Forest and Stream 



A Weekly Journal of the Rod and Gun. 



NEW YORK, APRIL 8, 18 8 3. 



COBBESPONBENGE. 

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 garded, No name will be published except with writer's consent. 

 The Editors are not responsible for the views of correspondents. 



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Forest and Stream Publishing Co. 

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material. Fresh blood for the fresh battle is one of the first 

 demands. 



The Board have determined upon a programme of matches 

 intended as preparatory drills, but in the meantime milch 

 work can be done. The spring is now fairly upon us, and 

 already the crack of the rifle is heard every day. Home of 

 the intending competitors for places on the team Ore settling 

 down very finely to work, making big scores with rifles in 

 every respect fully within the conditions of the match. The 

 modification of the conditions which held for the last match 

 has done much to encourage systematic practice, and we 

 shall be disappointed if encouraging scores are not met with 

 from the very start, 



Editorial. 



The Opening Rifle Season. 



Hunting Without a Gun.— iv. 

 The Sportsman Tourist. 



A Sonnet. 



Haunts of the Salmon. 

 Natural History. 



Habits of the Beaver. 



Snake Notes. 



The Birds of Maine. 

 Camp Fire Fuokekings. 

 (IajteBagand Gos. 



Firmer vs. Sportsman. 



Notes on the Quail of Texas. 



A North Carolina Medley. 



The Hunting Bide. 



The Great Deer Destroyer. 



Duck Shooting on the Hudson 



The Ottawa Convention. 



Last Words about the Screed. 

 Sea and River Fishing. 



The Boy Angler. 



Sea axd River Fishixk. 

 Wall Eved Pike. 

 Wall Eyed Pike of the Genesee. 

 The Trout Display. 

 Bass Islands of Lake Erie. 



FlSHOULTCRE. 



The Fox River Fishway Case. 

 The Kennel. 

 "American Kennel Register." 

 Ottawa Bench Show. 

 Pittsburgh Bench Show. 



'I" , ;.■■ .io ■ ■■■:■: ,1- : : 



Ri i'-r.E and Trap Shoottng. 



K,i:m ■ -.:-,■:, t:i! -, '. 



Non-Cleaning Rifle Match, 

 The Trap. 



' '._.": ,■■■:■'•..■ I. 



Y 



. _ D CAI 



Sharpie Yachts. 

 Breadth and Depth. 

 New Craft. 



'[,■:'."(;■• _ : '"..IlflPONDENTS. 



Sportsmen a:sd Farmers.— This is an old and much 

 vexed subject, but as yet by no means settled. In another 

 column we publish a pertinent communication, which is 

 written in a temperate lone and contains many admirable 

 suggestions. There is in reality, as we have reiterated, no 

 cause for quarrels between respectable sportsmen and re- 

 spectable land-owners. When a farmer is churlish and re- 

 fuses to admit a sportsman to his land, the very strong 

 probabilities are that the farmer has at some time been im- 

 posed upon by a man with a gun or rod. There is nothing 

 in the pursuit of agriculture to create an extraordinarily 

 long suffering disposition; and without such a spirit 

 farmer cannot be expected to forgive this rowdyism fr 

 which he may have suffered, and to welcome with open 

 arms the next gunning stranger. But if the sportsman be 

 gentleman, and disposed to employ tact, he can generally 

 succeed in convincing the land-owner of this, and so enjoy 

 the coveted privileges. Our correspondent's story of hi 

 personal experiences is instructive; we hope that others will 

 supplement it by contributing a relation of their own. 



THE OPENING RIFLE SEASON. 



THE Board of Directors of the National Rifle Associa- 

 tion at its regular meeting on Tuesday last elected 

 Gen. U. S. Grant as the president of the association. The 

 post has been vacant since the annual meeting in January 

 last, and after some persuasion the old war general has been 

 coaxed into giving his consent to an election. He is not to 

 do much, apparently, beyond allowing the use of his name, 

 lor nobody, of course, supposes that he will bring much 

 knowledge of shooting matters to that already possessed by 

 ihe workers on. the range. 



The association needs just now a strong popular backing. 

 It needs a liberal fund available at once for the heavy ex- 

 penses connected with the getting up of the team tor Wim- 

 bledon and the sending of it over to the English battle- 

 ground. The match was made in a plucky and 

 commendable spirit by the directors as the repre- 

 sentatives of the American people. It has been 

 thus far a truly international affair. The Americans 

 were defeated last September because with all the talk which 

 has been current here about the native skill with the rifle, 

 we had neglected an important chapter of the art. We 

 have gallery shots so good that the proposed match with 

 foreign riflemen was allowed to fall through by them. In 

 off-hand work and in the finest of long-range shooting we 

 have shown our ability to pile up victory on victory, but a 

 very valuable style of military shooting had not been 

 touched, and this vulnerable point was hit upon by the 

 British riflemen as a fair one to attack. After the accep- 

 tance of the challenge time was so wasted and opportuni- 

 ties so neglected that we suffered a wholesome drubbing. 

 It showed many things, but particularly that we could not 

 win with the rifles then in existence. 



Now we stand on the eve of the preparation for a renewal 

 of the battle. Much has been done during the winter, -as 

 our readers have been informed from time to time. Now 

 we have gnus from which excellent results are confidently 

 expected, and with energetic work on the part of a few men 

 a winning may more than offset the whipping of September 

 last. It will be a point of advantage to have the team com- 

 posed of new men, at any rale of men who have not fre- 

 quented the ranges and tried experiments of various sort in 

 9 desultory fashion, until they are so stuffed with preju- 

 dices and notions that they are most unmanageable as team 



Fou the London Exhibition.— On Thursday, the oth, 

 two of the American staff sailed in the steamer Grecian 

 Monarch for London. They were Lieut. McClellan, of the 

 U. S. Coast Survey, and Mr. Reuben Wood. "Mr. Wood goes 

 out, as our readers are already aware, to arrange and ex- 

 hibit the angling display of America in the care of the U. S. 

 Fish Commission. He bears letters to prominent anglers on 

 the other side, and will sample the game qualities of the 

 trout and the salmon before he returns. He will be back 

 about August 1, and we then hope to hear that he has had a 

 good trial of fishing in foreign waters, and also that he has 

 had an opportunity to witness a casting tournament in 

 England, and perhaps taken part in it. 



The New York Fish. Commission. — Mr. Roosevelt has 

 returned from his Florida trip in rugged health. We met 

 him in Fulton Market looking over Mr. Blackford 's trout 

 display, and he spoke of the trip as a pleasant one. Mr, 

 Green returned some weeks earlier and was at the point of 

 death from pneumonia last week, but has now passed the 

 point of danger . On t lie 24th of last month his death was 

 announced on the bulletin board of the New York Eroiiiig 

 Telegram, but the report was contradicted the next day and 

 we refrained from alluding to it at that critical time. We 

 hope by the. time he reads this that he will be on his feet 

 again. 



The Sunday 'Fishino Clause of the New York Penal 

 Code came up in the Assembly last week and afforded occa- 

 sion for a vast flow of bosh from the sapient Solons who de- 

 bated it. It is not at all surprising, but certainly very 

 humiliating, that the members at Albany should fritter away 

 their time over such trivial things to the neglect of many 

 other matters of real importance. The amendment to allow 

 fishing as a recreation on Sunday was lost by a vote of 50 

 to 42. 



Exo t, (SB Pigeon Shooting.— The farcical Sunday fish- 

 ing debate in the New York Assembly last week has a 

 counterpart in the absurdities of the speeches in the English 

 nouse of Commons fluent the proposed abolition of pigeon 

 shooting. We have a special letter from a London corres- 

 pondent, which will be printed next week. 



The Fox River Fishway Case. — In this case are in- 

 volved some of the important principles of riparian rights. 

 We give in full the able and lucid argument of the counsel 

 for the People. 



"Americak Kennel Reoister."— The lirst number ot 

 the Heijistar will be issued next Tuesday. Its su 

 already assured. 



HUNTING WITUOU1 A GUN.—IV. 



A \ J 1 1EREYER civilization and improvement have, for a 

 ' ' hundred years or so, laid hands upon the couutry 

 Which God made and man for the most part, spoils, there is 

 but little woodland left but that of second growth, and this 

 is yearly dwindling as some new industry arises and calls 

 for trees of size and kind before of little value. Such wood- 

 lands, if they have not the grandeur and solemnity and mys- 

 tery of the primeval forest, have beauty and their seasons 

 of silence and some secrets of their own to keep from the 

 world at large. 



The trees were set in their disorderly order by the oldest 

 and be3t of landscape gardners, who plied her art before 

 Adam delved or Eve span, and whose severe but kindly 

 hand thins, prunes and trains them. She gives them beauty, 

 and in the hush of noon and eventide and night, and in the 

 deadness of winter, such silence that one, being in the midst 

 thereof, may believe himself as far as he would wish from 

 his fellows. She gives them also plants and their flowers, 

 birds and beasts and their nests and lairs and ways of life to 

 hide cunningly. 



For w^hat is left us, let us be thankful— for the trees that 

 since the pioneer's axe laid low the giants of the old days 

 have grown to fair estate, and shade a soil that no plow has 

 rumpled, where the unstirred leaves may lie and molder 

 where they fall and nurture moss and ferns and the shyest 

 wild flowers; where a hare may yet crouch, a grouse drum, 

 a woodcock bore the mold, and where some trees have grown 

 old enough to take squirrels and woodmiee, and raccoons 

 and swarms of wild bees (o their hearts. 



Into such saved places it is good for one to go, weaponed 

 or weaponless. If he leaves his gun at home, he may see 

 more but have less to show for his outing; yet what one has 

 to show for his hunting not always counts highest in the 

 long run. 



One cannot go far in such woods before he will lie re- 

 inded that he is not very much apart from his kind though 

 it of sight and hearing of them. He will come upon 

 traces of the ruthless axe, stumps, chips and wasted wood, 

 1 among the sprouts, the brands and ashes of the chop- 

 pers' tires, or a rank wisp of herds' grass grown up from 

 the chance-sown seed of a team's baiting. 



He may find an apple tree in the midst of the woods, 

 which he shall know more by its blossoms or fruits than b\ 

 its manner of growth, for it has taken on the wild natu- 

 ral ways of its companions, and strives upward toward 

 the sky, mingling its lithe slender branches with those oi 

 the birches and maples. One is first aware of it when, 

 in blossom time, he scents an orchard fragrance in the 

 woods and sees out-of-place flowers aloft wilh all the wild 

 bees about them, or when in autumn he finds the forest 

 leaves strewn with farm fruits. It is like coming upon a 

 sheep astray in the woods, only this strayed one seems 

 quite at home here. However it was planted, by bird or 

 squirrel or wood-ranging cow, or by hunter or chopper 

 who tossed aside the close-gnawed core of his dessert, it is 

 a godsend to present generations of bees, birds aucl ro- 

 dents, audits racy fruit would sting delightfully with its 

 "bow-arrow tang" the palate of him who wrote the history 

 of the wild apple as only one who loved it could. 



But one will rind traces to lead him back far on the I rail 

 of time. Rocks as old as the world with the same kinds ot 

 mosses and lichens that grew on them centuries ago. The 

 stump of an ancient pine, barkless, moss-covered and out- 

 wardly gray, but with the terebinfhim odor and flavor of 

 its prime well preserved in its hollow heart. When its 

 tiny needles first pricked the daylight, perhaps no adven- 

 turer had sailed across seas to these shores. When it, was in 

 its lusty youth what a new old world was this! Hid the 

 great tree go where in colonial times all good pines were 

 supposed to go, namely, "in the masting of his Majesty - 

 navy?'' Likelier it went to the first sawmill built on the 

 nearest stream, and then to the boarding of the thrifty set- 

 tler's barn, where the broad boards, now as gray as the 

 parent stump, shelter to-day the grandson's herds and 

 crops. Many generations of a departed race have trod this 

 undisturbed soil, beneath whose surface the old roots lie 

 just as they writhed their way so lougago, and they are sound 

 yet though dead, good for kindling or a torch. No hunter 

 v,\n look at nor touch them without veneration when he re- 

 members that they have outlived a race of hunters, for 

 every hunter has fellowship wilh all peoples and generations 

 of hunters. That is a "touch of nature that makes all the 

 world akin." 



The descendants of the old live are growing all about line 

 and the ground iscovcred thickly Willi I Ui-ii- fallen leaves, a 



