238 AMERICAN GAME BIRD SHOOTING. 
for, according to the humorous statement of the narrator, 
the musket had kicked so hard that it drove him two or 
three feet into the ground and knocked the moccasins off 
his feet. He intimated that he would not hire savages 
again when out shooting swans, as they did more harm 
than good, by blowing the birds to pieces and destroying 
a lot of beautiful feathers. We had cygnets for dinner 
that day, and though the flesh was somewhat dry, yet it 
was rather palatable; but it took four day’s seasoning in 
the frost to make the adults fit for the table, and then 
they were not very dainty. 
According to my host, who was an experienced wild- 
fowler, the best days for shooting swans are those which 
are windy, as the birds are then extremely loth to take 
wing, and if they do rise, they fly so low and close to the 
land that they may be shot from covert or a sneak-box 
screened with boughs or reeds. They can be bagged in 
narrow streams by sculling rapidly down on them from 
the windward, as it takes them a comparatively long 
time to rise from the water; hence, one may sometimes 
touch them with a gun before they can get away. They 
do not afford much sport before September or October, 
as they moult in July and August, and look so wretched- 
ly poor that few sportsmen would care to shoot them. 
The surest way of making a large bag of swans is to 
“ fire-hunt ” them—that is, to use torches in their haunts 
at night, for as soon as they see the glare they become 
stupefied, and wait until the hunters knock them. over 
with clubs or guns. This is a favorite method of killing 
them with Indians, pot-hunters, and some men who 
would be angry if they were classed with either of these. 
I knew two white men to kill eighteen in one night, and 
a party of five Indians to bag forty-one between dusk and 
midnight. I was spearing flatfish from a canoe by torch- 
light, in an arm of Puget Sound, one night, when two 
swans came swimming towards me from the mouth of a 
