Forest and Stream. 
A Weekly Journal of the Rod and Gun. 
'^'■^s^^^SSi^^ '''^-\ NEW YORK, SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 1896. {no. J°^S?5,-#iS'tob^ 
For Prospectus and Advertising Rates see Page x. 
The Forest and Stream is put to press 
on Tuesdays. Correspondence intended for 
publication should reach us by Mondays and 
as much earlier as may be practicable. 
TE.E WATER KILLING OF DEER. 
Theke "was not room to say all tliat was to be said, nor 
some things which should have been said, on this page last 
week; among others that the letter signed Deerslayer and 
defending the water killing of deer was printed for a pur- 
pose. That purpose was to put the plea on record as a deer 
bounder's own description of one phase of Adirondack deer 
hounding. 
"We have heard so much of the chivalry and the sports- 
manlike quaUties sa d to distinguish the practice of water 
killing deer as carried on in the North "Woods that it is well 
worth while to have such a frank, if brutal, exposition as 
this letter affords of just what Adirondack hounding means 
as followed by one class of hunters. The description, it is 
true, does not differ essentially from others which have been 
given by critics of deer bounding, but the significant point 
of this communication of Deerslayer's is that it comes from 
a participant in the sport, an advocate and defender of it, 
who makes a plea in defense of his pet method, because he is 
apprehensive lest the Legislatm-e shall interfere to prevent 
his further enjoyment of it. When those who are opposed 
to deer hounding have written of roping the swimminggame 
and killing it with clubs or with firearms at close range they 
have been met with the answer that such statements were 
libels on true sportsmen deer bounders, and that the ropers 
and muzzle-end shooters belonged to a past generation. But 
here comes a man who admits all that the critics have said, 
who rejoices in those very methods whose practice has been 
so strenuously denied, and who upholds and defends such 
ways of securing the game. 
The first essential to an intelligent discussion of Adiron- 
dack deer hounding from the standpoint of sportsmanship is 
an established basis of fact as to what deer hounding as 
there conducted actually is and what it involves. If the 
several parties to the discussion were to tell all they knew, it 
would probably be shown as to the facts that a certain pro- 
portion of deer killed by hounding are killed on land and 
under conditions which could be defended as fair and com- 
plying with accepted rules of sportsmanship; while the rest 
are killed in the water by strategems closely allied to those 
described by Deerslayer, and by methods which no one ex- 
cept, of course, the perpetrators of them would ever dream 
of defending as sportsmanlike. Moreover, we believe that it 
could be demonstrated beyond controversy that the horrible 
brutalities and outrageous cruelties incident to and insepara- 
ble from hounding are so many and so atrocious that, were 
game laws based upon the consideration of these facts, 
hounding should be prohibited. But the protective statutes 
take no cognizance of methods, save as to the relation of 
these to conserving the game supply. The law knows noth- 
ing of sportsmanship; it does not concern itself with the 
methods of wing-shooting versus potting on the ground, fly- 
fishing versus netting, water killing versus still-hunting.' 
The statutes prohibit snaring game birds, not for the senti. 
mental reason held by sportsmen that wing shooting is 
a better way of getting game than snaring it, bu 
for the purely economic reason that snaring cannot 
be permitted because, as demonstrated by experi- 
ence, it exterminates the game. All the limitations 
prescribed by the game laws are in theory at least founded 
on this basis. The lawful seasons of shooting and fishing 
are designed to be so fltxed as to insure that each species may 
have opportunity to rear its youE g to maturity ; and the 
regulations which relate to liming streams, netting trout 
night shooting, use of big guns for wildfowl, killing moose 
in their yards, taking more than a specified amount of game 
or fish, sale, transportation and export — all these have the 
one purpose of so limiting pursuit that the stock may yet be 
perpetuated. And so it is with the law governing deer 
hunting. In almost all the States where the deer supply is 
recognized as a valuable resource to be preserved and con- 
tinued, the use of hounds, or at least the practice of killing 
in the water, is strictly forbidden. It is forbidden on the 
ground that hounding is destructive to a degree in excess of 
the power of nature to make good. If a similar restriction 
shall be provided to apply to the Adirondacks, it will have a 
similar reason; and apart from maintaining the deer sup- 
ply will not cgncejro itself with the gaerits of ^§ev hounding, 
The province of game laws does not include a determina- 
tion of what is sportsmanlike and what is not. Apart from 
the economic considerations involved the statutes can have 
nothing to do Avith Deerslayer's approved method of 
noosing the game in the water and blowing its head off with 
"the good old 10-gauge gun with a charge of buckshot.'' 
The influences which restrain a man from that style of hunt- 
ing should have been implanted while he was yet a child at 
his mother's knee, and fostered and developed and strength- 
ened into a controlling force by all the surroundings of civ- 
ilized society in this age of the world's progress when we are 
soon to write 1900, 
THE ADIRONDACK BLUE LINE. 
One gratifying feature of the discussion of the proposed 
amendment of the forestry section of the New York Oon- 
statution was the unanimity of the press in denouncing the 
proposition as unwise and iniquitous. If there was a single 
advocate of the measure among the exchanges which come 
to this office we failed to notice it. United and emphatic as 
was the press in opposition to the amendment, and thus re- 
flecting as it did the public opinion of the citizens of the 
State at large, there was yet shown a prevailing want of in- 
formation respecting the Forest Preserve and the Adiron- 
dack Park. These were commonly spoken of as identical, 
whereas they arp distinct. The confusion thus fallen into 
was perhaps due to the text of the amendment, and it ap- 
pears reasonable to assume that the author of that measure 
himself confounded the Preserve with the Park; his use of 
the term Forest Preserve would indicate as much. 
The Forest Preserve is thus defined by the Constitution, 
Sec. 7 of Art. VII. : 
"Forest Pbeserve —Sec. 7. The lands of the State, now owned 
or hereafter acquired, constituting the Forest Preserve as now fixed 
by law, shall be forever kept as wild forest lands. They shall not be 
leased, sold or exchanged, or be taken by any corporation, public or 
private ; nor shall the timber thereon be sold, removed or destroyed." 
The law fixing the Preserve being the act of 1885, as 
amended in 1893, and enforced at the time of the adoption of 
the Constitution, reads as follows: 
100 Forest Preserve.— The Forest Preserve shall include the lands 
now owned or hereafter acquired by the State within the counties of 
Clinton— except the towns of Altoona and Dannemora — Delaware, 
Essex, Franklin, Fulton, Hamilton, Herkimer, Lewis, Oneida, Sara- 
toga, St. Lawrence, Warren, Washington, Greene, Ulster and Sulli- 
van, except 
1, Lands within the limits of any village or city, and 
2. Lands— not wild lands— acquired by the State on foreclosure of 
mortgages made to the commissioners for loaning certain moneys of 
the United States, usually called United States Deposit Fund. 
The Forest Preserve then includes all the wild lands in the 
counties designated. While the Constitution forbids the sale 
of such lands within the Preserve, it does not forbid the sale 
of lands outside of the Preserve; there was, therefore, no 
call for an amendment forbidding the sale of such outside 
lands; nor can we suggest any reasonable surmise as to the 
motive or intention of the proposed amendment, which with 
respect to this point reads : 
The Legislature may also authorize the exchange of lands 
owned by the State situate outside the Forest Preserve,-for lands not 
owned by the State situate within the Forest Preserve. The Legisla- 
ture may also authorize the sale of lands belonging to the State 
situate outside the Forest Preserve. * * * 
But there are no wild lands owned by the State situate 
outside of the Forest Preserve, for the law of 1893 and the 
Constitution declare all wild lands to be the Forest Preserve. 
Every plot of wild land, therefore, i3 included in the Forest 
Preserve and cannot be situate outside of it. • An amendment 
authorizing the Legislature to sell wild lands owned by the 
State situate outside of the Forest Preserve would be an 
amendment empowering the sale of what does not exist, and 
nothing more can be made of such a proposition than that it 
is hocus-pocus, as we said last week. 
The only lands situate withm the Forest Preserve to which 
the amendment can refer are those tracts owned by private 
individuals and surrounded by tracts of State land. In many 
cases it is highly desirable that such tracts should be ac- 
quired by the State for the purpose of solidifying its hold- 
ings, but as there is now nothing in the Constitution forbid- 
ding the purchase of such lands by the State, no necessity 
exists of amending the Constitution to grant permission to 
make such purchase. 
It is reasonable to assume that the intention of the author 
of the amendment was to provide for the exchange of lands 
within the Adirondack Park for public lands outside of the 
Park. The Adirondack Park is something entirely differ- 
ent from the Forest Preserve. It is a district set apart by 
the law of 1885, as amended in 1893j to inpl^^e the territory 
tihi}S described in the statute: 
120. Adirondack Park.— All lands now owned or hereafter acquired 
by the State within the county of Hamilton, the towns of Newcomb, 
Minerva, Schroon, North Hudson, Keene, North, Elba, St. Armand 
and Wilmington, in the county of Essex; the towns of Harrietstown, 
Santa Clara, Altamont, Waverly and Brighton, in the county of 
Franklin ; the town of Wilmurt, in the county of Herkimer; the towns 
of HopkintOD, Colton, Clifton and Fine, in the county of St. Law- 
rence; and in the towns of Johnsburgh, Stony Cr^ek and Thurman, 
and the islands in Lake Georere, in the county of Warren, except such 
lands as may be sold as provided in this article, shall constitute the 
Adirondack Park. Such park shall be forever reserved, maintained, 
and cared for as a ground open for the use of all the people for their 
health and pleasure, and as forest lands necessary to the preserva- 
tion of the headwaters of the chief rivers of the State and a future 
timber supply, and shall remain part of the Forest Preserve. 
The Adirondack Park territory thus defined is marked on 
the official map of the Adirondacks by a blue line. The 
territory comprised within this line consists of parts of the 
Forest Preserve, that is to say, wild lands owned by the 
State, and of other land owned by individuals and corpora- 
tions. The public possessions in the Park are broken up 
into numerous irregular and disjointed tracts separated by 
lands over which the State has no control. It would un- 
questionably be for the public interest if many of these pri- 
vate holdings could be added to the public lands; and the 
proposition has been advanced that advantageous exchanges 
might be made of State lands lying outside of the Adiron- 
dack Park (not outside the Forest Preserve) for private lands 
within the Park bounds. This probably was the intention 
of the author of the amendment; at all events, such a pro- 
position would be intelligible, whereas no sense can be made 
of the amendment as printed. 
But if the amendment had read that State lands outside 
of the Adirondack Park m^ght be exchanged for private 
lands within the Park, even that proposition should be re- 
jected ; for the whole history of Adirondack public land 
transactions demonstrates that such deals are always en- 
gineered and put through with a sacrifice of the real interests 
of the public, and for the advantage of land speculators and 
lumbermen. To authorize Adirondack land exchanges and 
sales would be to open the way once more to jobs and be- 
trayals of public interest. Under existing conditions the 
only sure way of keeping what we have in the North Woods 
is to maintain the safeguard afforded by the Constitution 
as it stands. 
GAME SUPPLY FLUCTUATIONS. 
It is a noticeable fact in the evolution of the sports of field 
and stream that an over- abundance of a species of game de-> 
predates or destroys its value either as a means of sport or 
as an article of food. Audubon recounts that in earlier 
days the prairie chicken was in such common abundance 
that no effort was required to secure it, so common indeed 
was it that it was considered unworthy of the value of the 
powder consumed in shooting it. This is a dis'^inct con- 
rast to' the high esteem in which the bird is now held by the 
epicure, and the change shows that in matters pertaining to 
the palate and stomach prejudice or whim or education may 
be the dominant factor in determining what is best to eat. It 
was a long time before the terrapin gained fashionable ap- 
proval and was thereafter considered a rare delicacy. 
As an over-abundance will depreciate the value, so will a 
scarcity of a species of game enhance the value of it for 
sport or food. Scarcity multiplies the difficulties of pursuit 
and capture, and the obstacles to be overcome are the soul 
of all sports. They are what make skill, woodcraft and 
pleasure possible. They exact the highest and best physical 
and mental equipment of the individual for his best success. 
As there may be too great an abundance for sport, so there 
may be too great a scarcity for reward of diligent effort, and 
yet the scarcity tends to broaden sport in a general sense, 
since the sportsman seeks other special fields, adding to what 
he already fancies; or, indeed, the new sport may have its 
own distinct and enthusiastic following. Rabbit hunting, 
for instance, which now is done largely with beagles, is a 
form of sport which a few years ago was considered largely 
as belonging to boys. It now has grown into the favor of 
men East and West, and has its conventional tenets of sports- 
manship instead of the primitive methods of a few years 
ago. 
Fox hunting too is growing in favor and gaining a broader 
field, so that sport is derived from it by constantly increasing 
numbers year by year. 
And thus if one branch of sport is overcrowded to a degree 
which produces unsatisfactory results, or if there is a dearth 
of game material, it tends to the stimulation and develop- 
ment of other forms of sport,. so that what may on the sur- 
face appear to be a particular loss naay after all in a way be 
3, general gain, 
I 
