838 AMERICAN" GAME BIRD SHOOTING. 



for, according to the humorous statement of the narrator, 

 the musket had kicked so hard that it drove him two or 

 three feet into the ground and knocked the moccasins off 

 his feet. He intimated that he would not hire savages 

 again wheu out shooting swans, as they did more harm 

 til an good, by blowing the birds to pieces and destroying 

 a lot of beautiful feathers. We had cygnets for dinner 

 that day, and though the flesh was somewhat dry, yet it 

 was rather palatable; but it took four day's seasoning in 

 the frost to make the adults fit for the table, and then 

 they were not very dainty. 



According to my host, who was an experienced wild- 

 fowler, the best days for shooting swans are those which 

 are windy, as the birds are then extremely loth to take 

 wing, and if they do rise, they fly so low and close to the 

 land that they may be shot from covert or a sneak-box 

 screened with boughs or reeds. They can be bagged in 

 narrow streams by sculling rapidly down on them from 

 the windward, as it takes them a comparatively long 

 time to rise from the water; hence, one may sometimes 

 touch them with a gun before they can get away. They 

 do not afford much sport before September or October, 

 as they moult in July and August, and look so wretched- 

 ly poor that few sportsmen would care to shoot them. 

 The surest way of making a large bag of swans is to 

 *' fire-hunt " them — that is, to use torches in their haunts 

 at night, for as soon as they see the glare they become 

 stupefied, and wait until the hunters knock them over 

 with clubs or guns. This is a favorite method of killing 

 them with Indians, pot-hunters, and some men who 

 would be angry if they were classed with either of these. 

 I knew two white men to kill eighteen in one night, and 

 a party of five Indians to bag forty-one between dusk and 

 midnight. I was spearing flatfish from a canoe by torch- 

 liglit, in an arm of Puget Sound, one night, when two 

 swans came swimming towards me from the mouth of a 



