Dec. 18, 1897.] 
FOREST AND STREAM, 
* 
488 
alike, especially on game protection and on the subjects 
mentioned in this article. 
With Didymus I heartily agree about the destruction of 
bobolinks and other song birds, and it is only the fact that 
we "are so near and yet so far" on kindred questions which 
has brought forth this effusion. We may say with the 
Bramah that the taking of all life is wrong, but we don't 
believe it. All our observations on animal life disprove it. 
The robin devours the earth worm; the hawk feeds on the 
robin, and the cat will eat both the robin and the hawk, if it 
can get them. There are beasts, birds and fishes whose only 
food is other beasts, birds and fishes, and thus we have 
nature's great authority in the class omnivora, to which man 
properly belongs, to eat all of them if we choose. 
The hunting instinct and love of the chase come to us 
naturally. The brutality of it has been so modified that we 
are disgusted with the slaughter of more fish and game than 
we can use for food or fur, when there is left only the savage 
exultation of killing. We do not exult over the killing of 
game by another; it is merely a personal matter, "I killed 
the biggest moose, elk, bear, coon, trout, salmon, black 
bass," etc. ; the ego is at the bottom of it. We are not suffer- 
ing for the food which we have killed, but we do want the 
world to know that I, in the biggest kind of type, did the 
killing which makes the record. 
Didymus has kindly furnished a text for this sermon, and 
now it may be in order to ask: What line may a sportsman 
draw between legitimate sport and cruelty to animals? Does 
the man who decoys ducks to his blind, where some 
cripples get away to be eaten by gulls or mink, come under 
the ban? Does the upland shooter who wounds a plover or 
a quail, which escapes to die of blood poisoning a few days 
later, deserve to be called cruel? If not, then the coon 
hunter may enjoy his sport and its exciting fight. 
Old New Yorkers will remember Harry Jennings's rat pit, 
where business men dropped in with their terriers and 
bought from ten to a hundred rats, and the record was kept 
to the second. The owners of the dogs took great pride in 
these records, and I know that I'd enjoy a ratting match to- 
day ; but the cruelty society has had it made illegal. There's 
not a bit of cruelty in it, and, bless me, how the dogs 
love it! 
Years ago a stray dog came to my gate and whined. He 
was a medium-sized cur, nearly black, with those tan mark- 
ings over the eyes which denote some terrier blood, and I 
opened the gate for him and fed him. I did not want him, 
but he had adopted me and found a home. He seemed to be 
of no possible use except to wag his tail in a friendly way, 
and I called him Bango, a name that has an attraction for a 
stray cur, for some occult reason; and we were friends. One 
night there was a commotion in my hen house, and with 
Bungo and a lantern I started to see about it. The atmos- 
phere dispelled any idea that — 
"The woodbine spices were wafted abroad, 
And the musk of the roses blown." 
And I knew that an essence peddler was the intruder. 
Just what Bungo knew about skunks 1 had no means of 
learning; but he located the perfumer under some planks 
which made a bridge to the barn door. A plank was raised 
and Bungo made an assault on the enemy, and came out 
howling at the first volley from the intrenched foe. His eyes 
were .streaming and he was gasping for breath, but he rolled 
in the dust, ate some earth, and charged again with the same 
result. He was suffering, but not demoralized. A word of 
encouragement, and with a yell of rage he dashed in. There 
was a shaking of something, a cracking of bones, and he 
brought out a dead skunk. 
We washed Bungo, poured sweet oil and witch hazel into 
his eyes, and in a week he was all right. His odor was terri- 
ble, but he had won the right to bear it, and it would have 
been cruel to banish him for it, and we combated and en- 
dured it. 
I had heard it said that with such an experience a dog 
wUl never attack a second skunk, but within a month the 
same thing happened again, only Bungo killed his game in 
the second attack to which I urged him, and we doctored 
him in good shape again. These scrapes were cruel to 
Bungo, the skunks and to us; for we suffered from the me- 
phitic odor of the dog; but I could not shoot the skunks 
among the beams under the planks, and Bungo was willing 
to rid me of the nuisance at great personal sacrifice, and I 
did not doubt his willingness to try it a third time, if neces- 
sary. There was no cruelty in the whole proceeding. 
Bungo was fully rewarded by a few kind words, which tes- 
tified our esteem for his valor, and many a soldier has done 
valorous deeds for the same recompense from his superiors. 
The minds of men are as individual as their faces, their 
figures and their stomachs, and if we go on eliminating 
cruelty from all sports, as has been done since the days 
when Rome was mistress of the world, we may, a few cen- 
turies hence, become so effeminate as to consider the capture 
of a fish on a hook as cruel. There is the Peace Society, 
which would abolish war, which is the "natural state of 
man." It's cruel — yes, so are all of nature's laws; but the 
philosopher Malthus preached that war is a necessity in 
order to keep down the population and sf<.ve it from famine 
and plague. Imagine the condition of the world to day if 
there had never been "a war. The Old Testament is largely a 
history of wars, and the Supreme Ruler seems to have 
ordered and approved of them. I believe in the Malthusian 
theory, and think it time that this country had another war. 
We have at last begun to check that emigration which has 
overrun the country and built cities where the buffalo and 
the wolf should be ranging, where we should be holding 
the land for millions of Americans who are to be born two 
centuries from now. That's cruelty to the unborn man, 
who will find himself surrounded by the same conditions 
that now obtain in overcrowded Europe. 
Sport in a Roman amphitheater, when Rome was pagan, 
^ consisted in feeding captive lions on Christians, or in mortal 
combats between either prisoners of war or slaves. The 
spirit of the age approved it. Bloodshed was the drawing 
card, and it must be the blood of men or combats of lions 
and tigers in order to be considered sport. When Rome 
became Ohristian there was a modification of these amuse- 
ments. Boxing with the cestus, a metal ring bound to the 
fists with leather thongs, took the place of feeding men to 
the lions; and to day some men think modern prize-fighting 
is brutal when the contestants are not slaves forced to fight 
for the amusement of others, but do it voluntarily for the 
shekels and the fame which fall to the victor. With the 
modern 5oz. gloves there is nothing brutal about it ; one man 
gets exhausted, that's all. 
That is my view of a manly, athletic game, which is con- 
ducted by rigid rules of fair play. Then take a look at the 
brutality of lootbail, where the contest often degenerates into 
what is worse than a slugging match. Men are kicked in 
the face; a man bends to grasp the ball, and a dozen pile on 
him and break his back. You may say that the game is 
played by gentlemen (?) students for fame alone, but I will 
reply that modern prize-fighing is now conducted in a more 
gentlemanly manner than football, and it is seldom that a 
man is seriously injured who was physically sound when he 
entered the ring, and the fatalities in the two games within 
the past ten years have been nearly ten in football to one in 
the prize ring. I never saw a prize-fight nor a football game, 
and my knowledge of these sports is derived from the daily 
papers. 
As we are considering cruelty to animals — a subject 
which cannot be separated from that of brutal sports, like 
bear baiting, badger drawing, etc.— the subjects last named 
naturally come in. If a man of his own free will chooses to 
stand up before one of the foremost fistic champions of the 
day, with a full knowledge of what he may receive, and 
with a belief that he can go him one better, "l am not only 
willing that he should follow his inclination, but would like 
to see him try it. As a boy my ambition was to fight, and 
repeated wallopings from stronger boys had no cooling 
effect. My eyes were often blacked and my nose was 
skinned when I went home, and an interview with father in 
the woodshed failed to break up my pugnacity; for if a new 
scholar came into the old Fort Crailo school the first thing 
we wanted to know was: "Who can you lick?" Then 
came the matching and the chip placed upon the shoulder, 
and the status of the newcomer was decided, Humphrey 
Crary once said to me: "This new feller '11 put the chip on 
his right shoulder. Move up yer left hand as if you were 
afraid, draw it back and come ag'in, and then when you 
knock the chip hit him under the jaw at the same time, and 
then follow up with your left and "lick him before he knows 
there's a fight." That is logistics, strategy or what you 
please, and has won battles where thousands of men were 
engaged as well as where two schoolboys fought without 
hurting each other. These things, in my opinion, make a 
man of a boy, and if the storks had ever brought a boy to 
my nest I would never have punished him for fighting. 
Perhaps he would not be encouraged in it, for his taste 
might not run that way;, and the taste of a youth should be 
considered before all things. The son may inherit the tastes 
of some old great-great-grandfather or corresponding rela- 
tive on his paternal or maternal side, and that is the trouble 
with boys. Of course girls may be in the same category, 
but a father wishes his boy will be a second edition of him- 
self, and there his disappointment comes in, because his an- 
cestors on both sides mould the youthful mind, and the 
father may have little regard for some of his wife's relatives. 
Away back in 1880 it fell to my lot to be a guest of the 
Hon, Andrew D. White, American Minister to Germany, at 
a reception in his house in Berlin. Mr. White introduced 
me to a baron who was a noted sportsman and who was a 
most pleasant gentleman, but whose ideas on the subject of 
cruelty to animals were so foreign to mine as to be abhor- 
rent. Yet why is not the opinion of one man on this subject 
as good as that of another? I will try to repeat the conver- 
sation. 
"You still have some game of the smaller sorts left in the 
East, and even near the large cities," said the Baron. 
"Yes, of the kinds which are not easily exterminated; 
species which have grown wary, like the ruffed grouse, and 
will run ahead of a dog, and refuse to take to a tree and be 
shot at until they are killed, as is their habit where they are 
not so sophisticated. We have quite stringent laws in most 
of the older States which protect all kinds of game during 
the breeding season, and until the young are able to care for 
themselves, and are strong on the wing." 
"May I ask why you have such laws?" 
The question puzzled me as much as if he had asked why 
we forbid murder and burglary; but a look in his face 
showed that he was in earnest, and was not trying to get 
some fun out of me, and I answered: "Because we have 
men who would not only shoot half-grown birds, but would 
kiU the mother if it were not for the penalty which the law 
prescribes." 
"Tell me, why shouldn't they kill birds when they wish?" 
Again there was a suspicion that the baron, whose Eng- 
lish, by the way, was better than mine, was chaffing me. 
His questions were such that I could not readily answer. 
The protection of game during the breeding season had been 
an article of faith which no man had questioned until now. 
I looked into his bright, manly face, and put the question : 
"Surely you would not shoot a mother bird, and leave her 
chicks to starve?" 
"Yes," he said, "if I wanted her. "What is she or the 
suffering of her chicks to me?" 
Prof. Geo. Brown Goode came along and I induced the 
baron to repeat his opinions and then asked: "If you knew 
that several young birds would starve if you killed their 
mother, would you kiU her?" 
"Certainly I would, if I wanted her. The young are 
nothing to me, I only want the mother, and I am the one 
who has the authority in the matter of life and death on my 
domain; and as I have this authority there seems to be no 
reason why every man shoald not take the life of all wild 
animals as he does of domestic ones. You do not consider 
the feelings of the cow when you take her calf for veal, nor 
do you consider other life when you take it for food." 
"That is so, baron," I answered, "but the leaving of young 
to starve is another matter." 
"Nothing that I care about, "he replied, and there seemed 
nothing more to be said; our ideas were too far apart to hope 
for an agreement. I regarded his theory as one unworthy a 
civilizsd man, but he saw nothing barbarous in it. The men 
who turned their thumbs down in the Roman amphitheater, 
to signify that the vanquished gladiator must be murdered, 
felt no qualm of conscience, but to-day we are horrified at the 
thought, all of which goes to show that men have different 
standards regarding cruelty at different times. 
There are men who think the killing of all animals for 
sport is brutal, but I doubt if Didymus agrees with them; 
yet he condemns the principal feature of coon hunting, the 
shaking of the coon from the tree among the dogs. There- 
fore, if perchance he reads my new book, "Men I Have 
Fished With," I will advise him to skip pages 265-267, for 
it tells of a coon hunt much like that to which he objects. 
The "Game Laws in Brief." 
The current edition of the Game Laws in Brief (index page dated 
Oct. 15) contains the fish and game laws for 1897, with a few excep- 
tions, as they will continue in force during the year. As about forty 
States and Provinces have amended their laws this year, the Brief 
has been practically done over new. Sent postpaid by the Forest 
pod Slreajn Pub. Qq. 9p receipt gf price 35 ctnts. AU dejilers selj it 
REMINISCENCES OF AN OLD SPORTS- 
MAN.-VII. 
iContinued from page 465.) 
One beautiful October day we were shooting in Scotland, 
Conn., three of us, Mr. Boyden, Fred Eaton and myself. 
We had taken a very early start, as we had twenty miles to 
drive, and when the sun showed itself we were at the foot 
of the long hill, within a mile or two of the ground we in- 
tended shooting over. Leaving our team at a farmhouse, 
we were soon in the cover, and as birds were fairly plenti- 
ful, we had a most enjoyable time until we camped out for 
lunch on a birch knoll near a spring, when our troubles 
began. 
I always carried a large trout basket, which I found very 
handy to carry the lunch; and before we left home I had 
rolled up in a napkin a generous allowance of cold roast 
mutton, and in another napkin I had put bread and butter 
sufficient for our needs; but when we came to open the 
basket we found that I had neglected to put the meat ih 
the basket, and all we had to satisfy the ravenous appe- 
tites of three hungry men and two dogs was a few slices of 
bread and butter, three hard-boiled eggs, and a little salt 
and pepper; and it was all in vain that each one of us took 
a look into the basket, that cold roast mutton did not ma- 
terialize. 
Mr. Boyden was the first to recover hia self-possession, 
and without saying a word he drew a quail from his 
pocket and began to strip off" the feathers, and as soon as 
Eaton grasped the situation he was also making the 
feathers fly, while I started for a large ash tree a short 
distance away, where there were plenty of dead limbs, 
which I soon had in a pile and blazing for all they were 
worth; then I cut seven forked sticks about as large as my 
thumb and 3ft. long, and sharpened both ends, and as fast 
as the birds were ready I impaled each one on the forks 
of the spit and stuck the other end in the ground, leaving 
them hanging over the edge of the fire at an angle of 
about 45°, and in a short time we had sis of them roasting 
as nicely as one could wish. The birds were split open on 
the back, and as soon as the last one was in position I took 
up the first one and turned it by impaling it on the 
extra fork, and continued this operation until all were 
cooked as nicely as one could have done with all the mod- 
ern appliances; and I will venture to say, without fear of 
contradiction] from Boyden and Eaton at least, that a 
better relished al fresco dinner was never served. Al- 
though my skill in cookery has received its full meed of 
praise both from myself and others, I am not writing 
boastingly of it. I merely wish to 
"Leave footprints upon the sands of time" 
that may perchance lead some disconsolate and hungry 
brother to happiness and peace. 
While we were enjoying our lunch we had heard two 
reports from a gun in a woodcock cover near us that w^e 
had intended to explore, and as we were nearly ready to 
start there came another one just at the edge of the cover 
near us, and a few seconds later a tall, green-looking boy 
broke cover not more than three rods distant, and after 
gazing at us a moment he hesitatingly advanced and, giv- 
ing us good-day, rested the breech of his gun, which was 
as long as himself, upon the ground, and requested the gift 
of a few shot, as he had just fired his last charge. In re- 
sponse to our inquiry as to what he was shooting, he said 
that he was hunting woodcock, and drawing three of them 
from his pocket he showed them to us with no little pride. 
Mr. Boyden looked rather dubiously at the long gun, and 
remarked that he should think it impossible to handle so 
long a gun in the brush quickly enough to get on to a fl.y- 
ing bird. 
"Oh!" said the boy, "I don't shoot flying, and I never 
saw it done, although I have heard of it. I shoot them on 
the groimd." 
This was a new wrinkle to all of us, and we proposed 
that he should show us how it was done; so giving him a 
few charges of shot, he poured a small quantity into the 
muzzle of the old gun, and ramming them down with a 
bit of newspaper for wadding, he signified his readiness to 
show us how to do it, and led the way to the cover, while 
we kept a few paces in the rear and watched the perform- 
ance with no little interest. 
With a stealthy step he crouchingly and slowly ad- 
vanced, with his eyes incessantly rolling from side to side 
as he closely scanned the ground, until we had gone several 
rods, when he suddenly stopped and gazed intently at 
a particular spot for several seconds; and so realistic was 
his action, or rather inaction, that IJoyden involuntarily 
gave the signal for a point, which I answered in the 
usual manner before I realized what I was doing, while 
Eaton confessed afterward that he stepped into an open- 
ing and stood with gun in position, ready for a shot. 
Meantime our young friend, apparently satisfied with the 
examination, slowly retreated toward us a few paces, 
when he brought the old gun to his shoulder, and taking a 
good long aim he pulled trigger, greatly to the relief of his 
audience, for the mental strain we were under was too 
great for us to bear much longer without something giving 
way. 
One very curious incident in connection with this per- 
formance was that when he stopped so suddenly both 
dogs backed him as handsomly as I ever saw them back 
each other. As soon as the charge had time to travel the 
length of the gun, our friend di-opped it, and rushing to 
the spot he had fired at he picked up a woodcock and 
brought it to us in triumph; but somehow neither of us 
was in the least surprised at this result, as the whole per- 
formance had led up to it, and we had already discounted 
it, and the death of the bird was a foregone conclusion 
with all of us almost from the instant when he came to a 
point; but we were greatly surprised at the whole perform- 
ance; and could hardly believe the evidence of our own. 
eyes, nor did our wonder cease when at our request he 
again went through the same evolutions, with scarcely 
a variation, and again killed his bird, when we decided 
that we had enough, and giving him a generous share of 
ammunition we bade him farewell and resumed our hunt. 
I have often told of this incident, but have never since 
met the person who could perform the feat, or one who 
had ever witnessed anything of the kind. Of course, 
when your dog is pointing a woodcock, patient search will 
occasionally be rewarded with a sight of the bird; but this 
is entirely different from undertaking to ^»d them with 
the eye alone, 
