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12 
THE SPORTSMAN’S AND TOURIST’S GUIDE. 
ing in the mountain cabins is free of cost, 
and the wild, beautiful land is the hunt- 
er’s paradise—not a house within thirty 
miles, save, perhaps, the hut or cave of 
the moonshiner, The valley is the bed 
of an ancient lake, level and beautiful as 
any Texas prairie; the Blackwater winds 
slowly among the tangled laurel, and the 
puma, the bear, and the deer, are seldom 
alarmed by the voice of a hunter’s gun. 
The scenery is grand and beautiful among 
those mountains. The castellated rocks 
are like the ruins of old cathedrals, and 
the moss is deep and soft as Persian car- 
pets. Flocks of wild turkeys feed under 
the ‘ greenwood tree,” a mass of emer- 
ald and gold. Sometimes in Autumn, 
the white umbrella of the painter is seen 
by the waterfall, or among the hollies in 
the mountain gorge; but the wild duck 
dreams on the river, and the deer among 
the laurel, and the hunter comes not from 
the far North land.” 
THE NOTTOWAY REGION, 
The Nottoway region, lying on the 
Nottoway River—commencing at Stony 
Creek Station, on the Weldon Railroad, 
and continuing on to Southampton coun- 
ty, is without doubt the wildest and 
most desolate section of Virginia. The 
two counties—Sussex and Southampton 
—beat anything in the way of desolation 
ever witnessed. Of course, in such a 
sparsely settled and rarely hunted coun- 
try, there must be game, and actual ob- 
servation has demonstrated the fact, 
that there is more game in this section 
than any part of the Middle States. The 
and quail roam at will undisturbed by 
the report of a single gun. To sportsmen 
with good dogs, a breech-loader, and 
moderate skill, it would be difficult to 
enumerate the number of birds that 
could be killed. But the great sport of 
this section is deer hunting, and as 
strange as the assertion may seem, it is 
nevertheless a true one, that there are 
more deer now than ever before. There 
are many theories to account for this, 
_ but the two principal, and certainly the 
true ones, are that the farmers are too 
poor to keep a pack of hounds; nor have 
they time to hunt them, and then again 
two-thirds of the cultivated ands have 
since the war and the emancipation of 
the slaves been turned out to run wild, 
for with their limited means and impoy- 
erished condition under a new regime, 
the farmers have had to concentrate 
their labor on a limited area, and the 
land left uneultivated has speedily grown 
up in pine thickets that are impassable, 
and in these safe retreats the deer breed 
and bring forth their young in undis- 
turbed security. The country fairly 
swarms with them. The owner of Tower 
Hill is Capt. Blow, and he is the only 
one around there that has a pack of 
hounds. The captain used to be an in- 
veterate sportsman in days gone by, but 
_ now he hunts only when out of meat, 
negroes have pretty nearly thinned out | 
all the rabbits and squirrels; but as they 
do not keep a pack of hounds, the deer 
are safe from their driving and hunting. 
Neither do they keep pointers or setters, 
and generally kills between twenty-five 
and thirty every season; his porch is cov- 
ered with scores of antlers, the fruits of 
his prowess of the chase. When he puts 
his hounds out he is as certain to start a 
deer as he is to jump a jack rabbit. The 
only method practiced in this section is 
| driving the deer with hounds, and as they 
either cross the road or river at certain 
points, the chances are always in your 
| favor of bagging the game. 
