April 27, 1895. J 
323 
fun went on, all striking some of the larger pickerel, sav- 
ing a few, losing more, and enjoying all the time the 
royal sport. 
As we were returning to the boathouse, the Judge said: 
"Let's go for pickerel to-morrow. They give more fun 
than "bass." And we all voted for pickerel. 
In the evening we selected a uniform gradation of six- 
teen of our catch, from the smallest to the largest, weigh- 
ing in all fifty pounds, and expressed them to Middle- 
burgh. We dubbed them: "The sweet sixteen." 
A sweetly sound sleep succeeded our succpssful search 
of the day for pickerel, and at 7 o'clock the next morning, 
having broken our fast at a bountiful table of the Hub- 
bard House, and eager to feel the strike and pull and run 
and struggle of similar game to-day, we hoist sail for 
Stave Island, seven miles away, and on a course straight 
across the river from Clayton. 
We are disposed in the boats as on the day before, and 
a generous rivalry, bouyant as the bracing breeze which 
bears us briskly on, incites as to break the record and 
tie of yesterday. 
In an hour we drop sail and let out our luring min- 
nows into the famous waters around Stave Island. Strike 
succeeds strike, and the whole executive, legislative and 
judicial force of the boats is called upon to quell the dis- 
turbance which the rioting pickerel make. We capture 
many a hard tighter, and all are sentenced to close im- 
prisonment in the boxes of the boats. 
During one of the lulls which always come in fishing, 
the Judge, elated by his phenomenal success, and imag- 
ining that he had jurisdiction over even the inhabitants 
of the watery depths, waved his necromantic rod over the 
face of the water, and said, in tones of solemn cadence: 
"I see an eight-pound pickerel, twice eight feet below 
the boat. Jfickerel arise." And immediately the great 
fish floated upward and lay peacefully and quietly upon 
the mirrowy surface. Quickly and silently the unpity- 
ing gaff of the Judge took that pickerel in. 
We, in the other boat, at quite a distance, saw the act 
but did not hear the words, and loudly accused the Judge 
of harpooning a dead fish; he stoutly' denied the charge; 
told the story as above, and said defiantly: "Gentlemen,, 
that great pickerel was not dead, but I caught him nap- 
ping." And that fish is known to us as "Lazarus" to 
this day. 
After this experience the Commodore kept a sharp eye 
on the other boat to prevent the Judge and Editor from 
filling their box by the Aladdin process. 
And so the day went on with varying luck , until at 
evening we trolled to Clayton, taking some fine ones by 
the way, but the Judge's boat had beaten us, even with- 
out Lazarus. 
Off for bass the next morning to Halli day's Point, 
twelve miles up the river. The Judge and I chummed 
this time. The sailing was charming, and at nine o'clock 
we cast out for fish. I used a phantom minnow with 
two dark flies, three and six feet above it. This proved a 
taking lure, and I strongly recommend it for bass 
dragging; a very small kidney spoon may be used in- 
stead of the phantom minnow. 
Perch bothered a good deal, but that cannot he helped 
where bass are in that river, perch will be. The best 
catch of bass was made on the slope of a shoal, by live 
minnow bait. AVhen the surface was calm the big bass 
could be distinctly seen ten or fifteen feet down, moving 
slowly and majestically; we would draw the wriggling 
minnow, with line well shotted, in front of the coveted 
prize— he would eye it, seize it, turn it, and start off- 
then n strike, and five minutes of struggle and skill would 
be ende 1 by the landing net. 
Once, while I was tiring a three pounder, and the min- 
now was hanging on the sneli against tbe fish's mouth, 
along came a brother bass, a little smaller than the 
one on the hook, and deliberately carried off the min- 
now, and as life slowly sculled away, he seemed to say 
to the hooked one: "Thanks for your taking my chestnuts 
out of the fire." This incident illustrates many happen- 
ings in human life, and is full of food for reflection. 
That noon we lunched at the farm house on Halliday's 
Point, and at night we slept at the same place. Just as 
we were pulling in for the night a strike stopped my 
boat, and in a few minutes I found that I had fastened 
the heaviest fish in my three year's experience on the St. 
Lawrence, but lack-a-day, soon my trusty rod straight- 
ened, and my phantom minnow came in, chopped into 
hash— a great pickerel had laughed at the little hooks of 
the minnow, 
. Next morning at five o'clock we were trolling for mus- 
kelonge— four had been taken in those waters two day's 
before— but we took only a few fine pickerel, before 
breakfast. The day was passed much as the day before, 
except that we spent much time in rnuskelonge hunting, 
and went over the waters in which two of our co-guests 
at the Hubbard House, took two "spotted ones" the clay 
before, weighing twenty and eighteen pounds. 
Gradually we worked down to Clayton, landing at 
seven o'clock, and at eight forty-five, we rolled out from 
the station on the night express for Aloany. Thus ended 
four happy days, delightful in their actual enjoyment, 
and to memory (and purse) very dear. 
Middleburgh, N. Y. G. L . Danforth. 
Spring Shooting. 
West Virginia.— In your issue of April 13th F. J. S. 
says that there will be no spring shooting in Minnesota. 
I am glad to hear it, and so will many other readers of 
your valuable paper, I think. Stop spring shooting and 
the sale of game in all the States, and in a few years we 
shall have plenty of game and some to spare. But fail 
to do this and in a few years the game will be a thing of 
the past. Keep on hammering against the sale of game 
and spring shooting and you will have success some time. 
I wish that every man who uses a gun would take Forest 
and Stream, for it would do a great deal toward preserv- 
ing the game. Before I commenced taking your paper I 
thought nothing of kiling a lot of quail on the ground, 
but I would not do it now. There is more fun in giving 
a quail a chance to get away. If I kill it on the wing 
(which I don't do very often) I have the pleasure of know- 
ing that I gave him a chance, but that I was quicker than 
he was; and if I miss I console myself with thinking that 
he will be left for some other time. And it all comes of 
reading Forest and Stream, Burke Wilson. 
The Forest AND Stream is put to press each week on Tues- 
day, Correspondence, intended for publication should reach 
U*at tlw lalest by Monday, and as much earlier as practicable 
THE SUNNY SOUTH.— X. 
TANK SHOOTING IN TEXAS. 
Chicago, 111., &.pril 3. 1595— Mention has been made 
earlier of the fact that all the wildfowl of the coast coun- 
try leave the'salt water at least once a day and go inland 
to spend a part of the day on fresh water. Thev appear 
to feed both on the salt and fresh water, but seem obliged 
to go to the fresh water for drinking purposes. At any 
xate they go , and to this fact is attributsd some of the 
finest shooting at wildfowl known in the whole of Texas, 
which is saying a great deal. Texas is at best a dry state 
and when the-e has been a dry period, as for the past two 
or three years, a great many of the water courses are dry- 
ing up entirely. The cattle men on the great ranches 
provide against this by building dams along the streams, 
forming ponds of fresh water which are locally known as 
tanks. Such bodies of water may be from a few hun- 
dred yards to a mile or more in length, and as they are 
permanent bodies of water, they soon grow up with 
abundant natural food for the wild fowl. I do not know 
how far the birds go inland to "dsit these fresh water 
ponds, but certainly they crowd in untold numbers into 
such of the tanks as are located low down on the streams 
running into the salt water. There are numbers of these 
tanks along the strip of country from 20 to 30 miles back 
from the Gulf, such as the Mud Flats on the • Fulton 
ranch, the Portales tanks on the Loreles ranch, the Lag- 
una Largo on the same ranch, etc., etc. 
The Loreles ranch is owned by a Scotch syndicate of 
whom Mr. Christie is secretary, and Mr, Tod resident 
manager. This ranch covers a vast body of land whose 
"boundaries run up near to Corpus Christi, the tank of the 
"portales" ("gates") or dam being about 20 miles from 
the town. This tank is one famous for the vast quanti- 
ties of wild fowl Avhich visit it, but the ranch manage- 
ment have always forbidden shooting on the place, be- 
cause it drives away the cattle from the water at their 
natural watering time, and so causes financial loss. The 
laws of trespass, under the Texas statutes, do not apply 
to bodies of land of over 10,000 acres under one inclosure, 
and it is perhaps true , as many of the local shooters 
hold, that the Scotch syndicate cannot legally restrain 
shooters from shooting at these tanks. It is certainly 
true that these foreign gentlemen do not in all cases 
partake of the American spirit of courtesy and hospital- 
ity which is universal in the South. These facts, and the 
miscarrying of a letter which JMr. Guessaz sent, asking 
for permission to take our party in to the Portales tanks, 
gave rise to the only unpleasant incident on the whole 
trip in the South, and here we received the only discour-' 
teous treatment I ever knew a Northern sportsman to re- 
ceive in the South. In short, we were at first ordered off 
the premises, and only allowed to remain under a most 
grudging sort of consent from Mr. Tod, who came out in 
his buggy to se» what was going on. He might not have 
allowed us to stay had it not been for the good offices of 
Captain Crawford, an up-country ranchman who had 
come down to buy a couple of thousand cattle of tbe 
Loreles people, and whom we bad met on our car the 
night before. The whole affair was a trifle unfortunate, 
and we regretted it all very keenly, as we had no wish to 
intrude, even had we legal right to do so, which I am not 
sure we did. We were at fault in the matter, but only 
so under misapprehension, for we thought there was no 
objection and that Mr. Guessaz would get his letter of 
consent as soon as he got his mail, and so pre umed on 
the customs of the country and went on in, under Mr. 
Guessaz' guidance, the latter supposing it was all right. 
For my part, learning later as I did how serious a matter 
it is to have shooting going on at the tanks where these 
half wild range cattle come in to water— they remaining 
back on the hills and refusing to come so long as hunters 
stay around the tanks —I am disposed to say that the 
position of the ranchmen is an altogether reasonable 
one, and if I were in their place I should feel just as they 
do about it. While we felt a little troubled over this, 
therefore, and while Mr. Tod's action caused considerable 
local comment unfavorable to him by reason of his dis- 
courtesy to stranger^— almost a crime in that country— I 
can say tnat I blame him, and do say that we should not 
have shot at the tanks of the Portales at all, nor should 
I wish to do so again, for I do not think it would be right. 
That the Gum Hollow and Mud Flats tanks on the Fulton 
ranch are shot on all the time by the public is due to the 
forbearance of Hon.George Fulton, the most generous and 
broadest-spirited man in the world, not to any actual 
right of the public to do such shooting. 
" DUCKS IN THOUSANDS. 
But none the less, and wrong though we were in so do- 
ing even in our innocence, we did shoot on the Portales 
tanks of the Loreles ranch. These tanks are about 20 
miles from town, so we made an early start, our party 
going in two covered hacks. We made the dam at about 
10 or 11 o'clock in the morning, and when we looked 
over the great earthen bank, some hundreds of vards long 
and 20 feet high, which contains the flow of the little 
stream in a pond of perhaps quarter of a mile across, and 
twice that distance in length, we saw a sight which 
very few of us had e ver seen paralleled. There was a solid 
half mile of ducks on that little stretch of water, thous- 
ands and thousands and thousands of them, more ducks 
than we thought there could be in Texas. They rose and 
circled in vast black clouds, and refused to leave the 
water. Meantime, over the low chapparral aui along 
the sandy slough which marked the remnant uf the 
stream, between the dam and the salt water, there came 
more ducks, flock after flock, string after string, and 
piled into the water which alreadv seemed to be as full 
as it, could hold. The fresh birds cam* in fast until 
directly o-er the centre of the pool, and then cork- 
screwed down in that hurtling, booming tumble through 
the air, which makes one of the most exciting spectacles 
of wildfowling. The thunder of the wings was such that 
we had to raise our voices to make ourselves heard. 
That the Northerners were excited would be putting it 
mildly. Each man was wild. to begin, and it was only a 
moment before we were deployed in skirmish line along 
the dam, and were dropping birds at our feet as the great 
bodies swung out and headed toward the sea, only to 
come around again and circle. over the pond, reluctant to 
leave the spot they had come so far to visit. 
One would think that the shooting at such numbers of 
birds would be very deadly, but we som discovered that 
he f owl had a very^good theory of their o wn ^about the 
situation. They knew at once what was our purpose 
there, and after the first few shots they showed us that 
they had a mighty good notion as to the'length of a good 
gunshot. The dam had evidently been occupied by 
shooters before, and though it was across their natural 
line of flight, the ducks began to avoid it both going out 
and coming in, going over it so high that only a chance 
shot was effective. We then scattered and made such 
blinds on the far side of the pond as the scanty cover 
allowed, and kept on at the rapid sport. 
We had been shooting about half an hour when a 
young Mexican vaquero rode up to the dam and entered 
into conversation with me, who happened to be the miy 
one at the dam at that time. He was a very polite boy, 
and I liked him; big hat, cigarette, "chaps" and all, and 
wished I had my camera along. He told me in Spanish, 
as I very well knew, that we must not shoot at the tank, 
as it scared away the cattle. I pretended not to under- 
stand Spanish— as I really do not very much, though I 
once lived for a time in New Mexico, where it is the 
language of the country. All he could get out of me was 
"No sabe!" But he kept on, polite and graceful— he was 
a pretty boy- and tried to explain that he was only act- 
ing under orders, and that I must not think he was do- 
ing it himself. " Yo' no give a damn, me," he said, 
flashing his white teeth pleasantly, and using the only 
English at his command to make me understand — as I 
told him I did. . 
It was about this time that Mr. Tod drove up in his 
buggy and was met by Col. Bill Peabody. The latter 
seemed to have hypnotized Mr. Tod some, for he said 
nothing, but hoped we would have a good day's sport. 
He was rather glum in his wish, and I think he felt 
that he was imposed upon, as indeed I think he was, for 
all around we could see the cattle standing back from the 
water hole. 
We could see great clouds of geese over toward where 
the cutting out was going on for Capt. Crawford's beef 
cattle, about a mile from us, and a confused gabble and 
screaming would every once in a while come over to us 
as the geese rose and circled over the feeding beds they 
seemed to have found out on the grass somewhere. Any 
way we could look, we could see signs of continuous use 
of the spot by such numbers of wildfowl of all sorts as the 
Northern man never sees and can hardly dream about 
from any experience of his own. 
LOST AT NIGHT. 
We lay about the tank pretty much all day, and did 
what shooting we could without decoys and without any 
means of keeping the birds stirred up out of their big 
banks out in the middle of the pond beyond gunshot. 
What a man could do there were he out in a boat in the 
mil lie of the tank with a blind and decoys, I should 
hardly like to try to guess. He could certainly kill his 
hundreds daily, at least till the spot was "burned out" by 
the shooting. We killed during the day only about 
seventy-five or one hundred ducks in all, mostly bluebills, 
theereby making glad the hearts of a great many negroes 
and greasers at the quiet old. town of Corpus. 
The most exciting part of our day was the drive home. 
We did not start till night, and our drivers lost the trail 
in the chaparral about ten miles out, and we drove around 
aimlessly for nearly four hours. At last we saw a light, 
and met a" wire fence, which we followed to a junction 
with the light, so to speak. By much calling aloud in 
Mexican we at last unearthed an old, grizzled Mexican, 
who listened to our tale of woe in polite silence, and at 
length at our request agreed to pilot us to the road to 
Corpus. It was coming on to rain, but the old man 
made no complaint as he started out into the chaparral 
somewhere to find his horse, which presently he dis- 
covered and saddled. Then, pulling his blanket over his 
shoulders, he set off ahead, quietly, and in an hour 
showed us a place which our drivers were pretty sure 
they knew, saying "adios," and "gracias," for the little 
payment offered Mm in the politest way in the world. 
"A good Mexican is all right," said Mac, our driver, "an' 
a bad one aint no good on earth." Thus, by virtue of 
meeting a Mexican of the good sort, we at length reached 
our home in Corpus at 1 o'clock in the morning. We 
had promised Mitchell, the cook, that w 6 would be back 
for dinner, for it was Thanksgiving Day, and Mitchell 
had gotten up as fine a dinner as could be for us to enjoy 
when we got in. Of course this was all spoiled, aud 
though Mitchell didn't say much, I have no doubt he did 
a great deal of thinking about certain young "gemmen, 
over whom he felt that he had full charge, but very little 
control. 
PSEUDO SHEEPSHEADS. 
On the next day, as may be supposed, we did not feel 
impelled to go shooting any more. We took Max Luther's 
instructions and went out on the railroad bridge over the 
bay after a little fishing. This also proved an eventful 
dav. An ill-conditioned black Mexican dog took a piece 
out of the foot of Flirt, Oscar Guessaz 's dog, and we near 
had an international war over that, Guessaz pursuing the 
offending dog into the portals of his own house and nearly 
knocking the porch off the latter by a huge rock he threw 
at the dog, wnich missed the dog and hit a pillar. Then 
the owner of the dog said his mother was sick, and he 
didn't want his mother killed, and we said we weren't 
killing mothers, only dogs, and everybody was on the eve 
of rolling his gun, but suddenly everybody apologized all 
around, Max Luther promising Guessaz to kill the black 
dog later , and we all protesting we were sorry there was a 
sick woman in the business— which was very likely a fic- 
tion of a woman anyhow— and Mr. Guessaz explaining 
elaborately that he had thrown the rock at the dog and 
not at any woman or any porch. Then we went on fish- 
ing, and caught a plenty of fish, too. The trouble about 
our fish was that we thought they were sheepshead, we 
being ignorant savages from the North and not knowing 
a sheepshead from a drum. So we cherished in vain a 
long string of big and inedible drums, some very large, 
bass drums, about eight or ten pounds heavy I should say. 
Some of us had hand lines, but Wilbur Dubois, the 
silent man, had a rod and reel along, and he surely was 
the very embodiment of calm and unassailable content, 
as he sat with legs over the bridge beam watching the 
red aud green float with which he had adorned his line. 
E^ery once in a while the said float would disappear, and 
about snychrouously therewith Wilbur Dubois would 
give a swift jerk up and back, which would materialize 
in now and then a lusty trout, and now and then a cat- 
fish, as the poet says; and sometimes it wouldn't ma- 
terialize at all, at which Mr. Dubois would utter no loud 
