Back in Daniel Boone’s day, if you wanted meat to eat you had to go hunt it yourself. Fortunately Daniel Boone was a skilled hunter and an intelligent man.
One day Daniel Boone was out hunting, and he met up with a bear. Now Daniel Boone was not hunting for bear, so he was not especially pleased to see a bear. From what I hear, the bear was not especially pleased to see Daniel Boone either. That bear charged Daniel Boone. Fortunately Daniel was about fifty yards away from the bear when it charged, so he figured he had a head start. He turned his back on that bear and he began to run.
Now you may doubt my claim that Daniel Boone was intelligent when I tell you he ran from a bear. Rest assured, he knew people cannot outrun bears, and he was not trying to outrun the bear. He simply figured those fifty yards would give him enough time to find a tree he could easily climb, and that’s what he did. Daniel Boone swung himself up into a tree and started climbing.
“Now, wait just a minute,” you may be thinking, “bears can climb trees.” You are correct. Bears can climb trees, and Daniel Boone knew that—I told you he was an intelligent man. As Daniel climbed up the tree he knew it would not be long until the bear would be climbing up after him, so he prepared. Daniel Boone was not only a skilled hunter and an intelligent man; he was also a resourceful man.
Daniel Boone didn’t do a thing but sit straddle on a limb with his back to the trunk of the tree. Then he wrapped his legs around the tree trunk and dropped forward beside the limb, so he was hanging from the tree—upside down, legs holding onto the trunk, arms dangling. Daniel watched, and sure enough, it wasn’t long before the bear reached the tree, took one look up at Daniel, and started climbing toward him.
Daniel Boone was not only an intelligent man and a resourceful man; he was also a patient man. He held his hands up near his shoulders and he watched the bear climb closer and closer. Oh, he was a patient man!
Finally the bear was within biting distance of Daniel, and when the bear opened its mouth to take a big bite out of Daniel Boone, folks say Daniel Boone didn’t do a thing but run his fist down the bear’s throat, all the way through the bear, and out the other end. Daniel Boone grabbed the bear’s tail, gave it a big yank, and turned that bear inside out. Then he let go, and the inside out bear ran right down the tree.
I’ve heard those inside out bears don’t live long, so Daniel Boone never needed to worry about that bear again.
I have been completely unsuccessful in locating the source of this tale or remembering how the tale came to be in my telling repertoire, and yet, I am quite confident I did not make it up, but read a tale of the inside out bear somewhere. I can verify the basic tale exists in Kentucky folklore because there are at least four versions in the Leonard Roberts Collection.1
While I’m not sure how I first encountered the tale, I do know that the repetition built on stating an attribute (skilled hunter, intelligent, resourceful, and patient man), then following with an action that calls the attribute into question, developed over time in front of audiences. In the telling, when I call an attribute into question there are inevitably nods of agreement in the audience from folks who are having that same thought. This pattern developed based on a telling at a school when I heard audience members whispering, “But bears can climb trees!” and I responded to that whisper. Eventually, I began to incorporate the audience doubt into the telling deliberately. It makes for a fun, yet subtle, give and take between teller and listeners.