"After adjusting his clothes, and loading his gun with nine buckshot,
holding a torch in one hand and the musket in the other, he descended
the second time. He drew nearer than before, and the wolf, assuming a
still more fierce and terrible appearance, growling, rolling her eyes,
snapping her teeth, and dropping her head between her legs, was
evidently on the point of springing at him. At this critical instant he
leveled his gun and fired at her head. Stunned with the shock and
suffocated with the smoke, he immediately found himself drawn out of the
cave. But, having refreshed himself, and permitted the smoke to
dissipate, he went down the third time. Once more he came within sight
of the wolf, who appearing very passive, he applied the torch to her
nose, and perceiving her dead, he took hold of her ears, and then
kicking the rope (still tied round his legs), the people above, with no
small exultation, dragged them both out together."

This is the story, told by one who knew Putnam intimately and who had it
from his own lips, while neighbors were still living who were "in at the
death" and could have refuted any misstatement or exaggeration. The
deed, in truth, was characteristic of the dauntless young farmer, whose
courage and heroic character (as his eulogist justly remarks) "were ever
attended by a serenity of soul, a clearness of conception, a degree of
self-possession, and a superiority to all vicissitudes of fortune,
entirely distinct from anything that can be produced by a ferment of the
blood and flutter of spirits, which not unfrequently precipitate men to
action when stimulated by intoxication or some other transient
exhilaration."

That was "Wolf Put," or "Old Wolf Putnam," as he came to be called
thenceforth. But at no time in his active and wonderful career was he
an old man when he performed his deeds of valor. The wolf-hunt, in fact,