252 With Rod and Gun in New England 



CHAPTER XIII. 



We Boys it* Winter. 



By Major FRED. MATHER. 



Just half a century ago I was a boy of fourteen. That's not so very 

 long a time, as I look back upon it and think of the fun we had. Some- 

 how the boys of today don't seem to get as much out of boyish life as we 

 boys did, at least they do not have so much fish and game near the large 

 cities as we found. In early spring we would often take more perch, pick- 

 erel and other fishes than we could carry home, and then came the flight of 

 wild pigeons, now gone with the herds of buffalo before the destructive 

 methods of the netter for shooting-matches, and the skin hunter. 



Fish and game were plenty then as compared with that of to-day, 

 in the same locality, near Albany, N. Y., and we boys contented ourselves 

 with fishing during the summer, after the pigeons and ducks had gone. 

 The fall months were divided between fishing and the shooting of pigeons, 

 ducks, rail, shore-birds and squirrels. I had read of the big game in the 

 West, and a few years later went for it, and came back to the old grounds 

 disgusted with the butchering of the buffalo which I witnessed, and the 

 death of one individual, I am glad to say, is the extent of my responsibility 

 for their extermination. My early disposition to wander has broken out 

 now, and I will go back to boyhood's days, where I started. 



John Atwood was a long-legged village boy who was a couple of years 

 older than I, and who knew every swamp and thicket, stream and lake, for 

 miles around. John much preferred tramping the woods to going to school, 

 and I looked up to him with admiration. When the suckers ran in the 

 spring John taught me how to snare them with a copper wire ; when the 

 snow fell he showed me how to take a rabbit with a spring-pole, or in a 

 box-trap. These things were not forbidden by law in the time of which I 

 write, and I thought them the highest form of sportsmanship. We boys 

 measured a sportsman by the amount of game he killed ; to-day we call 

 him a "game hog " if he kills too much, or kills it by spring-poles or box- 

 traps. Pardon me, I will again try to get back to the starting point. 



A few freezing nights had come and some of the more venturesome 

 boys had tried their skates on the small ponds, for the Hudson was yet 

 unfrozen. John Atwood said to me : " You dassent go down to Kinder- 

 hook lake and fish for pickerel through the ice." We made no distinction 



