872 



Bow - Shooting. 



THUNDER-PUMPER. 



you can mark just how near you 

 come to killing each bird ; and 

 oftentimes a miss, when your 

 arrow fairly lifts the back-feath- 

 ers of the game or "tips" its 

 tail or beak, gives you as much 

 pleasure as if you had bowled it 

 •over. The peculiarly lively skip 

 and jump taken by a plover 

 when an arrow-head strikes into 

 the ground beside it is enough 

 to make any healthy man laugh 

 in spite of himself. Of course, 

 when shooting at game so small, 

 you must be content to miss five times as often as you hit ; indeed, 

 to kill once out of five shots would be excellent archery. I have 

 had some days of rare sport when my score showed over forty shots 

 to each bird I bagged. 



A kind of bittern or night-heron haunts the prairie sloughs in 

 the Kankakee region, and often, for lack of better game, I have 

 knocked them over for their wing-feathers, which make excellent 

 trimmings for light arrows. The natives call these bitterns by the 

 very appropriate, if not euphonious, name of " thunder-pumper." 



It is rather remarkable that the archer is subjected to the criticism 

 •of everybody who sees him. A grave man, who boasted of having 

 served many years in the Hoosier senate, once gave me a long 

 lecture on the folly and childishness of " playing with bows 'n arrers"; 

 but he would sit all day beside a mill-pond, fishing for " goggle- 

 eyes " and sun-perch, without dreaming of childishness. A Kankakee 

 herder, with a cast of countenance decidedly hangdog, ventured to 

 set his big cur on Will, because he went among some cattle to shoot 

 at a prairie-hen ; but a well directed blunt shaft settled the dog, 

 which ran yelling back to its irate master. I well remember an old 

 •curmudgeon whom we ran across in a Florida woods. He carried a 

 Hint-locked rifle, nearly six feet long, and wore what, some twenty 

 years before, had been a beaver tile. He helped himself to an 

 enormous quid of smoking fine-cut, and forthwith began to ply us 

 with questions about our weapons. We very patiently explained our 



