Crockett could not understand what it meant.

Crockett became angry at being thus deceived, and resolved that he would shoot the old hound, whom he considered the ringleader in the mischief, as soon as he got near enough to do so.
"With this intention," he says, "I pushed on the harder, till I came to the edge of an open prairie; and looking on before my dogs, I saw about the biggest bear that ever was seen in America.

He looked, at the distance he was from me, like a large black bull.

My dogs were afraid to attack him, and that was the reason they had stopped so often that I might overtake them." This is certainly a remarkable instance of animal sagacity.

The three dogs, by some inexplicable conference among themselves, decided that the enemy was too formidable for them to attack alone.