OOT. 31, 1896.J 
FOREST AND STOEAM, 
343 
have I witnessed such a sight in several years' cruising in 
the southern oceans. The petrel is a strange little fellow, 
always on the wing during the hours of daylight — and in 
those high southern latitudes the days are long; in sum- 
mer — ^yet I have never seen one sit on the water to rest or 
for any other purpose. It holds its position near the ship 
in the strongest gales and hovers near the water with its 
little we^ feet, constantly treading the water with the lee 
foot, whi6fe helps it to hold its position against the force 
of the wind. It seeihs impossible that any living thing 
can do without rest or sleep, yet certainly this little bird 
can do with the least of either of any creature known to 
me. 
The whale ship is a veritable storehouse of good things 
for the ocean birds. When a whale is taken and cut-in, 
a thousand choice morsels are cut off and float around for 
them to pick up. The albatross does not hesitate to at- 
tack the carcass and to fight for his share; and often in 
such numbers as to be a source of annoyance to the offi- 
cers using the spades. Again during the process of trying 
out the oil from the blubber, quantities of scraps and lean 
cut from the blubber are thrown over the ship's side into 
the water, and this is a continual feast for the birds. The 
albatross gathers up the largest pieces, the mollemokes and 
haglets take all the larger, while the little petrel, hover- 
ing here and there on tireless wing, seems content with 
the finest particles that float upon the surface of the 
water. 
There is another reason why the birds congregate 
around a whale ship. When on cruising ground at night 
the ship is put under short sail, so that very little head- 
way is made; and the birds can sit on the water and 
often swim along as fast as the ship moves, or at least a 
few strokes of the wings will bring them alongside. 
Every tub of refuse thrown overboard is a signal for all 
to come to the feast, and it is remarkable how well they 
know the sound of dumping gurry. During the night a 
large, bright light is kept burning to light up the deck to 
facilitate the work, and this lights up the sea around as 
well. I have often seen the albatross, when the ship was 
hove-to, hover or rather soar very near the ship, peering 
down upon the deck as if seeking to learn if there was 
any blubber on board, often passing very near the yard- 
arms. There is not a movement of the wings as the 
great birds scale along, and one can but watch and ad- 
mire their graceful movements. 
When one remembers the vast expanse of ocean in this 
southern part of the world it is very evident that we of 
northern latitudes can scarcely comprehend the great 
difference between the two hemispheres. 
In the south the parallel of 40° passes to the south of the 
Cape of Good Hope, Australia, the North Island of New 
Zealand and all of South Amer'ica, excepting Patagonia, 
Tierra del I'uego and adjacent islands. South of the 
parallel of 50° south latitude, with the exception of a 
small fragment of Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego and the 
adjacent islands, Falkland Islands included, not a human 
being has an habitation and home. How great an expanse 
of ocean is found to the south of 4.0" south latitude is 
readily seen by referring to the map of that region. If 
there be a body of land in the south it lies almost entirely 
within the Antartic Circle. 
A little south of the parallel of 50° one can sail entirely 
around the globe with the exception the south end of 
South America — Patagonia— without seeing land. In con- 
trast to this, in the northern half of ^ the world to the 
north of 50° some of the greatest capitals of Europe are 
found: London, Brussels, Berlin, St. Petbisburg. Chris- 
tiania, Stockholm, with Paris not one degree to the south 
of this parallel, and man is found almost as far as land 
extends. 
Such a contrast as this cannot fail to impress one with 
the vaetness and solitude of the great circumpolar southern 
ocean. If there be a continent within the Antartic Circle 
it has been reached by few and only in isolated places, 
where it was difficult to determine if the land was a group 
of islands or a large body of land. Such enormous fields 
of ice guard the approach to high southern latitudes that 
navigation is extremely perilous. But high volcanic 
peaks have been seen beyond the verge of this unknown 
region, and these alone proclaim the fact that land does 
exist beyond the farthest point reached by man. 
E. P. Hbrbndeen. 
Florida Protective Interests. 
Sportsmen in Jacksonville will make test oases of vio- 
lations of the game law. This is the only proper way to 
make the law effective. It is unlawful to trap quail dur- 
ing any season of the year, or to have live birds of this 
species in one's possession, yet they are openly offered for 
sale in this city. In extenuation of this fact, excuses 
have been made that the birds in certain instances were 
shipped from Georgia, the season in that State opening 
fifteen days before the Florida season; but it is doubtful if 
this subterfuge will hold in the courts, as the mere fact 
of possessing the living or dead bodies of game constitutes 
a misdemeanor in the eyes of the law until the open period 
begins, and subsequent to its close. 
The State of New York found itself compelled to close 
the game season entirely for a period of years, and to 
strictly enforce the prohibitory law during its operation. 
Unless trapping, pot-hunting, and shooting out of time is 
suppressed in Florida, a similar enaction must ultimately 
be made in this State. The true sportsman desires the 
preservation of game, and the shorter the open season 
the better he is suited, because he realizes the necessity 
for providing against the rapid extinction of the species 
embraced in the laws. 
The present statute is incomplete, and at the last session 
of the Legislature amoimted to simply a temporary com- 
promise accepted rather than the total death of the 
measure. Next year it is hoped that the lawmakers will 
realize the gravity of emphatic action in the premises, 
and perfect. measures that will insure the protection of 
the game birds and animals of the State. 
The press of Florida is unanimously in favor of strin- 
gent game statutes, aud every paper published in the 
State should take up this matter and present it to the 
people in a light that will convince them of the necessity 
for concerted action. — Jacksonville Times-Union, 
The FoEBST AifD Stbham is put to press each week <m Tuesday. 
Correspondence int&nded for publication should reach ms at the 
latest by Monday, and as mwh earlier as practicable. 
IN THE CASCADES. 
The Waldo Lake Country.— I. 
It has been said that years and experience bring wis- 
dom. WhUe this may be true as a general proposition, 
observation will hardly warrant such a presumption in 
favor of the sportsman. At least he is prone to forget 
the admonitions of sad experience, and while always 
promising reformation continues to plan new trips into 
remote and untrodden regions. Some of the greatest 
gillies within the limited range of my acquaintance are 
old, rheumatic, worn-out sports. One of these is sitting 
right here at this desk now reviewing unnecessary hard- 
ships and privations endured by himself and certain other 
less aged but equally guileless sports on a recent trip for 
big game in the Cascades. One would naturally think 
that nearly forty years of almost incessant hunting and 
fishing ought to make a fellow just a little bit discreet 
about undertaking these arduous mountain trips, even if 
his general sense and judgment have not been benefited. 
On the contrary, it seems that we old sports get fooler and 
fooler as the years roll by. 
In other words, nature has coquetted with us fellows 
so long that we have come to imagine that she loves us as 
well as we love her, and that a dream so sweet, so long 
enjoyed, can never, never be destroyed; and so we hang 
on like a puppy to a root, shutting our eyes to the cpnse- 
quences. What makes old age so sad is not that our joys, 
but that our hopes, cease, 
However all this may be, Sept. 19, 1896, found four 
Portland sportsman: J. Roberts Mead, S. M. Mears, Jim 
Christy and the writer, not by accident, but premedi- 
tatedly and with malice aforethought, on board a Southern 
Pacific flyer bound for the happy hunting grounds about 
Mt. Jefferson in the Cascade range. We were to go first 
to Albany, eighty miles south; thence by the Oregon Cen- 
tral to its eastern terminus, Detroit, some sixty miles; 
thence find our way as best we could to Waldo Lake, 
somewhere up in the mountains fifteen or twenty miles 
northeasterly. Christy and Mears had only a month be- 
fore returned from the headwaters of the Clackamas by 
way of Waldo Lake, and while their ideas were not of 
the most definite character regarding the way back to 
that country, and while each seemed to regard it as his 
bounden duty to antagonize the other's views and opinions 
about every other possible proposition, there was a plead- 
ing if not rather remarkable unanimity in their expres- 
sions regarding the bounteous game and fish possibilitit s 
of the Waldo Lake country. Mead and I had it for break- 
fast, dinner and supper, and the fact that a proposition 
had been presented about which these two worthies fully 
agreed dispelled all doubt in our credulous minds. 
We had left Portland soon after daylight in the morn- 
ing and arrived at Detroit as the shades of night were 
settling down and over the "roaring Santiam." A won- 
derful country this! but then all mountain countries are 
wonderful, and one never tires of the kaleidoscopic phan- 
tasmagoria which nature delights here to present. But 
the Santiam, even in this country of wonders, is known 
far and wide as the "roaring Santiam," which of itself 
raises the presumption that it is rather unusually large 
and weird. ^ 
The end of telegraphic communication is at Gates, 
twenty miles short of Detroit, which indicates something 
of the character of the country. 
You know it is a pretty ambitious railroad these days 
that can go where a telegraph line cannot accompany it. 
A railroad that can stick to the Santiam for fifty miles 
right up into the Cascades ought to be well sudsidized, for 
it is not likely to be very well patronized. But some day 
this line will push on through the great Cascades and be- 
come part of a great continental line which will need no 
subsidy. 
My hair seemed to sit up a little uneasily at some points 
on the road, and I am quite sure that it doesn't come up 
on as small provocation as it used to. I asked the con- 
ductor about accidents on the road. "Oh, yes," he re- 
plied, "we have accidents every now and then, of course, 
but we fellows have got out without a scratch so far. 
The other day the jar of the engine brought down a cliff 
upon U3, mashing the engine all up, but we fellows didn't 
get hurt." After a pause he added: "The great danger 
isn't so much from rocks as from trees. They start down 
from somewhere over in Clackamas county, I guess, and 
when they get down here they knock this railroad into 
a pretzel, I tell you, and we have to make a report to 
headquarters." All this was encouraging to a nervous 
temperament. I relapsed into silence, mentally solilo- 
quized upon my past deeds and misdeeds, and wished that 
the infernal old engine wore moccasins, and that the pere- 
grinating Clackamas trees would be "chained to busi- 
ness" at home, for that day at least. Resignedly I awaited . 
our arrival at Detroit, or the arrival from Clackamas 
county, as the case might be. 
But we reached Detroit all right. We knew that we 
were there, for the engine whistle had blown long and 
loud and we had come to a full stop. 
I wonder if the hotel proprietor at Detroit properly ap- 
preciates the value of whistles in his business and feels 
duly thankful to the inventor. It was the whistle more 
than anything else that convinced our crowd that we had 
arrived at Detroit. We looked out of the car windows at 
the roaring Santiam on the right and the hurricane decks 
of the lofty mountains on the left.^Then we looked in- 
quiringly at each other. 
The engine had cut loose and hitched up a rod or so, as 
if just a little bit ashamed to be caught asleep in company ^ 
with the solitary, dilapidated, superannuated appendage 
occupied by us, and all hands seemed to have taken to 
the woods. Nevertheless we found an excellent supper 
awaiting us, and later on we found good beds— all but 
Christy. 
The supper suited him all right enough, but he was 
touchy and finical about little things he found in his bed 
to an extent hardly becoming so thorough and accom- 
plished a mountaineer, When reminded of this weak 
spot in his otherwise manly character he roared out 
the rejoinder that he would rather fight a bear by day 
than a bug by night. This fighting business is simply a 
matter of taste, and Mears, just to be contrary of course, 
said that he preferred to exhibit his courage at the hotel 
and would take his in bugs. Mead and I, accustomed as 
we were to the attacks of the Molalla experts, paid little 
attention to these rural amateurs. We are still ready to 
back the Molalla fleas and bugs. 
Of course the hotel was crowded to overflowing with 
timber men, cruisers and the like, and the evening was 
spent in a general discussion of the Waldo Lake country. 
To the best of my recollection, no two agreed about the 
distance to the lake, its size, or the best way to reach it. 
It is doubtful whether two men in the room outside of 
Mears and Christy had ever seen the lake, but there 
wasn't one in the room that couldn't, in his own estima- 
tion, give all the rest cards and spades on any proposition 
concerning it. A Mr. Fox, an elderly, observing, quiet 
gentleman, had helped to survey the west line of the 
Warm Springs Indian reservation, and undoubtedly knew 
more about the lake Country than all the others combined, 
except Christy and Mears. Neither of these gentlemen 
took issue with Mr. Fox on any important point, for 
obvious reasons; but they made it very tropical for each 
other, and as they both insisted that they never made a 
mistake in their lives, and each entertained a diametric- 
ally opposite view of the situation in all its details from 
that entertained by the other, we were treated to a mar- 
velous exhibition of linguistic landscape painting which 
none enjoyed better than Mead and myself. He and I. 
were treated as ignorant noncombatants, and we quietly 
absorbed the doubtful benefits. 
Now, if there is any one particular thing that Christy 
plumes himself upon it is his Irish ancestry, and if there 
is any one particular thing that Mears dearly loves to 
taunt him about it is that same. So it need not be sur- 
prising that the philological wind-up, or, as they say in 
pyrotechnics, the final piece, arose out of this fact. A 
question had arisen, been heatedly discussed and finally 
submitted to Mr. Fox for decision. Mr, Fox decided the 
vexed question in Christy's favor and braced his decision 
by some reference to a gentleman with him at the time 
he made his observations. The temptation was too strong 
for Christy and he jumped to his feet and proudly ex- 
claimed: "I'll bet that that man was an Irishman." Of 
course all eyes were turned to Fox and he felt called upon 
to say something, and he mildly answered: "No, he was 
a white man!" To say that Mears rolled upon the floor in 
exultation would be an insult to his dignity, but we all 
thoroughly enjoyed the situation except Christy and poor 
Fox. The latter readily perceived that he had made a 
box of it and added, in his quiet way: "I am an Irish- 
man myself, boys I" The blaze in Christy's eyes died 
down, the laughter subsided and all went to bed in good 
humor. S. H. Greene. 
Portland, Ore. 
[to be continued,] 
MARTHA'S VINEYARD HEATH HEN. 
Having visited Martha's Vineyard every season during 
the past twelve years, and during the time spent there a 
large portion has always been devoted to my rod and gun, 
I will endeavor to give such information as I possess in 
reply to the inquiry of Mr. Ames in Forest and Stream 
of Sept. 12, as I have failed to notice any answer thereto 
save the concise and interesting one by the editor. 
Opportunities to observe the habits of the heath hen 
were more frequent several years ago than they are at 
present, but I seldom took notice of the birds then, except 
that when they were startled by the roadside I would men- 
tally calculate the chances of success or failure to bring 
them down with a gun. Daring the past five years, since 
the ruffed grouse became more abundant and inclination 
directed my footstej)3 to the field rather than to my boat, 
I realized that the bird was rapidly becoming extinct, as 
I could not fail to notice while walking or driving that 
fewer and fewer of the birds were seen in each succeed- 
ing year. 
I frequently took my dogs for company on a Sunday, 
and selecting some old, unused wood road, have followed 
it to that part of the island locally designated as the 
"plains," the home of the heath hen. 
Arriving at an open spot, the dogs would be ordered to 
"get away." With a bound they obeyed; with head high 
in air and every evidence of enjoyment they ranged as 
wide as they could see the signals given for their direc- 
tion. A point would sometimes be rewarded by the start- 
ing of a belated woodcock apparently out of his element; 
but frequently the heath hens were found. As they lie 
very close for the dog, it was an easy matter to approach 
very close, where I would remain several minutes to ob- 
serve their actions — as lon>? as I considered prudent for 
the patience of the dogs. When they, were flushed away 
they flew, generally alighting together an eighth of a 
mile or so away. The growth in the more open country 
consists of huckleberry and sweet fern bushes, wild cran- 
berry and checkerberry vines. The heath hens are ex- 
tremely fond of the cranberries and checkerberries. 
The larger part of the plains is covered with a tangled 
growth of scrub oak from 3 to 30ft. high and is almost 
impenetrable, in which the heath hen takes refuge when 
pursued too closely. 
One Sunday afternoon nearly four years ago I took 
those then well-known pointers Spot Dash and Belle Ran- 
dolph out for a run, following a neglected path for a mile 
or more. Suddenly I was confronted by one of the dogs 
pointing directly in my path. The attitude and sudden- 
ness of the action left no doubt that the birds were very 
close; but I failed to see them, although the scattered 
sweet fern and golden rod afforded scanty cover. Ad- 
vancing slowly, I flushed them scarcely 30ft, distant — 
nearly a dozen of them, their plumage matching their 
surroundings so closely as to escape detection. 
During the afternoon I had an opportunity to see point- 
ers' work such as I have seldom seen, the open country 
enabling me to observe their every motion, which was 
the personiflcation of canine beauty and strength; their 
foam-flecked mouths, rigid muscles and the exquisite 
grace of their posture making a picture that could not be 
transferred to canvas. Possibly I may be pardoned for 
the thought that I wished for — the possession of my Le- 
fever and a change in the game laws for the moment. 
Nevertheless that bright October afternoon will always be 
remembered as one of the most enjoyable in my memory. 
Possibly we flushed fifty or more heath hens, in most in- 
stances in flocks of from five to ten birds. 
During the same year, while hunting the ruffed grouse 
some distance away, I shot two birds, which on exami- 
nation proved to be heath hens, though they seldom in- 
habit the heavy timber, and I presume they had forsaken 
their home on the plains for the shelter of the forest. 
