282 



FOREST AND STREAM. 



[Oct. 31 1889. 



EN ACADIE. 



II. 



FROM out of that group of magnolia trees, 

 Whose waxy blossoms scent the breeze, 

 Shaking their perfumes far and wide 

 All up and down the country side. 

 Whose is that call, with its rhythmic heat 

 Of "Sweetheart, sweetheart, sweetheart, sweet ?" 



Ah! tnat is Gahriel, in search of his mate- 

 Lonely and losing and desolate — 

 Seeking his lost Evangeline 

 From Calcasieu to Lacassine, 

 Calling, to tempt her flying feet, 

 "Come, Sweetheart, sweetheart, sweetheart, sweet.' 



Because he heard she had proved untrue, 



And believed the lie, without more ado, 



For this lack of faith in the maiden's truth 



For a thousand years he must suffer ruth, 



Must wander and search, until he can meet 



His "Sweetheart, sweetheart, sweetheart, sweet." 



So he's taken the form of this little brown bird, 



With the saddest note that ever was heard, 



And he follows still in a bootless quest. 



Calling in vain, in wild unrest, 



Through winter's cold, and summer's heat, 



"Oh, Sweetheart, sweetheart, sweetheart, sweet !" 



Such is the tale the Acadian maid 



Repeats to her love, 'neath the cypress shade, 



And she crosses herself in loving fear 



As she hears the flute-Ilk e notes so clear, 



The same sad burden still repeat— 



"Oh, Sweetheart, sweetheart, sweetheart, sweet." 



hi. 



Puck and Ariel and sprite, 

 Symphony in black and white- 

 Saucy varlet, jocund wag, 

 Tramp, Bohemian and vag— 

 Most incorrigible joker, 

 Of thy fellow-birds a mocker, 

 Scoffer at humanity, 

 Jeerer at man's vanity; 

 Bubbling o'er with riotous mirth, 

 At all things in Heaven or earth, 

 Bandit of the southern pines, 

 Despoiier of my choicest vines; 

 Happy when you slyly prig 

 Choicest pomegranate or fig— 

 Or devour with mocking japes 

 All my ripening Tokay grapes; 

 Gorging on my finest berries, 

 Drunken with the wine of cherries, 

 Laughing at my futile wrath 

 As I glean thy aftermath. 

 Still, bold sinner, all's forgiven, 

 And thy direst sin is shriven, 

 When, from out the orange grove 

 King thy vibrant notes of love, 

 Wiiile the very heavens rejoice 

 In the music of thy voice, 

 And the palpitating air 

 Seems thy ecstacy to share! 



Oh! the dew lies fresh on the clover, 



And sweet is the morning air, 

 The sky hangs lovingly over 



And smiles at a world so fair. 

 The birds and the crickets are singing 



To welcome the morning light, 

 And up from the meadow comes ringing 



The musical call of "Bob White!" 



"Bob White! That's my name! 



I'm not ashamed to own it! 

 I'm plucky and I'm game. 



Fear? I've never known it! 

 Bob White! That's my wife there 



In the mayhaw thickets; 

 We have spent our life there 



Happy as the crickets. 

 Bob White! enjoy to-day, 



Care not for the morrow, 

 Be jolly while you may. 



And laugh at care and sorrow- 

 Bob White!" 



Oh! bonny brown bird of the meadow, 



Ring out, unmolested, thy call; 

 Thou 'rt safe, for the pot-hunter's fell shadow 



On "The Pomegranates" dares not to fall. 

 In orchard, or meadow, or vinery, 



Still welcome to me is the sight 

 Of thy simple, yet dainty brown finery, 



My brave little neighbor, Bob White! 



v. 



Come out upon the gallery 



When the sun has gone down, 

 And hark to the voices 



As the night comes on. 

 Hear that bull 'gator 



With his hoarse, sullen bellow! 

 'Tis his call to his mate, or 



A challenge to 'tother fellow. 

 Ha! there is the answer! 



Now there'll be trouble! 

 Hark! how they roar, 



Now single, now double! 

 "Fight?" of course they wilL 



They just love to fight; 

 Keep it up sometimes 



All day and all night. 

 "Te-rwe, te-rue, te-rue!" 



How shrill and sweet and clear! 

 That's the swamp thrush, calling 



To his love and dear. 

 "That must be a young 'gator?" 



Sounds like one, I know, 

 But it really is a bull-frog— 



Louisiana. 



Weight, ten pounds or so. 

 "Bci-a-a."' That's another frog; 



Used to think 'twas sheep; 

 Many a time I've wakened 



From a midnight sleep 

 Heard those beggars bleating— 



Rushed frantically out- 

 Had my trouble for my pains- 

 Nary sheep about. 

 "Where's that church bell ringing ?" 



That's no bell you've heard, 

 Oaly the lonely voice 



Of the shy cathedral bird. 

 Some say it's the ghost of the bell 



That hung in the chapel de l'Eau, 

 That was wrecked in seventeen-ninety, 



The year of the terrible blow. 

 Blown clear out of existence- 

 Bell weighed a thousand pound- 

 Went like the walls of Jericho - 



Never a trace of it found. 

 Some say the angels received it 



As it crashed down from out the steeple; 

 Some, that le Diable carried it off, 



For the sins of priest and people. 

 But all make the sign of the cross 



As they hear it solemnly toll, 

 For they know that Purgatory 



Is glad o'er another soul. 

 And— "B-z-z-z .'" Ah, here he comes ! 



'Tis the Louisiana 'skeeter! 

 The congregation is dismissed! 



Scatter! in short metre. 



H. P. Ufford. 



OLD TIMES IN CALIFORNIA. 



/ TpHE early hunting experiences of California pass from 

 J_ man to man, but seldom reach the dignity of print. 

 It is only forty shears since the whole State was a wild- 

 erness and overflowing with game. Almost every county 

 has its old veteran grizzly hunter; every valley is full of 

 pioneer farmers who shot elk, deer and antelope in the 

 wild oatfielcls, and wild geese from the doors of their 

 squatter shanties. Some of these stories seem worth 

 gathering up to illustrate the changes which a few years 

 witness. 



In 1849 the finest winter shooting then known in Cali- 

 fornia was "along the Contra Costa shore," on the east 

 side of the Bay of San Francisco, a region now the most 

 thickly settled rural portion of the State. The "bay 

 shore," a strip of country thirty-five miles long, consists 

 of sloughs, low islands, willow swamps, tule and cat- 

 tail fastnesses, an occasional fresh-water "creek," and a 

 few rocky hills set in the midst of the wide marshes. 

 West was the open bay; east was the broad valley, over 

 which Spanish cattle roved, and still further east were 

 the mountains of the Coast Range. 



There were eight or nine professional hunters in the 

 region, sending wildfowl to the San Francisco markets, 

 where mallards sold for $5 a pair. In February, 1852, 

 four of these hunters shipped from San Lorenzo" Creek, 

 and sold as the result of four old-fashioned muzzleloader 

 shotguns, in twenty-five days actual shooting, the fol- 

 lowing amount of game, 125 pairs of wild geese, 53 pairs 

 of canvasback ducks, 60 pairs of small ducks, 13 pairs of 

 widgeons, 41 pairs of spoonbills, 27 pairs of teals, 63 pairs 

 of broad bill ducks, 192 curlew, 207 plover, 48 dowicthers, 

 156 "peeps," 48 snipe and 1 rabbit. This makes a total of 

 1,428 head, which sold for over $800. These men made 

 so much money that they bought farms and retired from 

 the business of pot-hunting. In 1853 an old sea captain, 

 Jonathan Mayhew, went out one November morning to 

 a field near his house and fired two shots into a flock of 

 wild geese which had settled there. He picked up 59 

 geese as the result of the operation. 



In the early sixties, the whole region of which I write 

 was still full of game, but the pot-hunters had nearly 

 deserted it, and had gone to the Solano, San Joaquin and 

 Sacramento regions, where the wildfowl were so abund- 

 ant that the farmers poisoned hundreds of thousands of 

 them. Although so near to San Francisco, there were as 

 yet no club3 of wealthy sportsmen. The "Alameda 

 shore," as it was now called, became the favorite resort 

 of dozens of noted hunters of the time. For ten years 

 there was always good shooting to be had; then the 

 ground was overworked, and being rented in very exten- 

 sive tracts to clubs, is now slowly recovering some of its 

 reputation. 



All through the sixties, every man who went to the 

 schooner landings, or embarcaderos, on the salt-water 

 creeks, took his gun with him. The climate is most ex- 

 quisite here after the first showers. Then comes a warm 

 and perfect Indian summer, dry , clear and beautiful of ten 

 till Christmas. With the first rains, which seldom last 

 more than a day or two. the wildfowl crowd the water- 

 ways and nightly descend on the farmers' stubble fields. 

 In those halcyon days of the early sixties, which every 

 sport-loving son of Alameda county remembers with a 

 regretful sigh, the veriest farmer lad could often shoot 

 wild geese from his wagon box as he drove over the 

 winding, unfenced road across the wide cattle pastures 

 that extended from the wheat fields to the Bay. And, 

 after he had unloaded his wheat or potatoes, he could 

 walk along the bank of the slough and start up flocks of 

 widgeons, spoonbills, teal and mallards within easy shot. 

 In the course of a few years, the young men of the rapidly 

 growing community developed a great deal of the true 

 sportsman spirit. They bought good guns, they discount- 

 enanced pot-hunting and waste, they had an informal but 

 effective a5sociation. Some of the bags they made are 

 still talked of in the valley. 



One favorite plan the boys had was to choose a " half 

 fight moon," and go to the seaward end of the willow 

 marshes, on a row of old Indian burial mounds. We 

 generally built a roaring fire, well hidden in the trees, 

 and sat around it telling stories until nine or ten o'clock. 

 Then we took our stands on the mounds, near to the ends 

 of the willow clumps, and shot the ducks as they flew 

 overhead from their feeding grounds in the stubble fields 

 back of the sloughs. I have often known four good 

 shots to gather in eight or nine dozen in two hours' shoot- 

 ing, and sometimes a good sportsman well situated to be 

 in the line of wildfowl flight would shoot three or four 

 dozen by midnight. The ducks always ' ' flew in streaks. " 

 Between ten and eleven say, those which had been feed- 

 ing in the lowland fields returned and ran the gauntlet 



of fire. Then there was a long break, with hardly the 

 flutter of a wing or whistle of a single bird; then sud- 

 denly without warning, the flocks that had flown further 

 to the upper valley borders came whizzing overhead. 

 Sometimes, just before daybreak, the last of the wander- 

 ers would sweep in on hasty and frightened wings. 

 Night-shooting always has its fascinations for the hunter, 

 but it has especial charms in the warm, frostless Cali- 

 fornia nights where a man can literally shoot in his shirt 

 sleeves, and seldom has his overcoat with him or needs 

 it. The fires we built were for the beauty and mystery 

 of the swift lights and shadows under the willows and 

 along the water channels bordered with tule and wild cane. 



Blinds or shelters were things utterly unknown in those 

 days, and the chief use of a boat was to set the hunter 

 across a slough or creek to some of the islands. You 

 took your gun when the tide was about half full in the 

 channels, and walked over the marsh grass in almost any 

 direction until you came to a "wash" or blind side-chan- 

 nel, of which there were thousands. As you approached 

 it, ducks usually flew up, and gave you a fan; shot, at 

 from 25 to 40yds. In half an hour or less you would 

 have chance at another flock. This, in the phrase of the 

 day, was "marshing for mallards," for mallards were 

 considered the most desirable results of such an expedi- 

 tion, and there was not a day, from October to March, 

 when this plan could not be followed with pleasure. 



Another favorite method of taking a "day with the 

 ducks" was to start s© as to get to the shooting grounds 

 about daybreak. The farms in the valley, along the foot- 

 hills, were none of them more than four miles from good 

 shooting, and many were of course much nearer. Hunt- 

 ers from San Francisco came up by stage and stopped 

 over night at some farm house or village hotel; by 1865 

 there was a railroad skirting the foothills, and giving 

 access to the whole region. The sloughs, which ran in- 

 land past the points of the Coyote Hills — low rocks, then 

 partly wooded, and like islands rising from the marshes 

 — were filled with wildfowl at all hours of day or night, 

 but the houra between daylight and 9 o'clock offered the 

 best shooting "from the rocks." The hunter, there, was 

 safely hidden at some tide-washed point, looking over 

 wide salt sloughs. He usually sat between black rocks 

 and shot at everything that came within reach overhead. 

 The vai'iety of wildfowl was bewildering. Gray geese, 

 white geese, teal, widgeon, spoonbills, canvasbacks, red- 

 heads, mallards, curlew, all came swinging past, cutting 

 off the curve of the slough, and so flying above the 

 smooth hill slope, where, silhouetted against the rose- 

 purple of dawn, they offered most entrancing opportuni- 

 ties for swift shooting. Looking back upon my own 

 boyish experience, I am surprised that so few birds were 

 lost, for it must be remembered that there were not three 

 retrievers in the county at that time. This was owing to 

 the character of the marsh growth. Aside from the wil- 

 low islands and the tule bunches, which could usually be 

 avoided, there was little cover for the wounded birds. 

 The whole country really invited good honest shooting on 

 land at birds passing from one feeding ground to another. 

 Hardly any one cared to row a boat down the sloughs to 

 get into the large flocks three or four miles distant. And 

 so through the early sixties, as I have said, there was no 

 diminution in the numbers of wildfowl. 



Suddenly the pot-hunters came back, for wildfowl were 

 temporarily driven out from the Sacramento sloughs, 

 and in three or four seasons they broke up and destroyed 

 the large bodies of wildfowl that the sportsmen had left 

 undisturbed along the outer islands and sloughs of the 

 bay. This cut off the supplies; the Alameda shore by 

 1875 was one of the poorest of shooting grounds, and it is 

 only of late years that it is recovering its reputation, as it 

 passed out of public into private ownership. 



The abundance of wildfowl all over the valley, so near 

 to San Francisco, for fully twenty years after the discov- 

 ery of gold, and the growth of a large city on its borders, 

 has been a surprise to all sportsmen. The wild geese 

 settled down on the fields in flocks, covering several 

 acres. They were often shot by men on horseback, who 

 rode up within distance before the birds could rise. 

 After the winter rains, ducks often settled down into 

 farmers' door yards, or where there were goose ponds, 

 wild geese were found there mingling with the tame 

 ones. For years, therefore, the wildfowl constituted a 

 great source of food supply as well as sport. Every bit 

 of marsh or swamp or wet willow land, every spring or 

 stream or rod-square pond over the entire upland for ten 

 miles east of the bay shore, was teeming with game all 

 winter. And, indeed, all over California, twenty years 

 ago, the abundance of wildfowl was beyond the concep- 

 tion of modern hunters. It recalled the stories that come 

 down five or six generations ago about the New England 

 coast or about the Chesapeake shores. But here, with 

 the clear, warm, open winters, and the green grass and 

 blooming flowers in December, a sportsman felt in those 

 pioneer days as if it were the earthly paradise. "You 

 never had to go anywhere for game; it always came to 

 you," as the old hunters say to each other when they re- 

 call the past. Charles Howard Shinn. 



The Goose Creek Islanders.— Editor Forest and 

 Stream: I have read and re-read with great relish the 

 notes on the North Carolina coast, and the Goose Creek 

 reminiscences in your last issue by "Chasseur." It is 

 vivid and racy enough and is rigidly true. The writer 

 must have been there on the very ground to give such a 

 graphic description not only of the surroundings, but of 

 the physique and character of those beachcombers. I 

 recognize the. various attitudes of repose and reclination 

 of the male member on wmatever might be handy, the 

 expectoration through the closed teeth, the interior of 

 the cabins and the snuff-dipping old hag. And the grat- 

 itude of these miserable specimens — gratitude of the 

 serpent the husbandman found nearly frozen and took 

 home to his hearthstone. I spent nearly a month with 

 them on the Chicimocomico banks, a narrow stretch of 

 sand beach between Pamlico Sound and the ocean north 

 of Cape Hatteras. These brethren are sui generis, a 

 mean type, but identical in every respect with the Goose 

 Creek Islanders. After having eaten you bare and drank 

 you dry, after you have loaded them "down with gifts of 

 ammunition and clothing, extras that a long life of their 

 intensest energy could never earn for them, and for which 

 they have absolutely done nothing for you, but to lie 

 around and bless you with their ravenous appetite and 

 hideous presence — then when they can render you a 

 slight service will they jump to do it? Not if they know 

 you have a bare copper left. — Jacobstaff, 



