SHARP-TAILED GROUSE, ETC. 187 



the nest of the sooty grouse among quaking aspen tim- 

 ber or among the willows and tall grasses near an upland 

 brook. The favorite spot is beneath the wide-spreading 

 roots of a hill-side pine, and 1 have found one nest remote 

 from heavy timber, beneath a mountain mahogany. 

 While the sharp-tail prefers grassy slopes, the blue 

 grouse haunts the rocks. The males, especially, look for 

 rocky points during the season of incubation, and one 

 and another will perch upon a commanding pinnacle, 

 and while ostensibly acting as a sentinel, will court the 

 admiration of all observers. As a rule, nine to twelve 

 eggs are found in a set, and the period of incubation is 

 eighteen days. The young chicks remain with their hen 

 for a week or two, in close proximity to the place where 

 they were hatched, and when they get sufficiently strong 

 to make a short flight, their mother takes them down to 

 the willow-fringed stream . Their food, at this tim e, is much 

 like that of the sharp- tailed grouse, though they are 

 rather more partial to insects, and will wander away from 

 the thickets to some grass-grown park in search of grass- 

 hoppers. Later in the season, their food consists of ber- 

 ries, and they are especially fond of the seeds of the 

 helianthus. While with the young, the note of the hen 

 is very much like the cackling of a common barn-yard 

 fowl. 



August comes, and now the tyJiee cullaw-cullaw (the 

 chief- bird of the Indians) is in prime condition, and equally 

 interesting to gourmand and sportsman. Two months 

 later the flesh will begin to assume a resinous flavor, and 

 by the 1st of January par-boiling with onions will fail 

 to take away the taste of spruce gum. Rare sport it is, 

 in the bracing morning atmosphere of early autumn, to 

 shoulder a twelve-gauge gun, and with a good dog beat up 

 the thickets about a mountain brook, or skirt the heavier 

 pine timber of the uplands. Hunt the coolest places, is 



