FOREST A.ND STREAM. 



267 



and said he didn't want to be mixed up in any poaching 

 business, and he couldn't afford to chip in for deer at 

 forty or fifty dollars a head. Mack said there was no 

 dinger, and left it to me if my man didn't say so. I had 

 to agree with Valentine, that camping as we were, not 

 dropping much money, nor subsidizing any, it might be 

 risky. Sam, the court of last resort, kept smiling and 

 said; "Mack, if you want a deer Old Man, you go and 

 get one.'' 



"Well, that's all right, but how would you gdjf -^pjifeifc, 

 vSam?'' 



"Well, don't go to-night: it's too cold; but to-morrow 

 night if it's warm, paddle down to that runway I showed 

 you and hide and wait, and wait, and wait till the leaves 

 rustle and the twigs crack and a big black shadow comes 

 out on the beach, and then you plunk it over at short 

 range like one of Flint's old cows. Then steal up and 

 look round as if you tliought Flint was coming and hack 

 cff some chunks o£ hindquarter and dig a hole — dun 

 know what you'll dig it witn— and bury the rest so Flint 

 would never find his cow if he looked. ' Then come borne 

 with your meat and put it in the spring in lard pails- 

 keep a week or two. Some natures enjoy that thing, 

 I'm told." Mack scowled and put the gun back in the 

 bag and went into the tent with a remark about deer 

 similar to the one attributed to Mr. Vanderbilt. 



That fellow Mack is a camper after my heart. We 

 agreed some time ago that it was all right to eat oatmeal 

 from a tin cup and then use it for coffee, but that won't 

 do for Sam: he's scrupulous. We had to give him more 

 dishes. Sometimes he looks over the jjlates after we've 

 dried them. 



Aug, Yesterday we Ipf t Sam and Valentine keep- 

 ing camp and the two of us took the birch bark and went 

 on a voyage up the little river. I'm trying to think of 

 something to remember that trip by. 1 was conscious of 

 absorbing pleasure all day long, but after all there was 

 nothing, nothing but a little sun and air, and woods and 

 water. A long easy paddle at first and the a we kicked 

 off shoes and pulled trousers high up and found ourselves 

 laughing and leaning and slipping on smooth stones, pit- 

 ting ourselves against the current with the boat between 

 us till we came to another long slide. 



We stopped a few times to fish, and a good many times 

 for Mack to poke her nose ashore wlien he spied a cloven 

 footprint. He had to shake his liead and gloat over it 

 and make wild speculations as to how long it had been 

 there, till at last I suggested he take along a section of 

 clay with the coveted track and have it petrified. Took 

 dinner on a bed of dry, white sand where the freshet had 

 been in the spring. I could have used a camera then to 

 take Mack as he sat, bare-legged, with a tin cup of tea, 

 amber- colored and hot, making ill-bred sounds of satis- 

 faction after each gulp, and then tumbling forward and 

 flat, with his face pressed against the hot beach and his 

 arms extended, with hands and toes clutching the sand. 



It was easy shding homeward, with a stroke now and 

 then for headway, and when we came round the head at 

 sundown they both stood watching on the bluff. Tiieir 

 looks betrayed them. The rascals had been fishing. Sam 

 made a mouth, and his voice came floating: "What luck? 

 Show 'em up; show 'em up!" 



Mack turned to the bottom of the boat, where the three 

 fish lay— a big old hook-jaw and two small ones, anri 

 picked up the smallest, rinsed him till he glistened, ano 

 hung him in the air — about 9in. of trout. Then a how] 

 of derision went up and they put on exhibition a string of 

 10 nice even spotted ones. 



After we landed there was some wrangling. Valentin i 

 wanted to bet that Mack didn't catch the big one, and 

 Mack offered to go him that there wasn't a 3 lb. trout on 

 r,ne string, and that he never caught one of them at that, 

 There were no takers. After supper, when the fish had 

 mostly disappeared from the plates, and the bones ol 

 contention had all been thrown on the fire, the social £i 

 mosphere seemed to improve. Sam admitted it was too 

 bad not to have given Jeff" more credit for the bi^ one 

 He said: "A 2ilb. trout isn't exactly what you'd call 

 'big,' with a strong accent, but still it's the best one he 

 ever caught, so that makes it his big one, anyhow, and 

 he got it in a nice place in the rush and swirl below the 

 dam." Jefferson Sckibb, 



fallal ^ishrg^ 



Sometime perhaps, a panther may have seen me, and 

 I might have seen liim if I had known where to look, but 

 the nearest that I know I ever came to seeing a wild one 

 was when I saw one's track, made the night before. One 

 winter, more than twenty years ago, there came to us 

 the old story of frightful screams having been heard in 

 the woods and fields near the mouth of Little Otter Creek, 

 and of strange tracks seen, without which proof we 

 should have considered the story of the screams as apoc- 

 ryphal as those of the Shellhouse monster. But tracks 

 were worth investigating. 



An old hunting comrade and I took our guns and drove 

 to the place: on the way to which we met a nearer resi- 

 dent, who seeing our guns accosted us. 



"Griin' down to look for the animil, be von? Wal, they 

 say't he's made some turrible jumps. Thirty-six foot, 

 right on a level." 



As we drove out of ear-shot, I remarked to my com- 

 panion, Bill Leonard, who occasionally uses the long bow, 

 "Thirly-six feet on a level. If folks must lie, why can't 

 they tell reasonable liee?" 



"Yes, or else tell reasonable truths, as I do," said Bill 

 with a merry twinkle beneath his shaggy eyebrows. 



We soon reached the place where the tracks had been 

 discovered and found a little group of neighbors inspect- 

 ing them. My closed mittened hand, which is not a little 

 one, just filled one of them where the animal had walked 

 at a leisurely pace, A little further on he had suddenly 

 bounded forward in successive leaps that seemed of quite 

 remarkable length until we came to one so prodigious 

 that we thought at first the leaper must have been borne 

 up by the crust. But the niglit had been thawy and this 

 solution of the wonder had to be abandoned. I paced 

 the distance from track to track, and it was seventeen 

 of my paces, which are "Quaker measure," as I am a long- 

 legged six-footer. This and two or three slightly shorter 

 leaps led to the objective point, which was a fragment 

 of a sheep's carcass that a fox had been evidently gnaw- 

 ing at wh",n the panther scented or saw him. The fox 

 left the record of his hurried^departure and the panther 

 his more leisurely making off in a direction at a right 

 angle with his unsuccessful onslaught. 



We lost his track among the tangled labyrinth of wood- 

 roads in the neighboring forest, and nothing was heard of 

 him there if ter. 



Though there were half a dozen trustworthy witnesses 

 I have always felt a good deal of diilfideuce in giving the 

 measurement of the leap, until the publication of your 

 accounts by guides and hunters have given me more 

 assurance. Awahsoosb. 



Ferbwbubgh, Vr. 



A Congenial Company. 



To what perfection art and perseverance have brought 

 the taming and training of wild beasts is shown in the 

 illustration? It represents a performance by the animal 



THE PANTHER'S LEAP. 



Your panther number took me back fifty years to the 

 evenings that were made grewsome by the tales of my 

 grandfather concerning the wild beasts who were very 

 much at home in Vermont when he first settled here and 

 the State was wild and young. 



He had no actual experience of his own to tell but that 

 of others was at his tongue's end, and when I heard O, O. 

 S.'s thrilling story, I felt as if my infantile ears had beeii 

 cheated that this too was not added to my grandfather's 

 repertoire and had its place with the story of the man 

 who was poiinced upon by a panther while watching a 

 deer lick and that of the man who rode for miles on "the 

 tongue of his sled, between his oxen, with a great cat 

 threatening him now in the rear, now on either flank, 

 and of men beguiled into the woods in the night time 

 by the cries of panthers, mistaken for the wailing of lost 

 women, 



±±uvv the ghosts of those long-departed panthers used 

 to pursue me when, after supping full of horrors. I ran 

 home across the yard through those interminable six 

 rods of darkness. How their cold breath chilled my 

 back that almost felt the touch of the out-reaching phan- 

 tom claws. ° 



Wnen i was a boy, a panther annually visited Shell- 

 house Mountain with great punctuality about the time 

 that the huckleberries ripened there. A few reckless men 

 and women would venture upon the terrible beast's 

 usurped domain, venturing their lives for a few quarts 

 of berries, but we youngsters gave the whole mountain a 

 wide berth, the wider after each return of the braves 

 bearing reports of the terrific screams and mysterious 

 Rtea' thy footsteps whichhad attended their rash intru<^ion. 

 In after years I was led to remark with some suspicion 

 the regularity of the occurrence of these visits with the 

 ripening of the huckleberries, and am inclined to doubt 

 whether they occurred at all, but I implicitly believed in 

 the Shellhouse panther then, as did all the other bova. and 

 it was a fearfnfly deUghtf ul beUef . ' j 



Tamed animals fron 



the Animal Clfciis of O. Hageubeck. Hambm-g. 

 From a pliotograph. 



circus SO successfully trained and exhibited by Mr. Carl 

 Higenbeck, of Hamburg. Such dreaded beasts as the 

 polar bear, panther, tiger and black bear have been 

 shaped into a pyramid, the bear with a dog at each side, 

 forming a sort of gate, with two mighty lionepses keeping 

 watch without. Animals which under natural conditions 

 are each other's worst enemies, here, under the influence 

 of the human mind, seem apparently to have exchanged 

 their natures, and obediently form a part of the artisti- 

 cally wrought pyramid— a congenial company, which 

 would considerably lighten the dangerous venture of a 

 modern Knight Delorges.—Gartenlaube. 



The Strange Adventure of a Gull. 



As an example of the fact that animals, as well as men, 

 may be the victims of accident and mistake, the follow- 

 ing account of the cuiious misfortune of a herring gull 

 in Duxbury Bay one day last spring, may interest the 

 readers of Forest anu Stream. 



One day in April two Duxbury schoolboys were rowing 

 from Plymouth, Mass., to Duxbury, when their attention 

 was attracted by the odd position of a herring gull, sitting 

 in the water with its head almost buried beneath the 

 waves. As they approached the bird arose, flying heavily 

 a short distance, and the boys could see an object hang- 

 ing from its head— a fish as they thought,' The gull 

 alighting after a flight of about lOOyds,, was easily 

 captured, and was so exhausted that it hardly made a 

 flap of its wings. Then the cause of disaster was seen. 

 The bill of the unhappy bird for its entire length was 

 stuck in a huge quahaug clam, the valves of which, con- 

 tracting like a vise, prevented its withdrawal. 



While feeding at low tide the gull must have been 

 made a prisoner by the intended victim of his appetite, 

 and would probably have been drowned by the weight 

 holding his hpad under water, but for his timely rescue. 



After showing gull and clam to interested friends on 

 shore the boys liberated the bird, which, freed from its 

 dangerous burden, flew out into the bay, apparently none 

 the worse for its strange adventure, but, it is to be hoped, 

 poasesaed of wisdom gained from experience. P, 



SKIN PARASITES OF MICE. 



Some years ago, in 1870 I think, I found several forest 

 mice which had nested under a heap of old clothes that 

 had been thrown away with a lot of rubbish into a sand 

 hole or pit back of my grandfather's house. I caught 

 several of the mice and carried them home and put them 

 in a cage. The wires in the front part of this were so far 

 apart, however, that my captives soon got out. For 

 several nights they would come out of their hiding places 

 and run around the box on which I had placed the cage, 

 and even into the cage itself. I noticed that the largest 

 mouse, which was the mother of the others, had an ex- 

 crescence on one of her hindquarters which at that time 

 I thought to be an abscess or some tuch affliction, and 

 wondered at the small concern the animal showed at its 

 presence. It did not seem to incommode the mouse at all, 

 although in size it was very apparent, being fully one- 

 tenth as large as the animal. 



These mice soon left my room and I did not think of 

 the matter again till during the spring of 1880, when I 

 again found some mice of the same kind under some 

 rubbish. This time I grabbed up two mice as they were 

 running beneath my feet and thrust them into a coat 

 pocket, where they stayed till I went to the house at 

 chore time. 



In the evening, after going to my room, I took them 

 out, and one— the smallest— had two such bunches on 

 one hmd quarter, as I before described. This mouse I 

 accidentally injured in catching, and he could not run 

 when I took him from my pocket, and in fact soon died. 

 After his death I observed a motion of the skin which 

 surrounded the supposed tumor or abscess, and then I 

 saw for the first time that the swellings that I had taken 

 for "sores" of another kind were produced by the grub 

 of a fly similar, if not identical with, the ox breeze fly 

 {Oestnis horis, Clarck). My astonishment was increased 

 when one of them made its escape and left a cavity, the 

 inside of which could be seen through the aperture from 

 which the grub came. The other grub soon came out in 

 the same way, and the two were fully one-tenth the size 

 of the mouse's body. They were as large as any that I 

 ever took from a cow, and of a brownish color, similar to 

 that of the chrysalis of the PrometJiea, and nearly as big. 



I did not have time to examine further into the matter, 

 and sent the mouse and two grubs to Prof. F. G. San- 

 born, then of Andover, Miss. I never heard from him in 

 regard to them, and think he may have been from home 

 at the time, and so never received them. I have never 

 read of them being found in animals so small before, but 

 do not think it can be of so rare an occurrence, for the 

 two specimens of mice which I caught were in different 

 towns, and several years had elapsed since the first was 

 taken. Will some of the readers of the Forest and 

 Stream give any experience they may have had in the 

 same direction? Mergus. 



THE EAGLE AND THE BABY. 



Tacoma, Wash.— Editor Forest and Stream: Inclosed 

 please find a clipping from the Boston Traveller giving an 

 account of an eagle carrying off a child six months old : 



Detroit, Mich, Ang. 5.— Two eag-les had a duel to the death for 

 the possession of the six-moRths-old baby ot Peter Shaw, who 

 b>es four miles north of Allis, in Presque Isle county, yesterday. 

 Mrs. Shaw had laid the baby down in the grass and returned to 

 the house for a few moments, when an enormous eagle swooped 

 down on the Infant and sunk its lalons into the little one's flesh 

 and clothing.- Tlie mother heard her baby's cry but came too late 

 to be of Fervice, but her shrieks brought the father who, quickly 

 comprehending the situation, mounted ahorse and armed with a 

 rifle rode to the shore of a near by lake, where he knew there was 

 an eagle's nest in the cliffs. 



Shaw arrived just in time to witness a terrible sight. Two 

 eagles were hovering above a crag of rock, bittling for possession 

 of the baby, that lay hi?h upon the cliff. Before the father reached 

 the summit one of the eagles had fallen to the ground, while the 

 ocher had again taken up the child for another flight. The father 

 tired and the bird and baby fell into the water. The f rantiq father 

 plunged into the lake, caught up the h-dy, but the little one was 

 dead. He took home the body, along with those of the two eagles, 

 one of which had been killed in the fight over the prey. 



I did not think an eagle could lift ten pounds, and a 

 child six months old should weigh upward of fifteen 

 pounds. My children at that age have always weighed 

 more. 



Among the traditions are stories of children who were 

 carried oft' by birds of prey, notably by the lammergeiers 

 of Europe, the condor of South America and the various 

 eagles. 



Hoping this will call out some opinions from your cor- 

 respondents, I remain as ever your well wisher, 



Waeter B. Savaey. 



A Naturalist in Nicaragua. 



Mr. Charles W. Richmond, whose collecting tour has 

 been referred to in Forest and Stream, writes from 

 Escondido River that he expects to send home a large 

 series of fishes along with other natural history speci- 

 mens. 



The rainy season, which begins in May or June and 

 lasts about eight months, is now causing high water and 

 frequent floods. Fish do not bite while the streams are 

 swollen. In the proper season ripe banana is generally 

 used for bait, but some of the planters meet with consid- 

 erable success in the use of traps made of wire netting. 



Mr. Richmond expects to revisit Lake Nicaragua in De- 

 cember and will probably spend a month or two on Rio 

 Frio. He has been told by an intelligent man who is 

 familiar with the lake that a species of sawfish is occa- 

 sionally found there, which is highly probable, since 

 sharks are known to occur in that body of water. A - 

 species of devilfish (Ociopw.s) collected near Grenada by 

 Mr. Richmond has been pronounced by Dr. D j,ll new to 

 Lake Nicaragua. 



Fever has not ^overlooked the collectors and has inter- 

 fered seriously with their work since June. 



Panthers in Vancouver's Island. 



Toronto, Canada, Sept. 22.— Editor Forest and Stream: 

 1 have just returned from my sitmmer outing on the 

 prairieH, and while traveling I fell in from time to time 

 with British Columbians. I usually questioned these 

 about the wild animals of their region and was informed 

 by many different persons at different times that panthers 

 are on the increase in British Columbia a,nd on Vancouv- 

 ver's Island since the introduction of sheep. In the latter 

 colony especially their depredations are becoming quite 

 serious, and the coming Legislature is to take steps that 

 will result in a vigorously prosecuted war on the panther 

 race, Ernest E. Thompson, 



86 Howard Strket, Toronto. 



