406 
FOREST AND STREAM, 
I.N6V. 21, 1896. 
number, but scarcely ever seen one on the scales above 
4751b8. He says that a moose weighing 9001bs. is a big 
one. 
George Cherry, of Essex street, is out of the woods with 
a fine moose, which was displayed in the window of his 
restauraot. It was shot at Cherryfield, Me., or in the 
\dcinity of that town. He has in his refrigerator a num- 
ber of deer and four bears. Speaking of bears, the number 
coming in to the Boston markets is unusually large this 
fall. Two were sent in for sale to Messrs. Hyde <& Wheeler 
'the other day. They were from Bethel, Me. , and killed 
ipi that vicinity. The shipper informs Mr. Wheeler that 
jsome twenty bears have been killed already in the vicin- 
ity of Bethel or north of that town. They have visited 
the apple trees near to the forests or on abandoned farms, 
and have actually broken down great limbs in order to 
get the apples. They are generally taken in traps. 
Mr, James B. Jones is another sportsman who has 
been remarkably successful near home. Early in the 
season he had several broods of quail located in the town 
of Topsfield. The first day of the open season he could 
not get away; but the second day he was there, with a 
friend and dogs. Twelve quail and a woodcock resulted 
from the day's shooting. Mr. Jones says that he never 
had better sport in his life. He will try the same loca- 
tion again at Thanksgiving. 
From 4 to 6in. of snow in the woods of Maine and 
New Hampshire has started a number of sportsmen 
after big game, but the weather is too mild and the 
snow is likely to depart before the moose, deer and cari- 
bou suffer too badly. 
A Worcester, Mass., party, consisting of F. M, Harris, 
Calvin Macomber, Ralph Morgan, Samuel Alden and O. 
C. Ward, returned Saturday night from the Moosehead 
' Lake region, where they killed in three weeks ten bucks 
and three does. Moose were seen and a shot got at a bull, 
but he escaped. Special, 
und ^mu 
Our readers are invited to send us for these columns 
notes of the game sujoply, shooting resorts, and their 
evperience in the field. 
WATER KILLING DEER. 
WditOT Forest and Stream: 
Deerslayer claims that the gentlemen who wish to pro- 
hibit hounding are fancy shooters, etc. , whUe he is an 
old-fashioned hunter. This phrase suggests to me the 
species (rapidly becoming extinct, praise the Lord!) whose 
habit it was to shoot two dozen partridges in one shot as 
they sat on the ground in a bunch. Deerslayer claims 
that 5,000 deer were killed in. the Adirondacks last year, 
and that therefore they are not becoming scarce. This is 
an absolute reason that the deer are becoming scarce; no 
circumscribed piece of country can stand such a drain. 
Deerslayer says that they will last his time. It is hardly 
necessary to suggest his sublime disregard for posterity, 
even for that courageous chip of the old block who suc- 
ceeded in slaughtering a deer after a guide had it tied up 
for him to murder. 
By his own account the deer has absolutely no chance, 
and the method has wonderful advantages, for it could be 
executed by an infant or an invalid. The sportsman- 
butcher has absolutely nothinp to do except to point a 
shotgun and puU the trigger. The guide rows after the 
deer, ropes it and holds it while it is shot. Mind, the im- 
becile is not even expected to use a rifle. 
One suggestion would not be out of place. This is that 
Deerslayer confine his sporting instincts. If he would 
shoot calves in his back yard, we are sure it would be 
more pleasant for all concerned. Pinehubst. 
SOUTHBRN MASSAOHUSETTS. 
Editor Forest and Stream: 
il^j hunting days have long been over, for I am past 
four score and my sight has failed so that I can no longer 
shoot, and reading is so difficult for me that I rarely 
attempt it, and I have become so deaf that no one can 
read to me for any length of time. Occasionally, how- 
ever, when my son meets with anything of special inter- 
est he brings it to me, and he has just called my attention 
to the letter of Deerslayer in your paper of Oct. 31. 
It has stirred my blood to such a degree that I cannot 
restrain the expression of my indignation that anyone 
who pretends to be a sportsman should advocate such a 
sneaking method of billing deer, worthy only of the 
meanest pot-hunter. Such a man would shoot barn-door 
fowls in a barnyard and think it legitimate sport; and 
then to assume the pseudonym of honest old Natty 
Bumpo — that model of a sportsman! It's enough to stir 
his bones in their gravel 
He asserts that game laws are needless; that there is no 
danger of exterminating game; that aU the talk about 
"still-hunting" and "shooting on the wing" is nonsense. 
If one wants real sport let him put his dogs into the wood 
and lie close till they drive a deer into the lake, then chase 
him in a boat and put a rope over his antlers and 
hen put a charge of buckshot into him! The man who 
would kill a deer in such a way is no better than a mur- 
derer, a sneak thief or a pickpocket. He is precisely the 
kiad of cockney sportsman who make game laws neces- 
sary. A mere sensualist, whose only object is to gratify 
his palate. In reply to his assertion that there is no 
danger of deer becoming exterminated, I need only point 
to notorious facts. Have they not become exterminated 
from all the settled portions of New Eugland except a 
few preserves? Have not the buffalo which once roamed 
in countless millions on the prairies been so completely 
exterminated that the only representatives left are the 
few that have been domesticated in private herds? And 
finally have not the Indians themselves — the wild men of 
the forest — been exterminated, with the exception of the 
few scattered remnants of tribes that have adopted the 
dress and habits of the white men? 
Writing has become so much of a task for me that it 
has taken me two days to write these few lines, and this 
is probably the last contribution I shall ever make to 
your columns. Bat with my latest breath I tvould de- 
noTxnce the man who would resort to suoh unsportsman- 
like shifts, and I trust there are men enough left who 
sfear© my feelings who will or^ out against moh ooU' 
temptible theories as are advocated in the letter of Deer- 
slayer. H. W. S. Cleveland. 
Chicago, IU. 
Editor Forest and Stream: 
In am somewhat surprised at the reception given my 
note respecting the hounding of deer. The character of 
the responses is not at all what I had anticipated. Just 
review the epithets that have been bestowed upon me. 
The Mail and Express editor calls me a human fiend, a 
cheerful assassin, a diabolical Kurd, a creature whom an 
inscrutable Providence permits to live, a brute, butcher, 
deer butcher. My son is called a precocious cub. I am 
advised to run a slaughter house, to take a place in the 
Union Stock Yards at Chicago, and one correspondent 
exhorts me to set my old grandmother afire and kill her 
with a crowbar. (This, naturally enough, comes from the 
grand old Commonwealth of Massachusetts, with its 
record of twenty human beings,, mostly old women, and 
two dogs executed for witchcraft.) Another writer, more 
humane perhaps than the rest, would annihilate me at a 
stroke by calmly denying to me any existence at all; he 
appears to think me a myth. The whole thing reminds 
me of what I've read of the old days, when you put into 
the pillory the writer whom you didn't agree with, and 
cropped his ears and plunked him with rotten eggs. 
I beg to extend to all these kind critics assurances of 
my most distinguished consideration. I shall not return 
their compliments, not on such short acquaintance. A 
true deer bounder will not resort to blackguardism. He 
is able to conduct a discussion in a gentlemanly way. 
But does it not occur to you that this reverting to the old 
system of putting in the stocks one who does not agree 
with you is a very poor makeshift for real argument? 
And is it surprising that I am not converted by your call- 
ing me bad names? That I fail to find in any of the com- 
munications printed any one thing which could possibly 
be dignified as an argument to appeal to sensible men? 
Let us consider some of the propositions advanced by 
the advocates of the system of still- hunting. First comes 
the grotesque notion of the Mail and Express man that 
the only truly sportsmanlike way to hunt deer is to shoot 
at them from long range, and he implies that he thinks 
that the longer the range the more sportsmanlike the act. 
Now if there is any one thing in the whole realm of 
sportsmanship which disguste me for the diabolical 
cruelty it involves, it is this very same long range shoot- 
ing at game. It stands to reason that the longer the 
range the greater the opportunity to wound without kill- 
ing, and the more then is the cruelty involved. Long 
range shooting is not sportsmanlike; it is the kind of 
work indulged in by novices and greenhorns who are 
making their first warfare against gatne. These long 
range fellows have more to answer for than all the rest 
of the sportsmen community put together. It is they 
who pump lead at fleeting bands of elk and bunches of 
antelope, hurling after the game their bullets, where they 
can do nothing but to maim, with not the slimmest 
chance of recovering their victims. It is the tyro who 
shoots at ducks or quail at distances where no man with 
any brains in his head could expect to do anything more 
than to wound. These are the maniacs, who shoot with- 
out sense or reason. All through the woods you can find 
the disgusting evidences of their work in the game "shot 
down and left to taint the blessed air," as Nessmuk puts it* 
Now, Mr. Mail and Express man, the next time you have 
wounded your game at long range and have followed it 
for awhile, and then, becoming tired of the weary pur- 
suit, abandon it to its fate, while you sit down on a rock 
to exult over your only truly true sportsmanship, and to 
swell up with pride in your self -adulation at being so 
much exalted above the fiendish deer bounder — just let 
your conscience talk to you about the poor beast which 
has escaped from you, sorely wounded, and to suffer for 
no one knows how long, and then — but why talk about 
this? The long range hunter probably is blessed with a 
long range conscience. If the deer could talk they would 
probably tell us that from their standpoint the practice of 
the man who makes short work of them with guide and 
boat (and noose, if you please) is a less terrible being than 
the long range hunter who wantonly wounds to gratify 
his idiotic pride in fluke marksmanship. 
Another thing that makes me tired is this stiU-hunter's 
cant about "giving the game fair play" and "pitting 
one's skill against that of the deer." What is this much 
vaunted fair play? Why, a still-hunter simply sneaks up 
on his game and kills it before the poor thing suspects his 
presence. Did you ever hear of a still-hunter, when he 
had come up on his deer, whooping and hurrahing and 
waving a red flag, and getting it on the jump, to give it 
"fair play" before he shoots? Not much. Of all sports- 
man's cant, say I, this of "fair play for the game" is the 
thinnest, silhest and most Pharisaical. 
Yet this talent for sneaking possessed by a few they 
present as the only simon-pure, correct and refined 
sportsmanship, and this in language foreign to sport, by 
denouncing the other fellows as fiends and Kurds. 
And what does "pitting your skill against the game's 
cunning" actually mean? It means that you put not 
your skill against that of the game, but the skrU of the 
man who made your gun, of the boy who loaded your 
cartridges by machinery, of the guide who takes you to 
the woods and puts you on the trail, and who, if you are a 
moose hunter, calls up the game for you and tells you 
"Now shoot." It is pitting not your "skill," but fire and 
lead against the game. You might as well talk of pitting 
the skill of a commander of a warship against the 
cunning of the helpless women and children in the 
town he is bombarding with dynamite guns. If the deer 
too had a gun and knew how to use it, there'd be some 
"pitting" for sure— that is, if your valiant still- hunter 
ever ventured in the woods looking for "fair play." 
What rubbish to talk of the cunning of a deer when it 
is sneaked upon by the still-hunter, and when it is shot 
without even knowing it is in danger. What rubbish to talk 
of an equality between the cunning of a deer and the 
cunning of a man armed with a repeating rifle. Can the 
deer have a cunning equal to that of the man? No. 
Were it a thousand times more cunning, man is more so; 
and yet we are told that the deer's cunning opposed to the 
infinitely greater cunning of man, reinforced with a rifle, 
is an equality. 
Now don't you think that you are overworking dear old 
Nessmuk when you quote him as a patron saint of your 
style of still-huuting? If I remember rightly, Nessmuk 
used to go into the woods with just three bullets. He 
said that that wae eaough for him. Is there one ftmong 
you who would follow his example? Why, in this same 
issue of FOEEST AND STREAM containing your letters I find 
a story from a correspondent who went into the Rockies 
and took with him 200 cartridges. Not long ago some one 
else told about his party taking 500 rounds of ammunition 
apiece. In heaven's name, for what? To give the game 
a chance? Nessmuk was a little man, not a giant; 
honest now, wouldn't he have staggered helplessly im- 
der the modern up-to-date still-hunter's load of 500 car- 
tridges? My notion is that he would have fallen down. 
Faugh! what would Nessmuk (honor to his memory) 
say to your calling him to witness for you? It reminds me 
of a story I read the other day about a dramatic com- 
pany's playing of Hamlet. "We could settle the Shakes- 
peare-Bacon controversy right now," said one who was 
present, "How?" "Just go and see which one turned 
over in his grave last night." Poor Nessmuk! 
Do not misunderstand me. I am not criticising your 
methods in the least. If you prefer to sneak up to your 
game as an assassin on his victim, that is all right — so 
long as the game holds out and there is enough to go 
around, so that we can all take some in our own approved 
ways. For my part, I like the music of the hounds, the 
exultation of the chase (particularly if there are half a 
dozen boats heading for the same deer), and the satisfac- 
tion of knowing after I have gotten my game that it was 
taken expeditiously and without flummery, and that 
there is no chance for it to go off in the woods and lie 
down in prolonged agony, as it might have done if 
wounded by one of you long range sportsmen. Moreover, 
after I take my one shot and kill my deer I do not feel 
that I am less of a sportsman than he who goes about 
with a gun stuffed from end to end with cartridges, 
whose belt around his waist is stuffed with many more 
and whose baggage is overweighted with hundreds more. 
Now, I repeat that in all the letters printed in the 
reply to mine there is not one word of argument to show 
why the Legislature should forbid the hounding of deer 
in the Adirondacks. You surely do not expect the Leg- 
islature to be influenced by your wholesale denunciation 
of me as a bogy man, I am not likely to appear in the 
eyes of the men at Albany such a monster that they must 
needs enact a special law to deal with my particular case. 
The whole substance of your argument is that you kill 
your deer differently from how I kill mine, and that the 
ego and the right are the same thing. 
The editor himself concedes that game laws are not 
passed to require so-called "sportsmanlike" methods of 
game killing, Game protection is only a question of keep- 
ing up the supply. It rests therefore witJh the opponents 
of deer hounding in the Adirondacks to show that deer 
hounding decreases the deer beyond the recuperative 
powers of the stock. We deer bounders have on our side 
the authority of Chief Fish and Game Protector Pond, 
that hounding is not injurious in its effect upon the deer 
supply, and I cite his opinion as worth more than all the 
hysterical statistics given out by the men whose argu- 
ments are four-fifths emotional denunciation and one-fifth 
statistics. Horace Greeley once said that there were three 
kinds of lies — lies, blank lies and statistics. 
Most deer killed in the Adirondacks are killed by 
hounding. The same is true of Maine. And yet in both 
regions the game is on the increase. 
To sum it all up, deer hounding is more humane than 
still-hunting; it gets the deer without unnecessary cruelty; 
it does not ruinously deplete the supply; it is a method in 
which mo re hunters can take part than in any other. There 
may be two hundred hunters out about a body of water 
where only one deer is killed. Hundreds and thousands 
can take part in deer hounding who cannot still-hunt. 
The rights of the majority should be respected in this as 
in other things. That is the true American doctrine. 
The deer bounders can as justly claim that their rights 
and privileges shall be protected as can the still-hunters. 
Now, gentlemen, just one last word, more in sorrow 
than in anger: Denunciation is not argument. 
Deeeslayee. 
The Record, of Wells, Hamilton county, declares that 
1,000 deer were shipped through that village during the 
last week of the hounding season. 
THE MAINE MOOSE SITUATION. 
Boston, Mass., Nov. 6. — Editor Forest and Stream: In 
your issue of Oct. 31, under the head of "Parting Shots at 
Maine Moose," is an article which I have read with much 
interest. Growler is very much to be commended 
for the interest he takes in the preservation of the moose, 
but I cannot agree with him that it is necessary to make 
a close time for ten years, or for anything different from 
the law as it stands to-day. If the present law was en- 
forced to the letter, moose would be well taken care of, 
and in my judgment would rapidly multiply. In making 
this assertion I desire to say that I am casting no reflec- 
tions on the Game Commissioners or their Assistants, or 
on the work that they have done, and from what I have 
been able to learn this work has been more thoroughly 
done this year than ever before, and they should receive 
nothing but praise from all sportsmen. 
The hunting grounds of Maine cover many miles, and 
I imagine that the Commissioners have not sufficient 
funds at their command to thoroughly cover all the points 
as they should be for a proper protection of game. 
Growler says, "Another reason why bull moose of more 
than two years of age are getting scarce in Maine is that 
all the large males can be called in the love-making season," 
etc. ; but he neglects to say that this love-making season is 
in close time when game is protected by law. The rut- 
ting season is at its best early in September and is prac- 
tically over by the first of October, and my own experience, 
with one of the best moose callers in the State as a guide, 
is, that it is next to impossible to call out a large bull after 
that time; and if my experience is the same as that of 
other hunters there seems to be no occasion for a closer 
season for this reason given by Growler, as October 
first is the earliest time when game can be killed lawfully. 
The assertion that few large bulls are seen is accounted 
for by the fact that a larger part of the hunting is done 
in canoes, and while small bulls and cows frequent the 
streams and meadows, the large bulls usually are back 
the bogs and out of sight; thus giving the impression tq 
anyone who has not carefully looked into the question 
that, while there are plenty of cows and yearlings, there 
are no large bulls. I have just returned from a two 
weeks' trip in the Maine woods and have seen more evi- 
deooes of the iaoreag© to ms)m tban o» any trip I b§ye 
