1861. 



NEW ENGLAND FARMER. 



461 



neighborhood, there was a terrible cry of "mad 

 dog, mad dog !" and sure enough, a "large, black 

 dog" attacked a man, who sprang upon a horse 

 standing by, then he attacked the horse, and in 

 succession two men who were near. Of course, 

 all sorts of weapons were put in requisition, but 

 two or three charges of buck shot from an old 

 Revolutionary musket, gave the poor brute his 

 quietus. This was the second or third alarm that 

 morning, occasioned by the attacks of this mad 

 dog in our neighborhood. He bit several dogs, 

 and attacked three or four individuals, but hap- 

 pily, did not bite the latter. 



It was the heroic conduct of "Trim," in driv- 

 ing off this same rabid dog, that led to his un- 

 timely end — for no confidence could be placed in 

 his soundness, after a combat with an animal 

 known to be mad. 



SEAL HUNTING. 



The pursuit of the great Spitzbergen seal (PJioca 

 barbata,) although it lucks the wild excitement 

 of the chase of the sea horse, is a very delightful 

 amusement. The great seal will never allow him- 

 self to be "caught napping." I do not think I 

 ever saw a sleeping seal which did not, about 

 once in every three or four minutes, raise his head 

 from the ice and look uneasily around ; so that 

 he cannot be harpooned in his sleep, like his more 

 lethargic congener, the walrus. Imagine this 

 greater watchfulness on the part of the seal to 

 arise from the greater cause they have to appre- 

 hend being "stalked" by the bears while taking 

 their siesta ; however this may be, recourse must 

 be had to the rifle before the harpoon comes into 

 play in the case of Phoca barbata, and to make 

 good work with them requires the perfection of 

 rifle-practice, for if a seal be not shot stone dead 

 on the ice he is almost certain to roll or jerk him- 

 eelf into the water, and sink or escape ; and as a 

 seal never lies more than twelve inches from the 

 edge of the ice, the most trifling spark of life is 

 enough. 



The only part of the huge carcass in which a 

 bullet will cause the requisite amount of "sudden 

 death" is the brain, and this, in the biggest seal, 

 is not larger than an orange. A seal will seldom 

 allow the boat to approach nearer than fifty or 

 sixty yards, and a large proportion take the alarm 

 much sooner. Every rifle volunteer and every 

 gunmaker's apprentice who reads this will proba- 

 bly exclaim, "O, there's no diSiculty in that ; I 

 can hit an orange every shot at one hundred 

 yards !" This may be true, my gallant volunteer 

 or skillful gunmaker, but you have not yet taken 

 into account that the boat is heaving more or less 

 from the motion of the waves, and that the slab 

 of ice on which your orange is lying is heaving 

 also ; and this, upon consideration, you will admit 

 increases the "difficulty" a little ; neither Lord 

 David Kennedy nor myself were altogether tyros 

 in the use of the rifle before we began, but we 

 found the difficulty considerable ; however, after 

 a few days we became adepts at it, and rarely 

 missed shooting a seal dead. The rifles we both 

 used were elliptical four-barrelled Lancasters of 



forty-guage. During the last one hundred or one 

 hundred and fifty yards of the boat's approach to 

 the seal the steersman alone propels it by gently 

 paddling it with two oars, one eye on the seal and 

 the other on his oars ; if the seal looks in the di- 

 rection of the boat, he stops rowing, and great 

 care is requisite on his part to avoid coming 

 against pieces of ice, which make a rasping noise, 

 almost sure to attract the attention of the seal. 

 I need hardly observe that the boat must also 

 keep carefully to leeward, as the seal has an acute 

 sense of smell ; and if the advantage of the sun 

 can be obtained in addition, the moments of 

 Phoca barbata are probably numbered. I always 

 knelt in the bow of the boat, and selected my own 

 opportunity to fire, and, the moment the rifle was 

 discharged, all the men rowed with their utmost 

 strength to the spot, where, if the seal showed any 

 symptoms of life, I always darted a harpoon into 

 him ; but, if he seemed quite dead, some one 

 jumped out and struck the hack-pick into his 

 head, and dragged him away from the edge for 

 fear he should come alive again. This is not an 

 unnecessary precaution, as I have known a seal, 

 apparently stone dead, give a convulsive kick 

 over the brink of the ice, and go to the bottom 

 like a sixty-eight pound shot, while his proprie- 

 tors, as they delusively considered themselves, 

 were standing within two feet of him. 



When the seal is fairly dead, all the men ex- 

 cept one get on the ice, and with their knives 

 they strip the skin and blubber, in one sheet, off" 

 his body in a very few minutes. The carcass or 

 "krop" is then thrown into the sea, that it may 

 not be mistaken for a live seal at a distance ; the 

 blubber is laid flat in the bottom of the boat, and 

 you proceed in quest of more, or return to ship. 



A full-sized Spitzbergen seal, in good condi- 

 tion, is about nine and a half or ten feet long, 

 by six or six and a half feet in circumference, 

 and weighs six hundred pounds or upward. The 

 skin and fat amount to about one half the total 

 weight. The blubber lies in one layer of two or 

 three inches thick underneath the skin, and yields 

 about one half of its own weight of fine oil. The 

 value of a seal of course varies with the state of 

 the oil market all over the world ; but, at the 

 time of which I write, oil being unusually cheap, 

 they only averaged about five or six dollars 

 apiece; but still the fact of the animals being of 

 some use, contributed to render the chase of them 

 much more exciting, as nothing can be more 

 distasteful or unsatisfactory to the feelings of a 

 true sportsman than taking the life of anything 

 which is to be of no use when dead. — Seasons 

 among the Sea Horses. 



Administering Medicine to Horses. — I 

 consider the usual method of giving medicine to 

 horses by drenching, as it is called, highly objec- 

 tionable. In this process, the horse's head is 

 raised and held up, a bottle introduced into his 

 mouth, his tongue pulled out, and the liquid 

 poured down. In his struggle, some of the med- 

 icine is quite likely to be drawn into his wind- 

 pipe and lungs, and inflammation and fatal re- 

 sults sometimes follow. A better way is to mix 

 the medicine with meal, or rye bran ; make it into 

 balls ; pull out the horse's tongue, and place a 

 ball as far back in his mouth as possible ; then 



