By T. W. Ingersoll 
Sometimes you come across wild geese when out after something else 
cheerful pastime, you look and feel like 
the frozen murderers in the Eternal Lake 
of ice described in the last part of Dante’s 
Inferno; but you sometimes get geese— 
and you deserve all you get. 
Sometimes you come across wild geese 
when out after something else. I once 
happened to be shooting Wilson’s snipe 
by a marshy creek at quite a distance from 
any large piece of water, when I was 
startled by a loud ‘‘ Honk” of alarm. Look- 
ing around, I saw seven geese, which had 
just flown in over a dense belt of wood 
just behind me and not thirty yards off, 
and at the sight of me had doubled back 
on one another, making a mark as difficult 
to miss as a barn door. I gave them the 
contents of the No. 10 shot cartridges in my 
gun, with about as much effect as if I had 
puffed dust at them out of a pea-shooter— 
their thick-fitted plumage being quite im- 

pervious to the tiny pellets—and they flew 
away, leaving me looking after them 
“like one awakened from an_horrent 
dream.”’ This was provoking, but not so 
bad as the accident which befell a gallant 
captain in one of her late Majesty Queen 
Victoria’s West Indian regiments while 
shooting in Manitoba. The captain, a 
native of Ireland, was returning on a 
country cart with a friend and driver from 
a day’s prairie chicken-shooting, when they 
observed through the growing twilight a 
large flock of wild geese (about sixty of 
them) feeding on a stubble within easy 
range of a large grass-and reed-covered 
slough. The marsh grass was in most 
places two or three feet high, and it was 
at once suggested by the driver that ‘‘’ Those 
geese could be stalked.” 
With Milesian impetuosity the gallant 
captain, uttering the uncompromising words, 
