IN HOKKAIDO (YEZO) 287 



the door of the Japanese inn, to everybody's supreme satis- 

 faction. 



The shooting is done out of a flat-bottomed boat, poled or 

 rowed the oars worked not together, but alternately, giving the 

 boat an uncomfortable wriggling motion along the reed-fringed 

 marshy shores, the little creeks, and bays which abound. The 

 lakes are surrounded by hills covered with dense vegetation, 

 which now is superb, in the richest shades of red and yellow, 

 the mass of colour again reflected in the water. If that scene 

 were painted true to nature, the picture would be greeted with 

 smiles of derision, and the painter put down as an absurd 

 sensationalist by those who never have seen Nature when she 

 has clothed masses of maples, vines, &c., &c., in their October 

 dress. There are many islands on both lakes, all very small, all 

 very rocky and picturesque " Japaneesy " all covered with 

 trees, shrub, weeds, and grass, and they very greatly add to the 

 beauty of the whole. Koma-ga-take alone is bare of all vegeta- 

 tion, covered entirely with yellow ashes and scoriae of the last 

 eruption, its sharp peak the higher side of the crater lip 

 rising to a height of 3,860 feet. These lakes and marshes, their 

 lilies, reeds, and weeds afforded excellent feeding-ground for 

 ducks, some of which breed there, while by far the greater 

 number use them merely as a resting-place on their way from 

 Siberia south. We got mallard, widgeon, mandarin, golden eye, 

 large brown ducks, teal, and other varieties are frequently metwith; 

 geese are occasional visitors later in the season. But the sport 

 here also will soon be ruined, as the new railway that curse to 

 sport in out-of-the-way places has already approached the lakes, 

 and the workmen employed on it are felling trees and cutting 

 stone everywhere. As the iron road is about to cross the bigger 

 and best lake, bridged from island to island, the ducks will 

 before long seek out and discover a less noisy place where, un- 

 disturbed by trains, they can make a home and find a resting- 

 place. 



Such a place I visited afterwards, some seventy miles north of 

 Muroran, a huge shallow lake full of weeds and surrounded for 

 miles with reed-covered swamp, where duck were in their 

 thousands and geese many, a paradise for water-fowl of all 

 description. But the difficulty was to get at them ; they were 

 very wild when in the open and hid most effectively among the 



