Buena Vista Lake, twenty miles south of Bakersfield, is covered with 

 thousands of water fowl of almost every variety, and thousands of ducks 

 and geese are killed annually in and around this lake. I was told that one 

 party killed seventy-two ducks in two shots this morning on land adjoining 

 this lake, where they were feeding in a corn field. 



Within a few miles of Bakersfield during the open season it is easy to 

 bag the limit of valley quail or doves. 



There are thousands of jack and cotton-tail rabbits in this vicinity 

 which are not protected by law and can be killed at any time. 



Owing to the large area and in many parts sparsely settled, Kern County 

 is the best hunting ground in the State for all kinds of game. 



DECADENCE OF THE JACK RABBIT 



J. M. ALEXANDER 



THE shadow of life has fallen upon Mr. Jack Rabbit of California. 

 With his long ears and big brown eyes he has become an outcast 

 in animal life. Like his companion of ears, Mr. Burro, he has gone 

 into decadence and is now reckoned only in the annals of the 

 years agone. The wood ticks have settled deeper into his ears and in his 

 age disease has touched him under the soft velvet of his skin. The sports- 

 man's dog that flushes the quick-winged quail now utters but a whine of 

 contempt if "Brer Rabbit" should cross his pathway. 



The triumvirate of ears and fleas — the jackrabbit, the burro, and the 

 Indian, — relics of the golden days, are fast being gathered into garnered 

 sheaves of "has beens." The cry of the mountain and the meadow is for 

 their child of long ago, which with ears and eyes alert bounded from hum- 

 mock and hillock as a gray streak of light would flash in the frosted air. 

 Then, too, pierced to the heart by the speeding arrow, his soft fur would 

 become the portion of a warrior's robe, or hung at the entrance of the 

 tepee, to be touched aside only by the hand of the bronzed brave. To-day 

 the carrion crow or the mangy coyote tear and toss his gray fur into the 

 tangle of weeds and briars. 



Away in the South he has been driven like sheep into great corrals, 

 clubbed, booted, and torn, he has died with a wild cry of pain. If to him 

 life was spared, boxed, caged and battered he was sent to fields afar, where 

 the sportsman's hound might be loosened from its leashes to give chase In 

 a plot from which escape is impossible, and there where sounds of bets and 

 jeers and jibes mingled with the wild shouts of a multitude, he is torn into 

 shreds to make a "Sunday holiday." 



Away out in the fields in his native land his beaten pathway is beset 

 with traps fashioned by the barefooted farmer's boy. Between the pickets 

 of the old bramble-covered fence the wire noose hangs unseen to tighten 

 about his slender throat as he goes out in the moonlight in quest of the 

 dew-covered clover or the sprouting mallow. His own sharp, pearly teeth 

 have marked the pathway to his scaffold, for the inch between the pickets 

 has been gnawed into inches, making space for his lithe, sinuous body to 

 squeeze through. There the snare catches his throat and hangs him, 

 strangled in the moonlight. 



On the desert the alkali dust from the great sand plain caravan fills his 

 eyes, and his throat grows parched for the watered grasses of the spring 

 side, now guarded by the miner's cabin. In the forest the sound of the* 

 woodsman's axe and the rushing skid of the logs holds him ever in tremb- 

 ling fear. On the meadow, where the grasses grew so green and tender, 

 now the rattling ring and the cogged wheels of the mower warn him to 



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