92 FOREST OUTINGS 



hope of its residents for the future. The game has been protected, with 

 short open seasons of specified shooting, mainly in the off-peak season 

 of vacation usage. Game population is being built up to a point where more 

 liberal limits, especially in winter, may be allowed. Ducks now are thick 

 on its bayous, and generally so tame that one can get to within a stone's 

 throw of them to take their pictures. Deer have increased to a point where 

 soon a lifting of present limits will be required to sustain a natural balanced 

 husbandry on this forest. Coveys of quail are multiplying, too; in some 

 places they are so tame that they can be seen running and darting across 

 openings, and vying for food with the lean, sharp-snooted razorback hogs 

 still left to range freely by their owners on this forest and in its adjacent 

 poverty-stricken towns. 



If one is not by nature a hunter (and the man who writes this note of 

 comment is not), the prospect of the Choctawhatchee becoming soon an 

 important and fruitful hunting ground, with an augmented income coming 

 more steadily all year round to its needy forest residents and townsfolk, 

 will exert no overpowering emotional appeal. One might prefer, emo- 

 tionally, to keep it as it more or less is, a refuge, forever. But practical 

 considerations enter and enter most urgently, and it is conceivable that 

 in many places like this, with schools (especially the schools of the Negro 

 residents) and hospitals and diets and living standards as they are, hunting 

 will have to be fostered and encouraged to add to the food supply, but 

 principally to bring in tourist money. Native stocks of people are more 

 important to preserve than game. And with proper management, both 

 kinds of native stocks may be better sustained. 



"Look at that," says a forest officer, disgustedly, seeing crude barrels 

 of naval stores drained from overdriven trees, bumping in big trucks out 

 of private lands within the forest. "Draining their lifeblood away!" Later, 

 down on the firm sand of a beautiful point of beach, with woods behind it, 

 he points with delight to the sharply cut tracks of a big buck; and, "That's 

 going to be their main living, the folks on this forest!" he says. 



HUNTING CAMP . . . It is natural, then, that when foresters on the Choc- 

 tawhatchee think of recreation, they think first of all in terms of hunting, 



