364 



RECREATION 



interest in a good game preserve at so little 

 expense. 



Now, dear Dan, when I commenced I did 

 not intend to write a biography, and I have to 

 beg your pardon for this intrusion. 



With best wishes for your success with 

 Recreation, I am most sincerely yours, 



Charles Fenton. 



DUCKS IN THE NORTHWEST. 



In front stretched a wide expanse of rank 

 slough grass, an immense sea of green, rip- 

 pling in every breeze ; behind was the level 

 prairie. I was fresh from the crowded, dusty 

 thoroughfares of a large eastern city and 

 everything was strange and delightful to me. 

 Gophers that stood motionless on the little 

 mounds of sun-baked earth in front of their 

 burrows, into which they shot head foremost, 

 if I approached too close ; curious, flat-look- 

 ing badgers, sneaking^ coyotes, prairie chick- 

 ens, ducks and geese ; all these I had read 

 and dreamed of often, and now I was see- 

 ing them for the first time. 



I waded into the slough, which was waist 

 deep in most places, but as the bottom was 

 hard and the water warm, it did not cause 

 very much discomfort. It was late in the 

 afternoon and I had promised to bring home 

 a duck for each member of the family where 

 I was staying. At first it seemed too easy. 

 Mallard and shoveller were getting up on 

 all sides. Every time I took a step there 

 would be a succession of quacks and a swish 

 of wings. I stopped several mallard, but 

 could not find them in the long grass. As I 

 did not want to waste any more ducks, I 

 pushed on through the tangled grass for an- 

 other two or three hundred yards, where 

 all the ducks that I put up seemed to be 

 pitching. I found a long narrow piece of 

 open water black with ducks. At my sudden 

 appearance they got up with a roar of wings 

 that almost deafened me. I was so interested 

 in watching them that I forgot to shoot. 



I crouched down behind a bunch of grass 

 and waited, with the warm slough water 

 within an inch of my cartridge belt. In a 

 few minutes the ducks started to come back, 

 in pairs, singles and small flocks. Every time 

 they passed over the pond I sent an ounce 

 and an eighth of No. 7 chilled after them, 

 and they generally stopped short. It must 

 have been a laughable sight to see me floun- 

 dering out into the dirty water that splashed 

 in my eyes, my ears, and my hair to secure a 

 fluttering duck. It was not a very long time 

 before six were floating in the water 

 beside me. Mallard, shoveller, pintail and 

 blue bill; they made a heavy pile to carry 

 five miles across the rough prairie. 



I knotted their legs together with slough 

 grass and started to work back through the- 

 slough. With the load of ducks it was much 



harder work than I had bargained for. The 

 long, tough grass was knotted and laced to- 

 gether like a hammock, and often I had to 

 drop the ducks and kick a passage through. 

 When at last I did reach terra firma I sat 

 down by the edge of the slough and had a 

 long rest. 



The sun, a great orange ball, was sinking 

 below the fringe of ragged purple clouds on 

 the horizon. The wet grass was glistening as 

 each blade caught the last gleam of sunlight. 

 I sat watching three ghostly white sandhill 

 cranes standing motionless by the slough un- 

 til the pink reflection on the western horizon 

 had turned to a deep orange and the purple 

 clouds to black. 



Fighting hordes of hungry "Jersey" mos- 

 quitoes with both hands occupied is no cinch, 

 as I found out before I reached the house. 

 During supper the farmer remarked that I 

 was a d long time getting those ducks ! 



In the part of Assinaboia where I was 

 staying the ducks are seldom disturbed. Oc- 

 casionally a farmer would walk down to the 

 slough and discharge his old Snider musket, 

 loaded with B. B., into a flock on the water, 

 pick up the dead birds and leave the wounded 

 to struggle into the grass. That is the ex- 

 tent of the shooting done. The regular flight 

 of geese had not started when I was there, 

 but I often saw a small flock pitch into one 

 of the ponds in the slough. Yellow leg and 

 other sandpipers are there in thousands, coot 

 and rail infest the slough in myriads, and in 

 the winter antelope are often seen. It is truly 

 a sportsman's Eden. J. A. M. 



BUFFALO IN THE "FIFTIES." 



Editor Recreation : 



I read with a great deal of interest Captain 

 Dixon's paper in the July number, having 

 had something to do with these buffalo my- 

 self. 



I first began to hunt them when a boy of 

 16, on the plains north of Fort Laramie. I 

 was a tenderfoot then, just out from the East, 

 but I had a good teacher in a Teton Sioux 

 boy of my own age. He taught me to hunt 

 buffaloes. This was in 1855, when there were 

 still plenty of them to hunt. I saw a single 

 herd of them that year that our men esti- 

 mated to contain 275,000, and the man mak- 

 ing this estimate was capable of doing it. He 

 was a civil engineer from the East. 



For several winters just before we killed 

 the last of our buffalo, I did my hunting for 

 them in company with the Comanche Indians 

 on the Texas Panhandle. 



Captain Dixon seems to think, although he 

 does not exactly say so, that the same herds 

 of buffaloes ranged clear from the Rio Grande 

 to the far North, at certain seasons each year. 

 Others think that they don't, but I have al- 

 ways held to the opinion that there were two 



