-ft. 
Not. 7, 1896.J 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
S6B 
had that perfect skill which neyer comes to the late^ be- 
ginner. He did not till his ducks part of the time, but all 
the time. If a bird was too far to kill he did not shoot at 
it. Never was there a man who more perfectly under- 
stood the animals he pursued. He was as much at home 
on the marsh as they. Where the city shooter would not 
dream of venturing on the quaking bog he trod with fear- 
less heart, knowing just what spot was safe to step upon 
and what was not. He was as weatherwise as the wild 
goose. He knew by instinct which w&y the wind would 
blow, what day the ducks would fly, which way they 
would feed. Cunning and secretive and politic withal 
in these later days, he pushes you now wherever you pre- 
fer to go; but he does not tell which way he would go, if 
it were in the old days, and if the flight were coming in, 
and if the wind were as it is to-day, and if he himself 
were alone out on the marsh. Never in his heart of hearts 
has the Kankakee River pusher learned any actual respect 
for the city men he takes out shooting. He takes their 
money and endures their advice or orders and does his 
day's work faithfully, and stands the torture of witnessing 
bad shooting, but down in his heart he must be always 
thinking "What a duffer this fellow is I" Externally he 
is always polite. Without his aid would half the good 
bags be made we read about? I irow nit. It is the pusher 
who gets the boat into the mallard hole, and it is his eye 
that marks to a hair the place where the dead birds fall, 
and who goes out to them, walking on bis paddle laid 
down sometimes, and springing on and forward always 
just ahead of the line of sucking bog that chases his feet 
hungrily. While the sportsman shivers bundled up in his 
sweater, the pusher is warm with his shirt collar open. 
He does not mind the rain or a bit of snow or ice now 
and then. This sort of man I admire. On many and 
many an occasion, when the boats start out over the 
marsh from the club houses, the sportsman is the man in 
the stern of the boat, 
In the days before the sportsmen came on the marsh 
the marsh man was a market shooter, and he remains such 
to-day. He has not and never will have any respect for 
the laws alleged to protect fish and game. He does not 
tell you what laws to make about your sheep and cattle, 
and he does not care what laws you pass about taking 
care of his fish and game. There has come down to him 
from his ancestors the American feeling of ownership in 
the wUd game of the country. Heredity has given him 
the sense of rightfulness in his intention of taking the 
game and fish when his necessities dictate. He does not 
farm or labor for hire, and he must live, and here is all 
this means of living about him upon which his father 
lived, and his father before him. Who shall say him nay? 
The marsh is wide. Detection is impossible. The law is 
something very far. There is no argument about 
this. 
There are many ways of making a living along the 
strange Kankakee country which are not known to the 
city dwellers. Our marsh man, now grown, let us say, 
into a slender, sallow-faced, stooped, sinewy and strong 
young man, knows every secret of the earth and water of 
his country, and so he lives, representing the fittest, who 
have survived there. In the spring he shoots ducks, of 
course, as long and late and as early and steadily as he 
can. Meantime he meets the first run of the pike and the 
wall-eyes as soon as the ice is out, and diligently spears 
and nets them to his great satisfaction. He has a few set 
lines out all the time he is along the river. He also nets 
turtles steadily— something you never heard about, per- 
haps, but which he finds remunerative. He traps musk- 
rats till the weather gets too warm, of course, and knows 
all the ditches and river bends and cut-offs where these 
animals are best to be found. He shoots jacksnipe when 
they appear in the spring, and big yellowlegs, and all 
birds that bring any price in the market — none which do 
not sell well. He has a bad time in the summer for a 
while, but then he goes to gathering mushrooms — another 
thing the city man does not know, though this is quite an 
industry too along the Kankakee. The marsh man eats 
dogfish now, in tender faith that the Kankakee will not 
betray him, but bring to him only things fit and good for 
him. The stranger that visits him when he has dogfish 
for dinner will perhaps not be happy, for unless dogfish 
is well cooked it tastes like a mouthful of raw cotton and 
feels like a piece of sponge. 
By the end of June or earlier the marsh man is out 
shooting woodcock, and making one of his best harvests 
of the year — one of which he is always very slow to talk, 
for it is well to be careful about giving away a gold mine. 
Incident to the woodcock shooting is that of killing the 
young wood ducks which breed along the river. These 
illegal birds bring the best prices. 
By July the young prairie chickens are big enough to 
shoot, and these bring great prices too in the city. There 
are a good many chickens still along these great marshes, 
and in regard to them there is very little law in force. 
There are wild grapes of a fine sort ripe by summer time, 
and many berries. There are frogs to sell too, and some- 
times the marsh man sells these, though not often, except 
the big bullfrogs, which of course he hunts, because they 
always bring a good price in the markets. 
By August the young illegal teal are ready to shoot, 
and by September the plover are about, and also the 
jacksnipe again, and the rails and some ducks. I have 
told in another article how the marsh man hunts rails 
with his cur dog, and how he sometimes sells bitterns for 
"English partridges." He hunts now regularly for snipe 
and ducks especially. When he goes out on the marsh to 
shoot he takes his lunch with him — bread covered with 
honey. The honey hp got out of a bee tree, of which 
there are many along the Kankakee River, though you 
do not hear the native dwellers say much about it. In 
the fall also there are many mud hens, and these the 
marsh man eats as steady diet. At times he has a bit of 
raccoon, for the cur dog is a good one to trail a coon or a 
squirrel, as well as a crippled duck or a king rail on the 
marsh. 
In the late fall, when the ducks have gone South, the 
marsh man may get a few shots at quail along the thick- 
ets, sometinles killing a dozen or so at a shot. He begins 
now to trap for skunks, raccoons, and the like in the 
woods. At rare times he sees signs of an otter, and if 
the otter is to live through the winter he will live it at 
another part of the country. Trapping for muskrats of 
course goes on out on the marsh all fall. Then comes 
cold weather, and only the current of the river or the 
ditches keep the ice from covering everthing over the 
marsh. The native hunter knows yet another thing or 
two. He knows that the big marshes of the Kankakee 
are famous grounds for mink, and he takes the faithful 
cur dog and goes out after mink, hunting along the ditch 
banks and under turned sods, where some man has been 
foolish enough to plow a bit. Last winter he killed 135 
mink this way, he tells you, and the winter before eighty- 
five. This winter the old dog is getting a little old. He 
does not know whether he will do so well as 100 mink or 
not, but he hopes so. 
In the winter time a wolf may come in over the frozen 
marsh, and if he does he is sure to be trapped. The 
thousands of cottontail rabbits make an easy source of food 
supply, but they do not bring anything in the markets or 
they would all be shot. The white egrets which used to 
come to the roost in the heart of the swamp were long 
ayo shot off. Anything which can be sold in the markets 
is shot, no matter what the season, and many birds, 
it is sure, are used for the city markets, of which the 
reticent pusher does not always tell you. If the prairie 
chickens band up and roost in the timber in winter they 
are shot, and if they roost on the grass lands they are 
trapped. There is no sort of wild game whatever, or of 
wild creature or product having available quality for the 
table or market, which is not laid under tribute constantly 
by this sharp-eyed marsh man from season to season of 
the whole year. Sharp indeed must be his eye, and sure 
his hand, and keen his faculties, thus to live at this day 
of the century. Yet it is no romancing to say that many 
of these men do live thus, and with little or no other 
work from one end of the year to the other, They count 
more or less upon the sportsman trade that comes to 
them. Some of them keep rude little hostelries, where 
sportsmen can put up, and here the head of the family 
'tends house when too old to shoot. He may charge a 
dollar a day for board, and his son will charge two dol- 
lars or so a day to push you on the marsh, and a boat is 
rented now and then, or a horse and wagon hired to a 
shooting party, so that in one way or another the marsh 
man makes a living. He will tell you with pride that 
one year he took in $300 at his place. Some of the most 
independent of the marsh men are the boat pushers who 
live near some of the shooting clubs. For three or four 
months in the year these men have fairly steady work at 
|'<J to $3 a day and their board. These men are very often 
manly and intelligent fellows, with a smattering of ex- 
perience and life, and open, pleasant manners. They 
are gradually losing type and becoming changed to the 
humdrum of workaday existence. They may chop wood 
in winter, which certainly an old-time Kankakee man 
never would have done. Of farming they cannot do 
much, for the land does not permit it. What could such 
a man do in the hot competition of modern town life? 
He feels his fitness for the life on the marsh, his unfit- 
ness for any other life, and it is small wonder if he 
views with a growing suUenness the encroachments 
of the farms and fences which now begin to hem him 
in. 
Without over-drawing or exaggeration, we may say a 
large class of men have long lived as above described on 
the marsh country of the Kankakee, a strip of ground 
say 150 miles by 5, 10 or 25 in width, as it overlaps into 
other marsh country. If my friend, the writer, would 
find his field and his types, let him not delay too long. AH 
this must change. Within the last ten years the big land 
companies have been buying up the cheap marsh lands 
along the Kankakee. At first they were laughed at, but 
there now appears the craft and waiting ability of the 
capitalist. Great ditches cross the marsh in many ways. 
Hay making is followed as a regular industry, and hun- 
dreds of cattle have been ranged on these marshes in the 
last few years. 
This month yet a new place seems to have been found 
for the wild Kankakee marsh land in the products of civ- 
ilization. The dispatches say this very week: 
"Chicago capitalists have secured options on several 
thousand acres of land in La Porte and adjacent counties, 
this large area being located in the Kankakee region, for 
establishment of an industry that promises to revolution- 
ize a branch of the paper-making industry. 
"It is said that experiments have demonstrated that by 
a new process an excellent quality of binding twine and 
building and roofing paper can be made out of the long 
gi-ass that stretches away for miles in the Kankakee 
swamps. 
"The process is controlled by a syndicate of capitalists, 
and it is proposed to develop a new industry on a large 
scale by the establishment of a number of plants." 
No other body of wild land could have been in the en- 
tire country found so near a big city. The land was 
bound to be used. Many railroads now cross the marsh, 
of course, and now telephone lines are building over it, 
and pipe lines from the oil fields of Indiana. The tilled 
farms come down to the edge of the marsh, and more and 
more they eat into the wide sea of waving grass which 
for so long has been uncrossed by the craft of modern 
ways, which has held within its secret places a people 
who were of themselves, a class distinct and notable. 
These people to-day look on with their hands in their 
pockets as they see these things coming on, apathetic, in 
a way also sullen. I have heard them ask bitterly, 
"What chance has a- poop man to-day?" And indeed 
what is his chance? What are his prospects as he looks 
into the America of to-day -;-this man, this American pure 
and simple? 
This year the old Kankakee went back to the customs 
of other days. The floods came over the land again and 
the ditches were futile. Where last year there were tons 
of hay standing, this year the rail and snipe are flying. 
On the edge of the marsh the eager plows of the farmers 
last year had been turning the earth, seeking for a place 
to put a seed which should bring forth an ear or so of 
food. Last year there were cornfields where this year 
the tall, rank marsh grass has sprung up and covered the 
earth again, so that only here and there, over the tops of 
the strong, red rushes and broad-leaved grasses can there 
be seen a faint and faded white tassel of corn, held up 
like a hand beckoning distress out of a sea of despair. 
One year of water eats up a dozen years of drought and 
ditching. The marsh creeps and crawls and grasps for 
itself strongly, always thinkmg of the past it once knew 
and cherished. 
One of these marsh friends of mine and myself were 
looking out over the marsh together a few days ago, both 
of us silent. At last I said: "The old river is claiming 
her own again, isn't she?" Something like a gleam of 
satisfaction and triumph crossed his white-brown face as 
he said slowly: "She holds her own." E. Hough. 
1306 BoTCE BuiLpma, Chicago, 
HUMMINGBIRDS IN THE WINDOW. 
Editor Forest and Stream: 
Akenside painted the "Pleasures of Imagination" in 
glowing colors and thereby gained his only moiety of 
fame. Now let some one who is hankering after that 
elusive stuff take for his theme the "Pleasures of Lying," 
and if his genius is equal to the task he has an equal 
chance for immortality. 
Some scribblers seem to think that if they haven't 
sound material to build a story with they are privileged 
to manufacture what they need to make it interesting, and 
this innocent lying is indulged in so very freely that I 
imagine there must be lots of pleasure in it. 
Some time ago I was wicked enough to chuckle over a 
bit of work in the Natural History column of Forest and 
Stream, wherein it was stated that a pair of tame hum- 
mingbirds had a little disagreement about bathing, and 
that the bather would take the other by the hindleg and 
drag him into the saucer of water 1 If inventing it gave 
the writer as much pleasure as the story gave rne I do not 
blame her in the least for writing it, though as an in- 
structor in natural history I hardly think she's "in it." 
And now comes another, from the Home Journal, 
which in its flights of fancy fully equals it. It is headed 
"Hummingbirds can be Tamed," and then relates two 
cases, one of which was that some of them were kept for 
some time in the window of Mr. Taylor's restaurant on 
Broadway, and that they drew a constant crowd, 
This was so improbable that the temptation to investi- 
gate it was irresistible, and I asked Mr. Taylor whether 
he served up hummingbirds at his tables. He blandly 
smiled when I told the story and said that no such attrac- 
tion was ever in his window. 
The other part is not so easy to investigate, as the lady's 
name and address is not given. It states (not under oath) 
that she kept the little imaginative creatures in hfr parlor, 
and that among their other wonderful doings they built 
their nests in her lace curtains and hatched out lots of 
young onesl What could be more interesting? I regret 
that the little rascals spoiled her curtains, but there need 
be no loss in such a case. If she had taken her scissors 
and cut out the piece of curtain with the nest attached 
she might have sold the curiosity at almost any price. lb 
may be that she has preserved it, and if so 1 hereby offer 
to contribute $100 to the "Society for the Promotion of 
Lying" if she will merely let me feast my eyes with a 
look at it. 
I read in one of our magazines some months ago a 
chapter on "Hummingbirds" by a writer who showed 
a thorough knowledge of her subject in every line, but 
she could have enjoyed none of the "pleasures of imagina- 
tion" in writing it. Didymus. 
Ekglkwood, N. J., Oct. 13. 
THE HORNSNAKE. 
South Carolina.— JSa«for Forest and Stream: For 
many years I have taken great interest in trying to find 
exactly what underlying truth there is for the many sto- 
ries of the horned snake which survive in tradition and 
occasionally appear in the daily papers, often with appar- 
ently ample authentication. 
The father of all the stories (not the snakes) I found in 
an old "Report to the Lords Proprietors of the Carolinas," 
published in London over two hundred years ago. This 
able-bodied progenitor of myths stated that this country 
was the habitat of a snake whose tail was a poisoned horn 
or spike; that it took its tail in its mouth, and, making a 
hoop of its body, rolled after its victim; but the victim 
always escaped by jumping behind a tree, into which 
the snake drove its horn so that it could not draw it out, 
and snake and tree died together, the tree shriveling up 
to a sapling. 
Of course, that story is a little robust for this century; 
but I have met a number of educated and intelligent per- 
sons who profess to have themselves seen snakes with 
one or more of the following peculiarities: (a) With horn 
tips to their tails; (b) with disposition to strike with this 
horn as a weapon; (c) with a sting like a bee's in the 
horn. 
Now, it is a fact that no recognized naturalist has ever 
described in this or any other country any true snake 
with a true horn on its tail, or with any sting in its tail, 
horn or no horn. And if there is no true horn or sting 
the motions interpreted as efforts to use the tail as a 
weapon lose all significance and must be set down as ac- 
cidental contortions. 
Chambers's Encyclopedia does indeed describe two 
snakes as having tails "terminated with a spine- instead 
of a rattle," They are called the Trigonoeephalus rhodos- 
toma of Java and the Laehesis mutus of Tropical Amer- 
ica. But, on the authority of Prof. True, of the National 
Museum, it may be stated that the so-called spines are 
only the usual harmless horny caps found on nearly all 
snakes, and that that on the Java snake is about the same 
as that on our common copperhead, to which both the 
other snakes are related. That on the Laehesis is the 
longest on any known snake, but is only the harmless 
scaly cap after all — not used as a weapon or capable of 
such use. 
But while there is no true snake with any true horn, 
there are true snakes with apparent horns, and there are 
also apparent snakes with true horns; and in every appar- 
ently authentic story of a _ horned snake which I have 
ever been able to trace either the horn or the snake 
turned out to be only apparent. Of course I bar young 
rattlesnakes, the sprouting of whose rattle is a horny but- 
ton, but not a horn in the sense of this discussion. 
Now let me explain the apparent horns and apparent 
snakes which have deceived casual observers, and your 
readers can then each investigate for himself any case he 
meets or hears of, and determine whether or not he has 
discovered something new in natural history. And if 
anyone is so luoky, do let him put it in whisky and pre- 
serve it, lest it be forever lost — like the cause of the auro- 
ra borealis, which a college student onco told his profes- 
sor that he did know, but had forgot. If you ever find 
the true horned snake don't let him be lost. 
The apparent horn sometimes found on true snakes will 
only impose upon one who has very small ideas of horns. 
The scales of a snake are true horny substance, and 
where the tail tapers down to a fine point the last tenth 
