416 



FOREST AND STREAM. 



[Dec. 11. 1890. 



couldn't get across the bridge and had to lie there for 

 several hours. Finally another train came up to the other 

 end of the bridge and" they transferred to it. This was a 

 slowish sort of train, and at one of the stations Mr. Smith 

 got off to walk around a while, and leaned against some- 

 thing thinking till the train pulled out and left him. He 

 being the only one who knew where the grounds were 

 the remaining two spent about $50 telegraphing for him 

 at every station where they stopped. They got no word 

 till they reached Streator, where they were wired to wait 

 for the next train. The thoughtful man got in about 

 midnight, and they all went up to Alf Kennedy's and got 

 supper. They hadn't gotten to Pekin yet, and finally 

 they concluded they didn't want to go to Pekin, so they 

 took the early morning train back to Chicago. But they 

 didn't like to face their friends so soon after starting on 

 a quail hunt, so they took the next train down to Cum- 

 berland marsh on another road and in another direction 

 and went fifty miles on that trip. Everybody knows 

 there are no quail on Cumberland marsh, and so Charlie 

 Gammon didn't see a quail or come anywhere near seeing 

 one on his eventful but not very restful quail hunt. The 

 boys annoy him a good deal about this hunt, and it took 

 a good deal of persuasion to get him to say anything 

 about it for publication. 



There are beginning to be a good many indications that 

 the hunting season is about over and the lying season just 

 beginning. Now there's Eddie Price, the gray -haired 

 criminal who told that story about the duck that he filled 

 so full of shot that it sunk. This season Mr. Price lias 

 had another singular experience, which goes to show how 

 wonderfully skilled one can by long practice become at 

 shooting, and other things. This is the story of Eddie 

 Price's two teal holes, as now current. 



"I was shootin' down on the Kankakee marsh, above 

 English Lake." said he, "an' there was pretty good chance 

 o' teal coming down the river. They would leave the 

 river and skate across one bend, right where the rice and 

 flags were the thickest. I got out in there, me an' another 

 fellow, an' knocked down a few, but we see it was no use, 

 for the cover was so thick no man on earth could find a 

 duck after it was knocked down. Out to my left was 

 two little pond holes in the marsh, 'bout as big as a room, 

 each one of 'em, and "oout eight or ten yards apart. The 

 teal was a-flyin' right over them little water holes, and 

 I see if I could knock 'em down in there, I could get my 

 birds. So I crawls up so'st I was about 45yds. from the 

 first hole and 50 some from the second. I begun to shoot 

 and the birds begun to fly, and every time a flock flew 

 over them there pond holes I knocks bne bird down into 

 the first pond hole with my right barrel and swings on 

 ahead and knocks down a'other one into the second pond 

 hole with the left barrel. By that way I saved most of 

 my ducks, 1 s'pose, for in the evenin 1 1 picked up B\ teal 

 out of the first hole, 'n 30 out of the second. I alius 

 thought 1 held a little too far ahead on one teal that was 

 goin' across the second hole. 1 only shot 04 shots and I 

 got 61 birds, but I hadn't if been particler to drop my birds 

 in them there pond holes, 1 wouldn't have found two 

 dozen out of all I killed, though mebbe I'd a killed more 

 in the 64 shots, 'cause I could of bunched some as they 

 went over." 



Mr. Price has another s( ory about a grey hound of his that 

 used to set prairie chickens, "an' bein' so rangy, you know, 

 was the best chicken dog you ever saw;" but that is quite 

 . another story by itself. 



Dec. 4,— From the St. Clair Flats Mr. U. G. Huff writes 

 again that last week plenty of ducks were in but were 

 lying out in Anchor Bay and not moving, so that no 

 shooting could be had. 



Mr. F. A. Howe and a party of friends will take their 

 regular winter mallard hunt in February. They go to a 

 piece of land near Fountain Bluff, 111., below Cairo on the 

 Mississippi, where they think they have about as good 

 mallard country as can be found. 



At their business meeting Tuesday last the members of 

 the English Lake Club elected the following officers for 

 the ensuing year: President, A. M. Fuller; Vice-President, 

 J. E. Adams; Secretary, A. W. Cobb; Treasurer, R. W. 

 Hosmer; Executive Committee, A. M. Fuller, W. B. 

 Chatfield, Abner Price. English Lake Club had the mis- 

 fortune to have their marsh burnt off three years ago, 

 killing down the feed badly. This fall they will plant a 

 large quantity of wild rice, John Gillespie tells me that 

 they obtain this rice in Chicago and pay $2.50 a bushel 

 for it. As was earlier announced, this club has had out 

 policemen on their marsh this fall, and these did great 

 service in warning off camping parties and pulling up 

 muskrat traps. Muskrats must be preserved if a good 

 mallard marsh is wanted, for they cut out holes in the 

 dense reeds and give the birds better chances to use on 

 the marsh. There are three natives near the marsh 

 who are the w r orst troubles in trapping rats. Many of 

 their traps are confiscated, but that won't stop their spear- 

 ing rats through the houses after the marsh freezes. It is 

 likely that English Lake Club will try diplomacy and hire 

 these men as patrols and guards next season, paying them 

 more than they can make elsewhere. 



Mr. Sam Booth, in company with Mr. Alex T. Loyd 

 and a number of others, will' spend the holiday season 

 camping out, probably in a cabin boat on the Missouri 

 River, down South, and they should have a very enjoya- 

 ble time. 



We are having snow here now. it has been intermittent 

 for three days, and though the weather is not unpleasantl v 

 cold, it would seem that the ducks would largely pass on 

 south from here before long. It has not been much of a 

 duck season. The boys have not gotten excited very 

 much over duck hunting for some reason. There has 

 been an exceptional interest among Chicago shooters in 

 live-bird trap shooting this season. The stir of the Kansas 

 City match has not yet died down. The boys up at 

 "Billy's" talk of it still. A day or so ago, up there, I 

 found a grotip of them gathered around big Ben Dicks, 

 who had just received from Andy Thomas, his opponent 

 in the Kansas City shoot, an elegant embossed card show- 

 ing the score, similar to that presented Col. Felton by Jim 

 Riley. Everybody is talking trap, and this saves the 

 ducks, which is all very well. As is known, there was to 

 be an effort made this next session of the Legislature to 

 pass a law prohibiting five bird shooting at the traps, but 

 it is not thought now that such a law can be passed as the 

 Legislature now stancly. 



The quail also have gotten off easy this fall, and if we 

 do not have so terrible a winter as it is predicted we will 

 have, the stock for next year bids fair to be very good. 

 1 do not hear of any very startling bags. A son of Mr. 



J. J. Jeffreys got 30 on a late trip into Indiana, below 

 Newton, last week. 



Some few deer have been killed by Chicago men, 

 doubtless a great many that we do not hear of. I believe 

 I have mentioned that the W. L. Sbepard party got two 

 deer in their trip in the North Peninsula in October, Mr. 

 S. B. Chase got a fine buck in early November north of 

 Oconto, in Wisconsin. Mr. Thos. Dennaha also got a 

 good buck in his northern Wisconsin hunt. 



Mr. Wm. Mitchell, a druggist of Oconto, Wis., has just 

 sent down to his friend Hank Smith, of this city, a very 

 fine head for mounting. It is a four-year-old buck, and 

 a beauty. Dick Turtle, who will mount it, says it has 

 been skinned in the neatest and most careful way he ever 

 saw. The skin of the head and neck has never been split 

 at all. but just rolled back over the neck. A head for 

 mounting should never be split up the neck for skinning. 

 The best way is to cut up the back of the neck to a point 

 midway between the horns, and then make a cross cut 

 from the base of the one horn to the other. The skin 

 should then be stripped off entirely, and salted well. The 

 bones can then be cleaned more thoroughly than when 

 the skin is left attached at any point. This is what a taxi- 

 dermist told me, at least, one time when I took a buffalo 

 head in for mounting. This head had been skinned off 

 all except a little strip between the horns, where the salt 

 couldn't get, but the bugs could. In the winter it would 

 not make so much difference. 



Dec. 6. — A member of a prominent South Water street 

 commission firm told me yesterday that the receipts of 

 game for this fall had been the lightest known for a long 

 time, if not the lightest ever known. Ducks have come 

 mostly from western Minnesota, and a few from the great 

 freezers around Spirit Lake and other points in north- 

 western Iowa. The non-export laws of all these north- 

 western Stat* s are simply dead letters. "Last fall," 

 said this gentlemen, "the supply of venison, quail and 

 prairie chickens on the market was the largest for 15 

 years. Game was very cheap and much of it was put 

 down in the freezers. The deer that you see displayed 

 on the street this fall are nearly all out of the last year's 

 cold storage. We think that last fall's unusual abund- 

 ance was due solely to the opening up of the Oklahoma 

 territory, at least the bulk of our shipments came f i om 

 there." 



In other words, the game of the Indian Terr ory is 

 practically gone already. m 



Mr. T. S. Boykin writes from Arkansas City, on the 

 line of the Nations, to Mr. A. Hirth of Spalding's, this 

 city, that he has within the month of November killed 

 1,500 quail to his one gun, and states that 20,000 quail 

 have during the past month of November been shipped 

 from that one station to the markets of St. Louis and 

 Chicago. Would all those birds have been killed if they 

 could not be sold? And if they can be sold are they not 

 going to be killed? 



The gentleman above named has also a letter from his 

 friend, Mr. Wm. Flaccus, of Pittsburgh, Pa., who is 

 lately back from a very pleasant trip in Germany. Mr. 

 Flaccus has two brothers-in-law, who are both ober- 

 foresters on estates, the one in the Rhone district and 

 the other in the Spessart Gebirge, and he writes very 

 entertainingly about the abundance of game in their 

 districts. The deer are so abundant as to cause serious 

 damage to the crops of the peasants, for which the latter 

 always exact payment, both parties resorting to arbitra- 

 tion when the amount can not at once be agreed upon. 

 One keeper had sold 4001bs. of brook trout in one season 

 to a Baden hotel, the trout, shame to say, being taken in 

 nets and sold alive. The system of forestry practiced in 

 Germany, Mr. Flaccus thinks, is admirable, and should 

 be followed by every civilized land. 



Ex-Governor Kellogg, of Louisiana is in town this 

 week, and states that himself, Gov. Wade Hampton and 

 Senator Quay, wall start shortly for another tarpon trip 

 in Florida. It is to be presumed that Gov. Hampton's 

 recent gun shot accident is not proving so serious as was 

 feared. 



Mr. L. D. Webster, of this city, left hastily on Thurs- 

 day with-500 shells in his pocket, in response to a wire 

 from Henry, on the Illinois River, that ducks were in by 

 the millions, or maybe anyhow by the dozens. 



On Thursday also it was that Sam Austin, the new 

 keeper at Mak-saw-ba Club, sent up word to Joel Kinney 

 that the mallards were in on that marsh in very large 

 numbers. There must have been some splendid mallard 

 shooting on the Kankakee and Illinois yesterday and to- 

 day, but it is too soon yet to hear the results. 



Mr. Wm. Werner, chief conspirator in the Possum 

 Club, left last Wednesday for Cedar Lake, Inch, on the 

 Chicago & Erie road after quail, but has not been heard 

 from at this date. 



An early meeting of the executive committee of the 

 Illinois State Sportsmen's Association will be called for 

 the purpose of formulating a plan of action in the matter 

 of having some more game laws passed. Incidentally 

 they may say a word or two about the next State tourna- 

 ment. 



Speaking of game laws, or thinking of them, or need- 

 ing to know anything about any of them reminds me of 

 Forest and Stbeam's new Book of the Game Laws, a 

 copy of which I now carry in my pocket, an action that 

 any sportsman would do well to imitate, if he wants to 

 know he is right to a moral certainty on any game law 

 question in any State of the Union. Some sporting 

 papers, and some sporting goods dealers, and a good 

 many other people have of late been rendering sportsmen 

 very questionable service by putting out what they pur- 

 port to be tables in condensed form showing the open 

 seasons of all the States and Territories. I have been led 

 by the use of one of these condensed form businesses into 

 making one or two miserable blunders in game law dates, 

 and unquestionably others have also been victimized in 

 that way by "the little cheap slip that a dealer can give 

 away to a customer." It is a sort of "give away," espe- 

 cially to the customer who depends on one of these 

 things. Suppose he wants to get it right and goes to the 

 local statutes. Ten to one he cannot make head or tail 

 out of the enactments, and even a lawyer may 

 err about it. Suppose he wants the law of another 

 State and sends to a friend, an officer in some 

 gun club, for it. The friend may mean well, 

 but be ignorant. I have been through all these 

 stages myself, and until this book was published I was 

 ready to say that a man could not, anywhere in America, 

 get reliable information that would cover all the country 

 ' in game law matters. But that is just what one can get 



here, easily and quickly, and in the assurance that the 

 information is absolutely correct. I would recommend 

 law-drafting committees to look through these pages and J 

 compare local laws with those of adjoining States and 

 vice versa. The total collect of the laws, which must 

 have made gray-haired and bowed down the man w T ho 

 did it, shows a mass of reading which is valuable in a 

 good many ways besides that of telling a man when he _ 

 may go shooting in such and such a State. I don't be- 

 lieve many people know how verbose, how complicated, 

 how ingnorant and ineffectual per se the bulk of our game 

 laws are. May the Book of the Game Laws, itself built 

 up by intelligent hard work, begin the millennial work of ' 

 inatrgurating a clearer and more sensible state of affairs. ' 

 It is a labor done simply for the love of accuracy. Let us' ' 

 hope it may grow into much more than that in the way 

 of its unprophesied accomplishments. 



Dec. 7.— The boys have quit shooting and gone to story- 

 telling, I am' afraid. I said something about Eddie Price 

 and his teal holes. Now that veracious gentleman is 

 around again to-day, and is once more insisting on the 

 accuracy of his old statement— which I believe was once „ 

 before published in Forest and Stream— that during a . 

 certain hunt on the Kankakee he one day killed so many 

 ducks he couldn't put them all in one pile! This is one , 

 of the standard Chicago lies, and any ambitious newcomer 

 is always steered against it. 



I suppose no question has agitated the sportsman mind 

 of the whole country so much as the old one of "holding 

 on" and "holding ahead." Many and bitter are the discus- • 

 sions over that old difference, and many the geometrically 

 figured impossibilities which experience says are possible 

 on that topic. Apropos of all this, they tell a pretty good 

 story on Mr. George Smith, a well-known Board of Trade 

 marl here. Mr. Smith is a trifle English, very well to do, 

 and much addicted to the vice of buying fine gnns. He 

 is said to have $5,000 worth of Purdys, Westley Richards, 

 Lancasters and the like, and couldn't think of wearing • 

 the same gun twice in the week. He never shot so very 

 many ducks, however. Mr. Smith was up at Fox Lake 

 duck shooting, once upon a time, and the veteran pusher, , 

 George Beckwith, had him out, and got him into a pass 

 where there was good shooting. Mr, Smith had a lot of i 

 fun, but he wasn't getting many clucks. "You don't hold , 

 ahead far enough," said George; "you want to throw I 

 away far ahead of 'em, three or four feet at least, you'll 

 never get any till you do." 



"I don't like this way of shooting air," said Mr. Smith, 

 "especially when I'm out shootin' at ducks you know; but 

 if you say three or four feet ahead, here goes!" So he 

 blazed away in the air, and knocked down his next duck. 

 Much gratified at this, he pursued that method further, 

 and before long was getting them down in pretty good 

 shape. "This way of holdin' ahead is a bloomin' success," 

 said he. 



By and by the flight stopped and George piled the 

 birds into the boat, and they started home. On the way 

 they passed a big rat house, on the top of which a big 

 muskrat was lying fast asleep. George stopped the boat I 

 and pointed out the rat. "Do you see him?" he asked. 



"Indeed I do," said Mr. Smith; "see ine tumble him!'' 

 So he blazed away, and never touched the rat, which 

 jumped off and swam away. 



"Well, now, how on earth did you manage to miss that 

 rat," said. George, in his disgust forgetting his pusher's 

 discretion. "He was lying there fast asleep and I could 

 have killed him with a club." 



"By Jove; I can hardly believe it meself," said Mr. r . 

 Smith, "but do you know, I'm positive I did just as you 

 said, and held about 4ft. ahead of him, I did really, you 

 know!" E. Hough, 



[In last week's report of the Possum Club, Col. Felton ' 

 is made to say that he admired the "brightness of the 

 table talk, the sparkle of the sportsman reporter, etc., 

 etc." Doubtless all sportsman reporters will be pleased 

 at this unconscious tribute from the intelligent com-j 

 positor, but what was really written was "the sparkle of ' 

 the spontaneous repartee." Which is a good deal dif-; 

 ferent. As it stands, the statement looks just a trifle re-.; 

 markable.— E. H. | 



Names and Pobtkaits ots Birds, by Ghardon Trumbun. A 

 book particularly interesting to gunners, for by its use they can 

 Identify without question all the American game birds which 

 they may kill. Cloth. 230 D agea. pries B2.50. For sale by Fobest 

 amdStbjam. - 



The EULL tests of the game fish laws of all the States,, 

 Territories and British Provinces are given in the Book of 

 the Game Laws. 



REARING SEA FISHES. 



TINDER date of Nov. 27, Mr. Vinal N. Edwards, of! 

 U Woods Holl, Mass., informs the U. S. Fish Com- 

 mission that codfish are still abundant in Vineyard Sound 

 Edgartown boats are taking them in considerable num- 

 bers off the mouth of Edgartown Harbor, in about six. 

 fathoms of water. From 75 to 90 good-sized cod atei 

 taken on a tide. None of the fishermen can remembei: 

 that cod were ever taken there before and they agret 

 unanimously in the belief that these are the result of tht 

 cod planting from the Woods Holl station . 



The following important experiment in rearing seabas* 

 and scup is also mentioned by Mr. Edwards: 



"In June, 1890, while we were hatching sea bass anc 

 scup, I put one jar of young sea bass and one of young 

 scup into the eel pond in this place. There were aboun 

 50,000 of each. I think all must have lived, for during th( 

 month of November large schools of scup and sea bast 

 have been passing out under the bridge from the pond 

 Nov. 7 I seined in the pond, and caught thousands or ( 

 both sea, bass and scup. The smallest was 2in. long, tht! 

 largest 4-Jin. We have one of our aquaria full of them, 

 but they will die when the water gets down to 40°. 

 seined day before yesterday, and also found the sea basi 

 and scup plenty in the pond, but not so abundant as tin, 

 first part of the month. All the young scup I have caugh< 

 seining in the harbor the last month, no doubt, came ou I 

 of the pond, for no scup or sea bass are found any wheivJ 

 else. Spring before last I put in a few young sea bas j 

 into the pond, and they lived through last winter and m 

 now 10 and llin. long. I got some of them a few day 

 since. I also sent two or three by the Fish Hawk t> 

 Washington alive; these were taken from the eel pond, 



