5" 



RECREATION 



Chase, who is the game and fish warden of 

 Bennington County, and incidentally a 

 transplant oil Western man, to see " the' only 

 bunch of quail in Vermont," and, as I un- 

 thinkingly remarked to some one, who want- 

 ed to know, to catch a red* fox by the tail 

 and take his photograph. The open season 

 on quail in Vermont includes four months; 



warden, and this probably the only covey 

 in the State. The snow, knee-deep, with a 

 tough crust at ten inches. Thermometer 

 ranging around zero. A four-months' open 

 season! O temporal Oh, the devil! 



Deputy Galusha took us 1 ,, through his 

 own particular woodcock cover, and said he 

 had almost always good shooting at flight 



DEER COUNTRY IN WINDSOR COUNTY, NEAR WOODSTOCK 



just why, Chase, nor I, nor any one else, 

 cannot explain. There is no closed season 

 on foxes, and I had ample assurances that 

 there were among the Timid Ones aplenty 

 who would pay handsomely (I doubt it) to 

 see even the mangiest young fool reynard 

 that ran grasped by the tail by the hand of 

 man and held for his portrait. The Timid 

 Ones do not " savvy" our little Western 

 pleasantries. If there is really any man 

 who, above all others, must be " shown," 

 I believe he lives, not in Missouri, but in 

 Vermont. 



'; Assisted by Deputy Warden Galusha, of 

 Arlington, and his good blue pointer, we 

 eventually found the birds, a covey of eight- 

 een. They were using in the brush-grown 

 fence-rows of a hillside farm (I won't tell 

 where) and I was told were being fed regu- 

 larly by the neighboring farm folk and by 

 the school children. The only sportsman 

 who was interested in them was the deputy 



birds beginning with the moon of October. 

 We put up here and there a "partridge," 

 and crossed so many fresh fox tracks that I 

 persuaded Dave to take his dogs out after 

 dinner, despite the frightfully bad going. 



There were Brownie and Nailer and Tim, 

 venerable old Tim, with mustaches like 

 a wirehair. Chase and I borrowed, between 

 us, a single-barrel gun, and Dave took us to 

 a snow-covered hillside pasture, where he 

 said was a deceased calf that had been food 

 for foxes. The dogs visited the rendezvous, 

 but they said never a thing. Tim com- 

 menced to tug at something which would not 

 come loose, and, being deaf, he could not be 

 persuaded to come away. We hoped Dave 

 would put the dogs into the cedars, in the 

 valley, where they might rout out a fox that 

 had been crossing from the other ridge and 

 stopped to hunt cottontails. But he made 

 us go along down with him , to make sure of our 

 having no advantage over him. And so it 



