168



Whiskey Jack and another.



patient effort. But if it shares with our own jay this demerit, it

has gentler claims that more than make it up. It is a most lovable

little bird, so much so that the writer who a score of times might

almost have caught one with his hand, so to speak, has yet but a

single skin in his collection. You cannot kill your most confiding

friends, and life in the great forests of the North West would really

be a different thing without Whiskey Jack. Worn out with foot-

slogging hour after hour through the muskegs, weary with picking

your slow way in silence and suspense through tracts of fallen

timber, where though the trees lie like spilikins you must not snap

a twig, no sooner have you fired at last your shot, and sat down

to admire your quarry—or to mourn its disappearance, as the

case may be—than Whiskey Jack turns up. When you stop to

munch a hard-earned piece of bread and cheese, Whisky Jack is

there to help you, and will come at last to take it from your fingers.

He does not do that at once of course : you must throw the food a

little nearer, a little nearer, must move deliberately and not in jerks,

for all this time he is summing you up. At last he determines that

you are all but as senseless as the grey log on which you sit, and

then, at the psychological moment, as the journalists say, he comes

in and “ takes the biscuit ” with a little dart.


Now there are but two birds belonging to the genus of

Perisoreus^' ; one in the New World one in the Old; the latter

is P. infaustus, the Siberian jay. It is not a little curious that both

have the same habits, habits that distinguish them in character—as

they are separated in form—from Garrulus ; for this genus is not

companionable but quite the opposite—very “fly.”


The writer cannot recall an instance of this extreme friend¬

liness on the part of the Siberian jay in Norway or Sweden, where

the bird is common enough, and where they go through the trees

in discordant parties ; but in the immense forests that border on

the tundras of Arctic Russia the bird is every bit as friendly as


* Newton points out (“ Dictionary of Birds,” p. 468) that Bonaparte’s

name of Perisoreus was pre-dated by Dysornithia of Swainson. This latter term

would mean a bird of ill omen. The origin of Perisoreus is not so clear, unless

it be mal-derived from TrepLtruptvio to heap up all round. If so it would refer

to the bird’s practice of storing up its food. Newton (quoting Swainson and

Richards) gives the Cree name as “ Whiskse-shawneesh.” My own Cree hunter

always called it “ Wiscachan,” which is much the same as “ Whiskse-shawn. ”



