Transcripts: Southern Appalachian English

Bill Barnes

(Hartford, Cocke County, Tennessee) was age 95 when interviewed.  He was literate and a former deputy sheriff and prosperous farmer.

*.doc file for printing

My father was driving some cattle on what's known as the Cove Creek Mountain, and he come up to a party [that] had been a-fightin' a bear, the dogs, and it had eaten up their dogs in a laurel bed.  He asked the party for a gun to go down and kill that bear.  There wasn't a man  [that] had a load of powder or any loaded gun, and they couldn't get [SCRATCHING] anything to kill it with, and it was just eating their dogs up.  He went down to get him a knife, and he went down into that laurel where it was.  It had the dogs down, and he run up and stobbed his knife into it and cut a big long gash plumb to the hollow of the bear, and the bear wheeled on him, and he said it felt like he could feel it a-bitin' him nearly.  He could hear it popping its teeth, and the dogs, they come and grabbed it again, you know, before it could get ahold of him, and it wheeled back on the dogs.  And as it wheeled back on the dogs, he took a run-ago and run his arm into that hole he'd cut into it and run it right up about its heart and give a rake or two, and that bear shrunk down and bawled, he said, like a calf.