Aprtx 2», 1886.] 



FOREST AND STREAM. 



265 



The guides say, "Give us a limited hounding season and we 

 will aid you against the poachers. Deny this and we are no 

 longer your allies." This is the case as it stands. The pre- 

 text—it does not deserve to be called an argument— that deer 

 may be best preserved by running them with dogs, is too 

 shallow to be worth serious notice. It might be as well 

 claimed that the best way to keep ducks on their feeding 

 grounds would be to turn loose upon them each day a bevy 

 of hawks, or that to make trout plenty in the streams it 

 would be useful to put in a school of pickerel to keep tbem 

 stirring. A further sequence to this claim would be that 

 the farmer or cattle grower desiring to increase his stock 

 should turn into his pasture a pack of dogs to keep the cattle 

 lively and put them ia good multiplying condition! There 

 can be no doubt that if all the interests concerned would unite 

 in supporting still hunting and in discountenancing all other 

 modes, the deer would lose their extreme wildness and be 

 accessible to the hunter at any time during the season when 

 the flesh is suitable for food. But, unfortunately, it is one 

 of the failings of human nature to see things, each man for 

 himself, in the light of his own interest. In this case the 

 public interest conflicts too much with selfish interests to 

 encourage hope of unanimity on any measure. 



It may be that less deer will be unlawfully slain if the 

 guides, in return for a limited season of hounding, will pro- 

 tect them at other times. It is no uncommon thing in mod- 

 ern legislation to set aside principle for expediency. The 

 Legislature will judge for itself whether such a course would 

 be justifiable in the present case. 



The Commissioners will do what the law may enjoin upon 

 them to secure the observance of any enactment the Legisla- 

 ture may make upon the subject. 



ECHOES FROM THE PACIFIC. 



Editor Forest and Stream: 



Always an admirer of your excellent journal, which has 

 done much - indeed its full share — toward elevating and 

 maintaining the standard of sportsmanship throughout 

 America, 1 have been more than pleased to note its strenuous 

 opposition of late to the proposed legislative recognition in 

 New York of the dcspisable practice of bounding deer. If 

 the splendid fight that you are making against that ignoble 

 custom shall fail to impress the lawmakers of the Empire 

 State with a sense of the justness of the cause, then indeed 

 may the friends and advocates of game protection make up 

 their minds to soon bid a fond farewell to the few deer that 

 are left in the forests of the East. This thing of deer hound- 

 ing is not, happily, now practiced to any great extent here 

 in California, still it has not been brought as yet under legal 

 inhibition, and therefore remains as one of the issues over 

 which the real sportsmen of the State will in the coming years 

 have to struggle against legislative stupidity or meanness or 

 both. The general disregard of the importance of game protec- 

 tion is one of the things that has always been a puzzle to me. 

 Somehow or other we have managed to keep upon our Cali- 

 fornia statute books very creditable provisions for the pro- 

 tection of game, but at almost every session of the Legisla- 

 ture a few cranks come near spoiling the whole business and 

 throwing wide open the doors to the game butchers. Four 

 years ago a lot of grangers induced their representatives to 

 insist upon repealing that provision of the game law which 

 protected— or was' intended to protect — wildfowl from 

 slaughter from March 15 to Sept. 15. At the same time 

 another set of representatives from horticultural districts 

 demanded the withdrawal of all protection from the quail, 

 which their constituents claimed were eating up their grapes 

 and other fruits. In neither case was there the slightest 

 cause for alarm on the part of the horny-handed (and thick- 

 headed) gentry. By the time the close season commenced 

 the grain crops were too far advanced for ducks or geese to 

 injure them (you see our grain begins to grow in November 

 or December), and the great army of migratory fowl was 

 broken up and its members en route to the Arctic regions. 

 The few ducks that remain to breed in our marshes can 

 injure nobody, of course, during the summer. 



Neither are the quail responsible for the loss of the few 

 grapes attributed to them. The berries are eaten by other 

 birds, while the quail go to the vineyards to feed upon the 

 bugs and worms to be found about the vines. I venture to 

 say that nobody has ever found a dozen grape seeds in the 

 crops of quail in as many seasons' shooting. I have never 

 found one. Well, the few sportsmen who took interest 

 enough in the matter to argue with the legislators against 

 the absurd demands of the latter's bucolic constituency, 

 found they could make little headway against the current! 

 The "yeomanry of the iand" were too many for tbem, and 

 they had to accept a compromise in favor of the quail. 

 Hence the poor ducks are shot at any and all times of the 

 year, and it is a favorite pastime of a certain class of hunters 

 to go to the ponds iu the marshes in June, July and August 

 and slaughter the broods of young ducks by the wholesale. 

 To the credit of the local clubs in this section and San Fran- 

 cisco, however, be it said, they have done all in their power 

 to persuade men from disturbing the ducks before the 1st of 

 October. The law still says quail must not be shot between 

 March 1 and Oct. 1, but little attention is paid to it in out 

 of the way places. Indeed it was only a few days ago that 

 a railroad man, who has a young vineyard in the foothills 

 some thirty miles from here, said to me, "Say, whenever 

 you want any shooting this summer come up to my place 

 this summer and kill the d— d quail. No matter what any- 

 body says, you shoot all you want to." He was somewhat 

 taken aback when I told him what I thought of such an in- 

 vitation, and was almost speechless with amazement when I 

 challenged him to bet a cigar against $10 that he had ever 

 seen a quail eat a grape. He confessed he didn't know any- 

 thing about quail except that they did come into his vine- 

 yard, aud that something ate his grapes. The fact that 

 scores of other kinds of birds also live in the vineyards, and 

 that jack rabbits come into them nightly in droves, had not 

 concerned him much, because his neighbors had told him 

 that the quail were the grape fiends. 



One little incident will illustrate the blindness with which 

 farmers g© for these little, inoffensive and beautiful top- 

 knotted creatures. On the opening day of the last season a 

 friend and myself went to the foothills, some twenty-five 

 miles off, for quail. Contrary to the rule, there had been no 

 rain in September and the country was dry and parched, and 

 birds very scarce. Late in the afternoon we drove to a large 

 vineyard, owned by a mutual friend, thinking the birds 

 might be there in numbers, where they could find water and 

 cool shelter from the still ardent sun. We hunted that 125- 

 acre vineyard all over without finding a bird. But we had 

 all the grapes we could stuff into us. The great bunches of 

 purple or white berries hung from every vine, and I can 

 assure you the fruit tasted mighty good to us, hot, tired and 



thirsty as we were. (How would you like to spend an hour 

 or two of each day's hunt in such a place, where you would 

 have to steer your way through rows of vines above your 

 knees, bearing their loads of from three to five tons of lus- 

 cious grapes to the acre? You could do it in this part of the 

 State and never be ordered off the place.) Well, when we 

 were about to go the owner expressed surprise that we had 

 found no birds; for, he said, he often encountered them in 

 the vineyard, and the darned things had even gotten away 

 with tons of his grapes. We told him that we had seen evi- 

 dences of ravages among the vines, but thought he must be 

 mistaken about the quail — that we did not bplieve they were 

 the cause of it. It happened that when we left the house to 

 prospect the vineyard, a greyhound sneaked out and fol- 

 lowed us until we returned. " He paid no attention to our 

 dogs, but seemed to be on the lookout for bares. These being 

 scarce, he put in his time tearing off bunches of grapes and 

 eating others from the vines. We watched the brute with 

 some interest, and found that within an hour he had de- 

 stroyed not less than one hundred pounds of grapes; and 

 doubtless this was a part of that hound's daily business on 

 the ranch. His owner, when informed of the above fact, 

 said he had seen the dog occasionally eat a few grapes, but 

 had no idea he was so destructive; and, finally, he admitted 

 that, between the various kinds of birds that frequented the 

 vineyard, the hound, and the rabbits, the damage to his 

 grapes might be accounted for. Now, this was his first year 

 in the country; he had bought the vineyard from the origi- 

 nal owner, and knew nothing whatever of the habits of quail 

 or other residents of the forests about him, but had accepted 

 without hesitation the opinions of ignorant neighbors to the 

 effect that all injuries done to vineyards are chargeable to 

 the quail. 



These are the kind of people who influence legislation in 

 matters of this kind. Only a few years ago some game 

 butchers got around a board of supervisors in one of the 

 mountain counties and induced them to passa local ordinance 

 extending the open season for deer shooting beyond Nov. 1 

 and up to Jan. 1. They found an old and obsolete provision 

 in our codified laws, which — by a far-fetched construction — 

 seemed to give them the power to do. The object was to 

 enable parties to slaughter deer in the deep snow, when the 

 poor things could not get away. The cue was taken in 

 other counties, and deer were killed openly, in defiance of 

 the aeneral State law of 1881, all through the foothills. The 

 infection spread like cholera, and it looked for a time as if 

 every county in the State were going to have its own game 

 regulations, or, rather, that each was trying to outdo the 

 other in facilitating the destruction of the wild game of the 

 State. I fought the efforts of these creatures from the 

 start through the public press, despite the opinions of some 

 lawyers, who held that local boards of supervisors had the 

 right to suspend the State law. Local journals in these 

 mountain counties sided with "the boys" of their respective 

 villages, and denounced me personally, and at least one of 

 the San Francisco dailies, which gave some attention to 

 "sporting" matters, contended that, "unfortunately, the 

 things couldn't be helped." But I knew 1 was right, that the 

 provision in the law of twelve years before, above referred 

 to, was a dead letter in the face of the more recent laws 

 enacted since the new constitution was adopted, which latter 

 expressly provides against all special legislation (for counties), 

 requiring every law to be general in its application. The 

 law of 1881 was general, and it declared that it would be a 

 crime to hunt, take or kill deer "in any of the counties of 

 of this State" between Nov. 1 and July 1 of the following 

 year. 



Well, the fight lasted for a whole season, and then the 

 matter finally got into the courts, and my side of the ques- 

 tion was sustained. By that time the faint-hearted and the 

 doubting Thomases were ready to fall in, and the shout went 

 up all along the line, "1 told you so!" Finding themselves 

 beaten at this game, what did these fellows do — the ones that 

 wanted to run deer into the snowbanks with their dogs, and 

 then shoot or club them to death — but try to prevail upon 

 the Legislature to amend the law so as to ailow all boards of 

 supervisors to make laws for their respective counties. All 

 sorts of subterfuges were suggested in order to evade the 

 constitutional provision against special legislation, but for- 

 tunately there were several well informed, upright sportsmen 

 in the last Assembly — such men as Hazard, of Los Angeles; 

 Coleman, of San Francisco; Munday, of Sonoma; Pyle, of 

 Santa Clara, and others— and the bushwhackers accomplished 

 nothing For all that, deer are killed in the mountains at 

 all seasons by the hide hunters. Thousands are slain every 

 year by these traffickers in illicit merchandise, aided by the 

 gangs of youths from the towns, who swarm through the 

 hills in the summer camping season, 



I intended to refer to the bad effects of hounding deer iu 

 the hills about here some years ago, but I find I am covering 

 too much space. I shall, however, resume the subject in a 

 week or two, although I doubt if any testimony can be given 

 that will be stronger than that published in your latest num- 

 bers. There may be "music" in the baying of a pack of 

 dogs on the trail of a deer in the woods, as some contend, 

 but where will the music come from when the last deer shall 

 be run down and knocked in the head? N. E. White. 



Sacramento, Cat , April 6. 



A DAY ON SHINNECOCK BAY. 



HARRY and myself were to have a day off, and how to 

 spend it had been the subject of our thoughts for the 

 past forty eight hours. Finally I proposed a day's ducking 

 on Shinnecock Bay, to which he readily acquiesced, as he is 

 a thorough sportsman and a very good shot. 



The arrangements were soon made Our guide was Eugene 

 Jackson, whose letter about the foul slaughter of our snipe 

 in the spring has no doubt been read with great interest by 

 the upholders of the Audubon Societv, iu a late issue of 



FOREST AND STREAM. 



We arrived at Atlanticville one Friday evening, and were 

 at once driven to Eugene's house, where* after a hearty sup- 

 per and a little talk about the birds we turned in. We were 

 up betimes the next morning and ready for the ill fated 

 waterfowl. There was but very little wind, and we had to 

 pole almost the whole way across the bay. As the daylight 

 appeared we could see flocks of broad bills, coots and red- 

 heads scattered over the bay, evidently at their morning 

 meal. This looked encouraging, and Eugene thought we 

 ought to have good shooting. When we arrived near the 

 inlet, which was a quarter of a mile or more away, we 

 dropped anchor and commenced to get the batteries ready. 

 Eugene put out the decoys, while his men and ourselves 

 were at work on the batteries. This took us upward of half 

 an hour, and by that time the sun was up and the birds were 

 beginning to fly, 



Finally we ensconced ourselves in the batteries and waited 

 for the birds. The first lot that came along were broadbilJs, 

 and when our guns spoke, four dropped among the decoys, 

 and the rest, with hurried flappings, winged their way to 

 the westward. Then came some coots, then some redheads, 

 and we had good sport. 



"Here comes a single broadbill," said Harry, "you take 

 him." 



On came the ill-fated canard— bang, bang— not a feather 

 stirrer!, by thunder! 



"Yes there fc. too," said Harry, "see, he's going down; 

 there, he's struck water!" as the bird fell with a splash, and 

 lay still. So they came, and by noon we had thirty four 

 bird*, redhead, broadbill, boobies and coots. 



We signaled to Eugene, and he came, and gave us our 

 dinner cans, and after sailing round and picking up oux 

 birds, he left us to do some more shooting. 



It was now comparatively dull, as the afternoon flight had 

 not begun, but about 3 o'clock the birds begun to come back, 

 and then the shooting was better, but not so good as iu the 

 morning. That afternoon we bagged about fifteen birds, 

 mostly broadbill and boobies. When Eugene came for us, 

 about 5 o'clock, our grand total was fifty-one birds, counting 

 in some that Eugene had shot. We got the batteries and 

 decoys aboard in a short time, and started for home, helped 

 along by a brisk sou'west breeze. 



1 may as well say here, that, if any one wants a good 

 guide, go to Eugene Jackson. He'll give you good board, 

 and, if there's any shooting, you may be sure he'll give you 

 as good as there is on Shinnecock Bay. 



We were well satisfied with our day's sport, and went 

 home feeling better for the short respite on our monotonous 

 city life. J. Wendell, Jr. 



ABOLISH SPRING SHOOTING. 



Editor Forest and Stream: 



It is not my intention to overload the waste basket that 

 leads me to write you again, but knowing that your good 

 paper is always in the lead in pushing any cause that is for 

 the interest of our true sportsmen, I wish to ask if you will 

 not lend a helping hand in stopping spring shooting of all 

 kinds. 1 have just returned from a four days' pleasure trip, 

 and will own that I was guilty of shooting ducks, but let 

 me add that the bag made by two of us in the four days 

 was less than that made by many in three-quarters of a day. 

 I realized more fully than ever before tue harm done by 

 allowing the war on our game to go on* in the spring. 



I know that the pot-huuter will object, but what of that; 

 he would shoot the mother duck while feeding her young, 

 or steal the eggs and sell them before they were hatched, but 

 I am sure thai every true lover of the sport will gladly put 

 his shoulder to the wheel and help along so noble a cause. 

 Let us hear from our brother sportsmen from all along the 

 line, and see if ther-; is not some way to check this growing 

 evil. 



It is folly to argue this question in the least. If spring 

 shooting continues we will soon have no shooting at all. 

 What stronger or more forcible proof does any one want 

 than the lesson taught by allowing the thieves to trap and 

 slay our pigeons? Yet the war goe3 on, and in a very short 

 time that splendid bird will be numbered among the things 

 of the past. Look at the game markets in our large cities 

 to-day. Count the dozens of ducks that come in, and then 

 count the thousands of poor birds that are allowed to spoil and 

 find their way to the dump pile. But I have said enough; 

 let others better fitted to do the cause justice come to the 

 tront and help to keep the stone rolling. I am sure we are 

 in the right, and have on_our side the God of justice and 

 humanity. Nimrod. 

 Batavia, 111 , April 13. 



FLIGHT OF BULLETS. 



Editor Forest and Stream: 



Reading of the erratic flight of bullets brings to my mem- 

 ory an incident in my own experience. In my youthful 

 days I became the happy possessor of a single-barrel muzzle 

 loading shotgun, "Indian Chief" we used to call it. It had 

 been changed from flint lock to a percussion cap gun, aud 

 many a day's sport did I have with it. In an unfortunate 

 moment one of my younger brothers suggested the idea of 

 gettiug a pair of mouids and casting some bullets for it. 

 The moulds were procurred and the bullets cast. They 

 weighed about one ounce each. Wishing then to test the 

 powers and accuracy of the old Chief, we set to work aud 

 made a target, which cousisted of aninch pine board marked 

 off with circles and a bullseye. 



We lived at that time iu the village of H, and were sur- 

 rounded by neighbors, the nearest of which, on the right, 

 was a Dr. V., whose house was ouly a few feet distant. 



After finishing the target I went out behind the coach 

 house and placed it against a small building. A large garden 

 and lawn separated us from our neighbor on the lett. I 

 loaded the Cuief with the usual quantity of powder, and 

 rammed the big bullet down good and solid, then stepped 

 across the lawn and garden, aimed at the bullseye and let 

 her flicker. The idea never entered my youthful head that 

 the bullet would more than pass through the target. I 

 crossed to examine my target, and was rather surprised to 

 find that the bullet had passed entirely thiough, more sur- 

 prised to find that it had passed through the two sides of the 

 building, behind which stood a hogshead used as a receptacle 

 for rubbish. Upon tracing the bullet's flight I found it had 

 passed through two sides of the hogshead, thence through a 

 picket on the fence dividing our lot from the doctor's. 



Then my hair began to rise. 1 examined the side of the 

 doctor's kitchen and saw the bullet hole there, and then I 

 legged it for the house with my gun, told my brothers to 

 scatter, stowed away the Cbhf and became intensely 

 interested in my studies. A few moraents later a ring at ihe 

 door bell became more interesting, and then I heard the 

 doctor's voice inquiring from my mother of her hopeful's 

 whereabouts. 1 was summoned from my intellectual pur- 

 suits and was asked a few leading questions, the result of 

 which was that I was invited to accompany the doctor to 

 his house. He showed me into the kitchen, pointed out 

 where the bullet had entered, having passed through weather- 

 boards and plaster, and making its exit on the opposite side, 

 passing through plaster and weather-bo'irds agaiu, just miss- 

 ing the pump on the outside, aud entering the rail of a 

 picket fence close to the pump and passed diagonally 

 through it. 



It did not need the doctor's lecture to thoroughly scare me 

 and impress on my mind the criminal foolishness of target 

 practice within the bounds of a village. At-, 



Gravenhdrst, April 19, 



