THE BIRD OF THE HOUR 
The Canada Goose 
BY REGINALD GOURLAY 
“ylu.L about the craiti- 
“| est, the most wary of 
e_] all his wary kind—and 
Ll having moreover the 
eS | Merit of being remarka- 
~ & “+= bly good to eat, unless 
he happens to have 
+ been ‘‘a many wintered 
bird that led his clanging legions home”’ 
from North to South and vice versa for 
years and years, when he is tough beyond 
words—your Canada goose is surely, at 
this time of year, ‘‘the bird of the hour.” 
Tough and useless a fowl as he is except as 
a trophy, the knowing hunter always tries 
to bag the ‘leader,’ or the old gander 
in the van of a flock, first of all if he can; 
knowing that without him, the others will 
- be—comparatively speaking—‘‘as sheep 
without a shepherd.” But it is not easy to 
bag the leader of a regiment of wild geese. 
It is, of course, easier than finding the 
North Pole or leading a Christian life, 
but not much. 
I did it once ( hot the old gander lead- 
ing a flock of wild geese, I mean) in a 
dense fog, when for the time the cunning 
of these fowl is comparatively useless, 
and they fly about in bewildered and noisy 
circles. After bagging this Nestor, I ac- 
quired seven of his younger relatives with 
comparatively singular ease. I will never 
forget the wild commotion in that great 
flock of wild geese—their startled “honk- 
ing” and cackling as they flew about in 
wild and devious circles through the dense 
bank of fog, only lighted up by the pink 
flashes of the hunter’s destroying gun, 
and only visible even to hm when no 
farther than twelve or fifteen yards off. 
But such scenes and chances rarely occur. 
There are many other species of wild 
geese in North America besides B. cana- 
densis for this instance, the greater snow 
goose, the white-fronted goose, mostly 

abundant in the West and Northwest; 
the brant goose of Nova Scotia, New 
Brunswick and the North Atlantic sea- 
coast, and the Hutchins goose, abundant 
in Manitoba. However, as the Canada, 
or gray, goose is the finest, most abundant 
and most widely distributed, and more- 
over because it is the fowl most frequently 
shot by the sportsman of the Eastern and 
Middle States and Canada, I shall speak 
solely of it in this paper. 
The vast multitudes of these splendid 
fowl that I have seen in the Northeastern 
wilderness of rivers, marshes and muskegs 
on the slope toward Hudson’s Bay and 
about Abittibi Lake and River almost 
passes belief. I am told that they abound 
just the same in Alaska and in the far 
Northwest; in fact, that the wild goose is 
to be found during the summer and early 
fall in similar vast hordes on a certain area 
practically right across the great American 
continent. I know that in the Abittibi 
region, where I had the pleasure of be- 
holding the Canada goose on his native 
heath or muskeg, there was no hour in 
early October—night or day—when the 
sonorous clang of this noble wildfowl 
could not be heard. And even so far 
south as Jack’s Lake, beyond Peterboro, 
Ontario, when I was there with a party 
deer-hunting in early November, a good 
many years ago, the belated flocks of wild 
geese flew over our camp southward night 
and day; and one of my comrades brought 
down two or three by perseveringly firing 
his rifle into their dense flocks. 
Now it may be asked, “‘Why if they 
swarm so in the North are not more of them 
seen in their annual migrations over the 
States ?’? For several reasons. For one, 
the aerial roads they follow in their long 
migratory voyages are not confined to the 
seashore or its vicinity; the flocks pass 
over the interior of the whole vast con- 
