368 
^'OREST AND STREAM 
[Nov. 6, 1897. 
took to the woods with our rifles. "We saw two flocks of 
turkeys and several deer, but p;ot not a single shot. Were 
"cut out" three times to-day. It is not safe to hunt in this 
neighborhood, for the most of these fellows will shoot on 
first sight at anything that moves. 
At the last "cut out," feeling very much vexed, I stood 
Still, not knowing exactly what to do, whether to continue 
to follow on the track or give it up, when suddenly off to 
my right I heard the report of a gua. Running over in that 
direction, I very suddenly came on the track of a deer on a 
keen jump. Noting blood on its track and knowing it had 
just been shot, and feeling mad that I had so often been "cut 
out" in following my deer, I sprang on the track and fol- 
lowed it some four miles on as rapid a rate as I could go, 
when getting tired, and thinking the hunter, whoever he 
was, would give it up by this time, 1 went along more mod- 
erately, seeing the deer often, but afraid to tire, for fear of 
the hunter hearing the report of my rifle. Night now com- 
ing on and failing to get a shot, I gave it up, and went back 
to Smith's house, telling him about my deer chase. The 
next morning, taking his rifle and strap. Smith went out and 
soon found the deer, dead. It was a fine, fat doe, shot 
through the hip with a very small ball, which glanced into 
the body. I told Smith he might have the deer, but kept 
the circumstances, as related, a secret from him. 
During the remainder of the day I saw several flocks of 
turkeys, one drove of seven deer, and seven singly and in 
pairs; but secured only a fine hen turkey. Returning to 
Smith's, I found Catherine, safe from her ride and vainly 
endeavoring to put the big iron pot on the crane, filled to the 
brim with venison, squirrels and wheat do,ugh, for "pot-pie," 
as she named it. Of course, my gallantry was not lacking; 
so jointly we soon had the coming dinner over the fire, hang- 
ing by the iron chain and hook crane. 
Thursday we devoted to repairing several old turkey pens 
and making trails of straw to them, but our labor was all in 
vain, as shack was so abundant that the turkeys paid no 
attention to them. 
Monday L. and myself took the woods together, proposing 
to hunt along the "big wind fall," which was now well 
filled up with second growth timber. We soon separated, 
and each in a short time struck a drove of deer. In the 
course of an hour they finally came together, making in all 
sixteen deer in one bunch, We then followed them in 
company until 3 P. M., when they all struck olf in a south- 
erly direction. I then proposed to L that we return to 
Smith's, as it would now take us until dark to reach his 
clearing. Getting out my compass I told L. the cour.se to 
take when I branched off from him, having thereby a better 
chance to see game. I traveled very fast and ran a portion 
of the way, but notwithstanding 1 did not get to Smith's 
till after dark. We waited a long time for L before eating 
supper. After this a neighbor came in who asked where L. 
was. I told him I had left him some six miles in the woods 
and I rather thought he had gone on the Henrietta road and 
stopped. "AYell," says he, "it is such a cold and cloudy 
night if he does not get out of the woods by 10 o'clock he is 
a dead man." 
Being quite sure that he had stopped on the Henrietta 
road, I felt very little alarm about him. About 10, hearing 
a noise at the door, I went and opened it, when in tottered 
L. , his clothes all torn and himself looking the picture of 
despair. In a faint voice he eagerly asked for some rum. 
"Quick, some ruml" I got the jug and poured him out full 
half a glass, which he drank off at once. Then setting a 
chair back from the fire for him, he sank into it exhausted. 
A supper was prepared, which he ate with a ravenous appe- 
tite ; after this he gave a short account of himself. He said : that 
after leaving me he had kept on his course to Smith's, when 
he came across a large flock of turkevs, and followed them till 
neai'ly dark. Coming to the pen which I made, he was in a 
quandary whether to go oat to the Henrietta load, a mile off, 
and stay, or go three miles through the woods to Smith's. 
Deciding on Smith's, he started, and when, getting half-way, 
as he supposed, he fell down and broke the glass of his com- 
pass. He then continued in the direction he thought right 
tiU he came back to the very spot he bad started from an 
hour before. Getting frightened, he took another direction 
and traveled on with all the speed he could make. Soon he 
became very tired, fell down often in the snow, sat down 
every few minutes on the logs, so tired he could hardly draw 
his legs after him. It becoming a little lighter by the break- 
ing away of the clouds, he thought he could see an opening 
in the woods, which he steered for, and which luckily proved 
to be Smith's clearings. 
Next day his face and legs were badly, and it was several 
days before he could walls. In the morning, out of curios- 
ity, 1 took his track and followed it for some two miles, 
The steps were very short, and the spots where he had sat 
down were very frequent. He had tuken five complete 
circles, each one gaining ground toward the east. He 
worked always to the right (L. is left-handed), which for- 
tunately was the reason for his reaching Smith's clearing. 
I continued to hunt for a few days until L. was sufficiently 
recruited, when we left for Cleveland. We will always re- 
member the pleasant evenings spent in the Smiths' log home. 
Although poor in this world's goods, they were always 
healthy and cheerful, always ready to aid with the .small 
means at their command. At night Smith would bring out 
a big wooden bowl of choice hickory nuts, and while we 
cracked and ate and told stories he would pound away in- 
dustriously at his leather. Catherine, vho seemed to be the 
belle of the wilderness, often 'invited her nearest female 
friends fiom three to eight miles away to make a visit and 
stay over night, so L. had many opportunilies to study 
female human nature. 
About the last turkey we killed in the Rus&ia region 
seemed so uncommonly large that we weighed it on reach- 
ing home, when to our surprise we found it weighed exactly 
3'^lbs. It was very fat, and so laige that in order to cook it 
in the stove we were obUged to cut it in two. Notwith- 
standing it was well roasted, it tasted so rack and strong 
that none of the family could eat it. 
New Jersey Shooting. 
AsbukyPare, N, J., Oct. 29.— Reports from all the game 
sections of Monmouth county are of the most encouraging 
order. This is particularly true of the quail supply; from 
every one the same reply comes: quail very abundant and 
well grown. 
In consequence the shooter's heart is exceedingly glad, and 
already preparations are well under way. It is to be hoped 
that the system of posting, which was in vogue in manysec" 
tions last year, will not confront us the corning season; for 
men who call themselves sportsmen to band to,gether and 
have the owners of laud consent to posting in order that the 
small cost of printing may be saved them, and thus bar their 
fellow-man from any share of the chase, while they (the 
sportsmen) have a clear field, flavors much of the game hog 
in a new guise. 
Already the reports from Barnegat are good. Ducks and 
geese are dropping in, and some good bags have been made. 
Colder weather will undoubtedly improve the conditions, 
and we hope for a renewal of our old-time sport on these 
grounds. Leonard Htjlit. 
NuxupeiT of 
Adirondack 
Deer 
Killed 
in 
1896. 
Night . 
Hound- 
Still- 
County 
Hunting-. 
ing. 
Hunting. 
Total. 
Bucks. Does. 
.. 170 
748 
116 
1,034 
477 
577 
51 
487 
942 
451 
491 
277 
33 
372 
191 
181 
434 
61 
573 
269 
303 
58 
• 7 
65 
83 
33 
38 
12 
54 
26 
28 
20 
28 
11 
15 
Washington 
25 
■7 
32 
11 
21 
1 
3 
4 
2 
2 
980 
322 
1,757 
909 
848 
Essex 
.. 26 
258 
91 
375 
218 
157 
571 
207 
1.173 
685 
538 
Total 1896 
,1,599 
3,461 
1,286 
6,406 
8,283 
3,178 
Total 1^95 
.1,283 
2,694 
973 
4.900 
2,207 
2,693 
Increase over 1895 
... 366 
767 
313 
1,506 
1,206 
480 
Froprietors of fishing resorts will find it profitable to advertise 
them in Forest And Stream. 
ANGLING NOTES. 
Drummond. 
Drdmmond is a dog, an Irish terrier of the bluest blood, 
hi'' pedigree running back, I iudge from its length, to the 
time of the Irish kings. He was given to me by Dr. Drum- 
mond, of Montreal, president of the St. Maurice Club, and 
the first few months of his life were spent at the club house, 
and it is more than likely that he there heard more or less 
about the big trout that are caught in Wayagamack Lake, 
and perhaps that turned his thoughts to' fish and fishing 
rather lhan to vermin. He is a dog of action instead of a 
dreamer, for he was traveling with a friend of mine, a con- 
ductor of an express train, and being in the baggage car, the 
door of which was o.pen, something outside attracted his at- 
tention and he slipped his collar and took a header out of the 
open door. My friend is not yet sure whether "the little red 
devil wished to find out how quickly a train could be stopped 
or was simply looking for trouble." 
With a member of the family he went into a store possess- 
ing an overhead trolley or railroad for conveying cash to a cen- 
tral station. He took the deey)est interest in the arrangement 
the moment he saw it, and when a cash-bos came flying 
along the line he made one bound into the lap of a lady to 
whom he had never been introduced, another to the top of a 
show-case, and a third at the whizzing box. He missed the 
box, but he landed all right on the head of one of the shop- 
girls that had never done a thing to him, and before her 
scream died away he had tackled that trolley system from 
three different points of vantage. 
The family say that his eyes are almost human, and I do 
not dispute it. That he is affectionate, intelligent, ancl brave 
as a big lion there can be but one opinion; but it is only lately 
that I have discovered that he has a literary turn, and that 
his specialty is angling literature. In my absence my mail 
is piled up on my desk until it overflows the desk, and then 
it is massed on a couch in the library. Drummond investi- 
gated the mail one day lately while 1 was away from home, 
and there were letters and packages and papers galore; tome 
in wrappers and some with none. There was foreign mail 
and domestic mail, and apparently he examined it all, and 
selected two copies of Forest and Strkam, supposed to be 
securely rolled and wrapped in a brown paper wrapper He 
took oft" the wrapper and chewed up the Sea and Eiver Fishing 
department of both papers. It may be said that this was all 
chance, and I would admit it if his attention had been de- 
voted to this department in one paper only, but how does it 
happen that he extracted the fishing department from both 
papers? The Kennel department does not appear to have 
interested him in the least. At first I did not know but he 
was trying to get even with me for certain arguments I have 
had with him by chewing up my "Angling Notes," but I 
had no notes in that issue, and i must assume that he was 
simply trying to improve his mind. That Drummond is a 
dog of excellent judgment is proven by the fact that there 
were a number of other papers in the bunch relating more 
or less to angling, but there is no evidence that he did more 
than examine their titles, and then fairly devoured Forest 
AND Stream, as the best of the entire lot. 
Fish Poisoning. 
It was on a railroad train that I read a newspaper item 
about Otter Creek, in Tremont, being poisoned with Paris 
green, with the result that many brook trout were killed. I 
made a memorandum of the matter with the idea of having 
some experiments tried with flsh and Paris green, to discover 
exactly what would happen under certain conditions. 
When, a little later, I went into Forest and Stream oflSce, 
one of the first questions the editor asked me was what I 
knew about killing fish with this poison, and I told him that 
up to that moment I had never poisoned fish with any kind of 
paison, and knew nothing about it. A few days later I was 
at home again, and when I went to market I met a friend 
and neighbor who said: "I saw those trout that, were 
poisoned." A few questions brought out the fact that it 
could not have been Otter Creek that was poisoned, as my 
newspaper clipping stated. My friend said ]\Ii-. Silas L. 
Griffith, of Danby, Vt., had constructed some breeding 
ponds to establish a flsh hatchery. The ponds _ were about 
10 X 16ft. scjuare and 3.Vft. deep, These ponds were fed by a 
stream through a 3in. pipe. Instead of there being thousands of 
breeding trout killed there were just sixty-two, the trout run- 
ning from 3 to olbs. in weight each, with smaller trout in other 
tanks. These were the trout that were killed, and I can bet- 
ter understand how it was possible for a miscreant to poison 
fish confined in small space, comparatively, than, as the 
.newspaper said, poison a stream of the size of Otter Creek. 
My friend, Mr. Lapham, tells me that Mr. Griffith is a pub- 
lie-spirited man, who has done much for the town in which 
he lives, having given it a free library or something of that 
sort, and being interested in fish propagation, he proposed to 
establish a hatchery for breeding trout artificially. If the 
man or men who poisoned the water could be sent to jail 
for life, to reflect over the fact that in killing a lot of fine 
trout they endangered human life as well, it would be com- 
mon-sense justice, if not common law justice. 
Eaves-Dropper by Force of Circumstances. 
One never hears his name mentioned in a public place by 
strangers, I imagine, without one's getting a start, even if 
one has never committed a crime and is not a fugitive from 
justice. Last Saturday morning when the gentleman in the 
Empire State Express from New York to Albany read the 
Forest and Stream of Oct. 23, and commended Mr. 
Cheney's "Angling Notes" to the lady on his left, and ap- 
proved most heartily of whai Mr. Cheney said under the 
title "One Man in One Day" in the paper which he held in 
his hand, I doubt if he noticed that the gentleman on his 
right, in the next chair, quietly folded his tent, as it were, 
and fled to the smoking compartment of the car; but he fled 
just the same, because he was the Mr. Cheney who was being 
commended. At this safe distance I can take off my hat, 
make a profound bow, and thank the gentleman for the 
pleasant things he said about the writer of these notes. 
Canadian Game Laws. 
In a letter from my friend, Mr. F. W. G. Johnson, man- 
ager of the St. Catherine street branch of Molson's Bank in 
Montreal, relating his success on a shooting expedition from 
which he had just returned, he has something to say about 
other matters than killing deer and grouse. Mr, Johnson is 
a conservative sportsman and believes in moderation in all 
forms of sport, and is a strict observer of the fish and game 
laws. 
He says: "We killed no trout, as it was near their spawn- 
ing time, but we killed enough pike and chub to satisfy our 
hunger for fish. I saw near a trout spawning bed in one of 
the lakes fully a cord of birch bark piled up on the shore of 
the lake to be used as torches by the festive habitant in spear- 
ing the trout off the bed, to be salted for winter use. On the 
train coming in I saw in the express car a small fawn of 
1897 crop, that would not weigh over 30 t^ 351bs., judging 
from her looks. Poor little thing! Such is protection of 
fish and game in the province." 
What Mr. .Johnson says of a remote lake in Canada, is 
probably true to a greater or less extent of all waters con- 
taining fish in what we have come to term^the backwoods. 
It is a difficult matter for the law to reach these remote lakes 
and stop the slaughter of fish at the breeding season The 
people who spear trout on their spawning beds for. food have 
always done it if we could but know the truth of the matter, 
and they will continue to do so until they are caught in the 
act and have to pay the penally, and that may stop the 
slaughter so far as the particular individual is concerned, but 
there will be others. These people look upon the fish as 
food that they are entitled to take at any time, and any law 
which chances to interfere with the slaughter they regard as 
an outrage and oppression. They never once consider that 
they are cutting off their ultimate food supply, such as it is, 
by killing spawning flsh by wholesale. The food is at hand, 
and they take it and chance being caught. The transporta- 
tion clause in the New York law was passed to pievent the 
extinction of the trout, because it was almost impossible with 
the small number of game protectors to cover the gn at 
woods regions, and detect violators of the law in this res- 
pect. When the men who netted trout almost with impunity 
in the remote streams and lakes, found their market cut ' oil" 
by the transportation clause, which forbids the carriage of 
trout by public carriers unless the fish are accompanied by 
their owners, a check was placed upon the destruction of 
the trout in these far away waters. To my amazement, 1 
learned within the past two weeks while driving in Fulton 
county with a sportsman, who has the welfare of our fish 
and game at heait, that it is a common practice for men to 
drive from place to place in that region, and buy trout and 
birds and convey them by wagon to the summer hotels, and 
thus evade the law. What we need, and what Canada 
needs, is more fish and game protectors to enforce the laws, 
and to educate the people by a few convictions that fish and 
game must be left to breed unmolested. In some sections it 
requires several convictions to bring about a change of heart, 
and in others one conviction will suffice. 
It is only fair to say of the enforcement of the fish and 
game laws in Canada, that a brother, writing me from his 
camp in Canada — not a fishing camp, by the way, but a 
mining camp — commends the vigilance of the Canadian 
game wardens. He was surprised to find the wai'dens so 
active, and he put it down to the fact that Canada realized 
the importance of protecting her fish and game as a "valu- 
able mine, to be worked for revenue from her own and visit- 
ing sportsmen." In New York State we have practically 
one fish and game protector and forester to every two coun- 
ties, and the men, however active they may be, cannot cover 
the territory in their charge and do it as it should be done. 
I happen to know something of how these protectors are 
supervised by the Fisheries, Game and Forest Commission, 
and if a man does not prove capable and competent he is re- 
moved without ceremony and another put in his place. If a 
man does good work he is retained, although he may not do 
all the work of detecting game violators in his district, sim- 
ply because there is a limit to the powers of a man. If he 
does not do good work, and his reports are a pretty fair in- 
d X of his energy in the prosecution of his duties, he is dis- 
missed, no matter what influence may be brought to have 
him retained. 
I travel over the State quite a bit and hear more or less of 
game and fish law violations that are not punished, and nine 
and nine-tenth times out of ten the people who tell me of 
the violations wish the offenders punished, but do not wish 
to give any evidence which will lead to their punishment. 
No one who has not engaged in a case of violating ihe game 
law can understand what convincing evidence must be forth- 
coming to convict in court. Sidewalk testimony and hear- 
say evidence, for some reason, wiU not convince a jury of the 
guilt of any man. The testimony must be given in court 
and under oath, and it must be specific, and even then it will 
not convince some juries Apparently every one who 
knows anything about a bank burglary is willing to testify 
against the burglars, but when the crime is one of breaking a 
game law the witnesses have to be hauled to court by the 
scruff of the neck. The people, all of them at least, are not 
yet educated to the fact that b,:th are crimes, the difference 
being in degree. There is so much to be said on this subject 
that it is better to stop before a simple note runs into a dis- 
course. _ 
