CRUST AND LAKE HUNTING. 533 
entirely alone. They were equally at home every where, ag 
much so as the wild deer they hunted. 
Old Sturge himself is a ‘case’ for any country. He will 
walk forty miles a day with as little trouble as a dandy would 
feel it to be promenading from the Astor to the Broadway 
hotel; and ‘Sturge’ will have the advantage in that, though 
he only carries a pack on his shoulders of sixty or eighty 
pounds dead weight, the dandy is burdened with an unappre- 
ciable quantity of live brass. He goes in and out to‘his 
favorite Lake twice a day, something as if it were “only 
cross the way.”’ He is a helter-skelter, harum-scarum, good- 
uatured, headlong fellow, who is forever blundering into the 
most ludicrous scrapes with wild animals, and yet has man- 
hood enough to come out right end up usually. 
He always has a number of traps set near the Lake. He 
was coming in one morning with one or two old hunters, and 
passing by a trap on the way, found a large bear caught by 
the hind-leg. Without waiting to shoot the creature, or 
indeed thinking at all of it, he rushed upon it with his knife 
to cut its throat. Bruin of course met him with the hug 
fraternal, and then commenced between them a desperate 
struggle. His comrades were too much paralyzed with 
laughter to come to his help, and before he succeeded in 
despatching the bear with his knife, his clothing had all been 
stripped off, and himself badly torn and bruised. 
Nobody on the face of the earth but ‘Old Sturge,’ would 
ever have dreamed of doing such a stupidly reckless thing ; 
but this is only one out of many such madcap capers. How- 
ever, he is pioneering a settlement to Louis Lake most 
effectively, by taking there a large family of children—most 
of them boys, and as hardy as young partridges. He intends 
‘to keep a corner of the shantee for sportsmen, who prefer 
Louis Lake, and the tough, wiry old fellow will hold himself 
in readiness to carry them astride his shoulders—if they desire 
it—thirty miles further into the wilderness. 
