 1983. In it my mom is grown, apparently it was 1967, involves my grandma who was still on the farm, the family dog at the time, Uncle Ed, a bear, and apparently a local auctioneer.
Here we go…
“Ma grabbed the .22 rifle and ran outside when Pip-a-dog started yipping in pain and fear. Pip led her to the edge of the cornfield but wouldn’t go under the fence. Growling low in his throat his hair stood on end.
Ma climbed up on the gate to go into the cornfield because it was so dark she couldn’t see anything. But the growling Pip-a-dog got her by the pants leg and kept pulling til’ she came down again. He kept right on backing up and pulling until Ma gave up and went back to the house. Next morning she found bear tracks bigger than her hand about six rows into the cornfield.
When Ed and I came home for the weekend she fed us her bear story along with supper. We thought she was laying it on pretty thick, because we’d grown up here on this farm, in Sugar Bush and we’d never heard of a bear in the Lebanon Swamp before. Waupaca County is full of deer, pheasants and coon but the bear story was hard to swallow.
Just then Pip-a-dog started yipping again. Ed and I hit the door at a dead run, each of us grabbing a shotgun as we went. As Ed leaped in front of me I remembered I’d tied Ma’s black pony to the clump of bushes by the back of the house. By then Ed saw the horse and when I screamed, “It’s the bear!” and clawed at his back, he seemed  suspended in mid air, as he back peddled furiously. His body caught up to his legs and I heard his pants rip as he lept over the porch and hit the door. When Ed finally realized what he had seen wasn’t a giant bear, and I had been partly responsible for his error, he was fighting mad. I guess I’m lucky he didn’t blow me away with that shotgun.
We were still laughing when the convoy pulled into our yard. All the neighbors had guns and lights and were forming a posse to go look for the bear. Our local auctioneer had just wrecked his car on a dark, back road, and he swore he’d hit a bear. It had lumbered away into the Lebanon Swamp and no one knew if it was badly hurt. We hunted the rest of the night and most of the next day but no one ever saw the bear again.
We still laugh about the time back in ’67 when the bear almost got Ma, the horse almost got Ed, and the auctioneer almost got the bear.
After that we all believed Ma’s stories no matter what she told us. And you have to admit she was right about the dog. He was a Pip!”
Leave a Reply