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Thanks, Moby
Chapter 2
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After supposedly having been lured to this pond by a game trail early in his adventure, Knowles claimed to have killed a black bear along the shore by hitting it over the head with a club and then skinning it, turning the hide into clothing; a picture of him in this skin—looking kind of like Tarzan in the throes of a midlife crisis—ran in newspapers across the country. Later on, when skeptics raised eyebrows about whether such a feat was possible, Knowles was incensed, offered to do it all over again, this time in front of witnesses. And so it was that some unfortunate, rather sleepy-looking black bear was brought in, which Knowles promptly conked over the head and then skinned, using nothing but a sharp piece of slate. The crowd was mighty impressed.
The problem was that after the show, as the spectators were heading back out of the woods, someone spotted a crude cabin right here along the shore of Lost Pond. The structure appeared to be several months old, but Knowles said he’d never seen it before—a claim hard to swallow given that he supposedly camped here for several weeks. “I knew then he was lying,” said Helon Taylor, seventeen, who later became superintendent of Maine’s Baxter State Park. From there, rumors sprouted like saplings on a clear-cut: con-man Joe, not living the wild life at all, but cozied up in a crude cabin with reporter Michael McKeogh, who was busy concocting a book to make them rich, lighting fires with matches, drinking whiskey and eating cans of beans and stew. To be fair, none of the skeptics ever could explain why, after his adventure, when Knowles was examined by the physical director of Harvard, he showed a marked increase in fitness over when he went in. In fact, said an amazed Dr. Sargent, it was “a hundred and fifty points better than the hardest test taken by the football men.”
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