Encounter with a Bear.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume X, Issue 3115, 29 January 1889, Page 3

Encounter with a Bear.

•A desperate fight with a bear took place recently at Franklin's Pleasure Gardens, Northampton, where the local volunteers had been having a sham fight. The repeated firing in the grounds evidently alarmed the various wild animals there, and when a man named Gotcli entered the pit to attend to the bears one of them Buddenly sprang upon him from behind and knocked him partially unconscious to the ground, Then seizing the mail's head in its fore paws, tho bear began knawing at his scalp. An alarm was quickly raised, but no one for a time was daring enough to follow the man into the pit and drive off the bear. Lieutenant Colonel Hollis, however, who with other volunteors was attracted by the cries of the spectators, drew his sword and hurled it at the bear. The point of the weapon struck the animal, with the effect ot making it Btill mote ferocious, Lieutenant Hull of Northampton, then determined to enter the pit, and taking a rifle with bayonet fixed, he pluckily descended into the place and attacked tho bear, which was still lacerating the head of the man lying at the bottom. With a powerful thrust ho drove the bayonet into the bear's shoulder, and with a howl of pain the animal immediately releasod its hold upon the prostrate man, and turned upon Lieutenant Hull, By dexterously using the bayonet, however, repeatedly wounding the biute, Lieutenant Hull managed to drive the bear to the wall, and Gotcli was rapidly,-but with considerable difficulty, got out of the pit. Lieutenant Hull made his escape, leaving his bayonet and Lieutenant Colonel Hollis's sword at the bottom of the pit with the bear. Gotcli, who was taken to the infirmary, was found to be seriously wounded in the head, tho scalp being torn from the skull in several places, The bear was left in a dying condition. The managers say that tho bears were excited by the volloy firing and tho volunteers; but it is a ■ singular fact that the other bears rat throughout at the top of their poles and gazed in the most unconcerned manner at what was going on in the pit.