366 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[Dec. 24, 180K. 
in this matter. I have fired a steel-pointed ball from a 
*>-40 rifle into an oak tree nin. m diameter at the dis- 
tance of 5ft, and the ball failed to go through though its 
penetration is given as over 50m. of pine boards. _ 
To sum up, the .30-30 rifles are effective weapons ; their 
best points being their light weight and comparatively flat 
trajectory, but they do not in .all respects bear out the 
statements of their more enthusiastic admirers. 
After staying a few days in the old lean-to, we moved 
our camp a few miles and pitched the tents under a great 
group of cedars- Fifteen or twenty giant trees stood so 
close together that the foliage would shed a moderate, 
rain and the leaf mould that we cleared away to make a 
safe' place for the camp-fire was ift thick. In the in- 
tervals of mountain climbing and in the evenings under 
the flame-lit canopy of the cedars 1 had leisure to talk 
with Sam about the history and manners of the Ojibways, 
of which tribe he was a member, and I got him to tell me 
some of the hero stories which he had learned in his 
youth All these stories told of the doings of a wonder- 
ful man called Winneboujou, who appears under various 
aliases in the legends of other races of Indians, and the 
cycle of loosely connected tales was handed down by re- 
citers, Who often followed this profession for genera- 
tions, the son taking up the task when the father died. 
One of these reciters was named Wab-e-zish Kim-e- 
see or old man Marten. He was so old that his ha;r 
had turned gray, and all his kindred had died except 
one grandson; so he traveled around with this little boy 
and stayed in any lodge he wished to, for he knew that 
he was always welcome. He often visited the grand- 
father of Nommace, , or the Little Sturgeon (this was 
Sam's Indian name), and sat in the evening smoking 
with the men around the fire, unless he were mvited in 
the Indian fashion to tell a story. ( 
Once, while old man Marten was making one of these 
visits, Little Nommace, who was tired of sitting all the 
long winter evenings in the corner, decided to invite, the 
old man to tell a story. Nommace had been working at 
the agency, and took half a plug of tobacco as part of his 
nay. for, though he was too young to use tobacco him- 
self, he knew that he would have to get a big piece it he 
wanted a long story. . 
Then in the evening, when the men were squatting 
around the fire, Nommace sidled up and tied his tobacco 
to a lodge pole, so that it dangled right in front of old 
man Marten. After that the boy drew his blanket about 
him and went to his corner. For a polite interval old 
man Marten paid no attention to the tobacco, but after a 
time he reached up and took it. Then he cut up some of 
it and mixed it in a wooden trap with kinnikmnick, made 
from red willow bark, and when the pipes had been filled 
at his invitation and the men were smoking, he began the 
story of the flood. , 
"Monstrous serpents who dwelt in a cave under tlw 
river were oppressing the poor Indians, and had killed a 
great many of them. This made Winneboujou s neart sad 
and another incident made him angry. One day he saw 
some wolves chasing a deer. Winneboujou hurried to- 
ward them, but before he could reach them the wolves 
had pulled the deer down and eaten him. Then Winne- 
boujou said to the old wolf: 'Give me one of your 
children that I may make him my adopted son, and the 
old wolf did as he was asked, and Winneboujou warned 
his new son to keep away from the river where the 
monstrous snakes lived. But the adopted wolf was on 
one occasion chasing a deer that sprang into the river 
and swam across, and as the wolf followed after, the 
snakes came out and killed him, and when Winneboujou 
saw that the snakes had done this he was angered. 
So he went to the river at a place where the monsters 
used to crawl out of the water to sleep m the sun, and 
there he changed himslf into a charred and broken stump 
and waited for their appearance. . 
"When the monsters came out for their sun bath they 
saw the stump, and perceived that it was a new thing tor 
there had been no stump there before; and one ot the 
snake chiefs, suspecting magic, said to a warrior snake, 
'Go and find out whether that stump ; is what it appears 
to be or whether it is something bad.' 
"The warrior snake came near and looked at the stump, 
but he could see nothing unnatural about it, so he de- 
cided to squeeze it hard, and if it were a living being it 
would have to cry out. Then he wrapped his folds arouna 
it and tightened them hard, so that Winneboujou was al- 
most forced to groan aloud, but at last the trial finished 
and the snake glided away and reported that the stump 
was what it seemed. So the two chief serpents (.for these 
people had twin rulers) and all the tribe stretched out 
and slept, and when Winneboujou saw that the last one 
had fallen asleep he took his bow and arrows, and creep- 
ing up he shot each «of the two chiefs in the heart and 
fled away. But serpents have tough hearts, and these 
two chiefs were only wounded, and they went to their 
cave and sent for a wise old woman— a captive who lived 
in a lodge near by. The old woman came every day to 
see the serpents, and at each visit she put strong medicine 
on the wounds and worked the arrows out a little way, so 
that the serpents grew better daily. 
"Winneboujou, however, who was lurking around to 
have another shot at the serpents, saw the old woman 
one day going along with a great bundle of banwood 
bark and he asked her what it was for. 
"She did not know Winneboujou by sight, so she told 
him how she was tending the wounded serpents, and 
that all the snake nation were trying to kill Winneboujou, 
and as they could not find him they sent her to gather this 
bark to make cords with it ; then they would stretch lines 
far away, and if Winneboujou stumbled on the lines or 
pulled them they would know where he was. The hero 
said nothing then, but he went daily to the old woman s 
lodge to ask about her patients, and when she told him 
they were nearly cured he became afraid, so he knocked 
the old woman on the head with his war club and killed 
her and took off her skin, and disguising himself with this 
he went, at the usual hour, to the cave of the snakes to see 
the wounded chiefs. Arriving there, he put some very 
strong, bad medicine on the wounds and instead of pulling 
the arrows out, he pushed them far in until the chiefs 
both died. Then Winneboujou fled a great way. Cer- 
tain of the snakes went to the old woman's lodge and 
found her skinless body and knew that Winneboujou had 
killed their chiefs disguised as the old woman, but though 
thev searched after him they could not find him. So the 
nation of the snakes sent messengers to stretch cords 
throughout the whole earth as the old woman had de- 
scribed and it so happened that Winneboujou saw one 
of these cords and pulled it very hard, and the serpents 
felt the pull and were able to tell that he was a great way 
off • so far off they could never hope to catch him. There- 
fore thev decided" that the only way to kill Winneboujou 
was to make a flood big enough to cover the most distant 
parts of the earth and drown him. So they went to their 
cave and loosed the waters, and the waters rose and 
spread far and wide, and Winneboujou, when he saw the 
flood coming, went up a mountain, and as the water fol- 
lowed close, lie climbed a tree on top of the mountain, 
and when the water reached him here he called to the 
There is no appearance of chance in all this either; it all 
goes on, with an apparently steady plan of improvement, 
and I use the word apparent advisedly, because the time 
involved is too long — and our own lives too short — for us 
to foretell what does not appear to us. I will let Fred i| 
Mather and Col. Alexander fight out the question of the 
evolution of "lame ducks" and "bobtailed dogs," to which 
Col. Alexander now seems inclined to confine it, and 
assure the latter that the believer in evolution leaves jj 
nothing to chance. 
That was a delightful letter of William H. Avis, a fort- j 
night since, on squirrel shooting, it took me back many l| 
years to my young days, when 1 have had just such good || 
times in the search for and pursuit of the wary and 
nimble game, for game he is, despite Frank Forester, and 
it is a good lesson in still-hunting to spend a day in the J 
woods for gray squirrels. 
If I could now recall the details, I could tell many such 
a story, though perhaps not quite so well as Mr. A. has ,1 
done; but it is only an incident here and there that I can * 
remember. How, after firing both barrels at the same 
squirrel, as I supposed, as he ran up a tree, I was aston- 
ished when I went to pick him up by a blow between my 
shoulders, which came from another dead squirrel which 
fell from the tree. How one warm autumn afternoon, J 
after a long tramp, 1 had sat down under a big oak to 1 
rest, and gone to sleep, to be wakened by a scratching 
in the leaves near me, and saw the biggest squirrel I ever J 
shot. It was looking for nuts, and how slowly and 
quietly, I raised my gun, which was lying across my 
knees, and happened to be pointed the right way, and by \ 
a side shot dropped him in his tracks, unconscious of 1 
what had hit him ! Many more such items can I recall, ! 
but I could not now describe a day's experience. 
1 am glad Mr. Belknap got his gun flints, and hope he 1 
may find them useful yet. I began my shooting .experi- 1 
ence with them. Vqn W, 
CARIBOU LAND. 
tree to grow higher, and the tree shot up, but the water 
still followed ; and the tree towered up a "second and a 
third time at his bidding, but at last it became tired and 
could grow no more. 
"Then Winneboujou said to the beaver, Dive and bring 
me up earth,' and the beaver dived, but it was so far to 
the bottom that he got drowned before he reached the 
earth and floated up dead. The loon, too, dived at the 
command of Winneboujou, but he also failed to reach 
the bottom, and floated dead, and finally the muskrat 
dived on the same errand. In a little while the muskrat s 
body came up to the surface near Winneboujou, and he 
reached out and caught it, and found some dirt on its 
paws, and from this dirt he made an island upon the 
water, and little by little he remade the whole earth. _ 
Thus with tales of Indian wonders, and with hunting 
that after the first day gave us only a few grouse, the 
time sped fast, resting among the fragrant cedars or 
climbing through the yellow tamaracks until my pleasant 
outing came to its appointed end. H- G. Dolog. 
Chat, 
Charlestown, N. H., Dec. 15. — Editor Forest and 
Stream ' Twenty degrees below zero at sunrise in south- 
western New Hampshire does not look much like any 
evolution in the weather, from the good old New Eng- 
land winters, which some people are in the habit of be- 
moaning as a thing of the past! However, we had just 
such a "cold snap" three years ago, Dec. 14, 1S05, and 
shall probably have many more in years to come while 
almost seventy years ago I can remember a mild Christ- 
mas, without snow. . ... 
But that is not what I propose to write about, which 
was that I was very glad to see, about a month ago, Mr. 
Cheney's letter expressing his belief that the ordinary 
salmon of commerce and sport, the Salmo salar, was only 
a descendant of the fresh-water salmon, or wannauish, 
who in some primeval age was either crowded out of 
fresh water by the ice of the glacial period, or got in the 
habit of going to the sea on a visit, as our fashionable 
people go to Florida in the winter, and finding more 
ample food and a more equable climate, took up his resi- 
dence there, until the necessities of his nature brought 
him back to his native fresh waters for the reproduction 
of his kind. . 
I believe I expressed my opinions on this question in 
Forest and Steeam some years since, and I am glad 
to see that Mr. Cheney agrees with me. 
I think we might as well discard the misnomer of 
"land-locked" altogether, as it was given under a misap- 
prehension of the situation by Prof. Baird. I think this 
may be considered as a clear case of evolution, and is but 
one of those which we might see going on around us 
every day, if we only kept our eyes open. " 
Human life is too short to note any of the radical 
changes which are still constantly in progress, but yet. 
those of us who can look back sixty years can note the 
changes in the breeds of horses and cattle, sheep and 
dogs, from those with which we were familiar in our 
boyhood. The fact is, the whole world is in a constant 
state of progress or evolution, and has been ever since 
the days of the first creation, and those days are not. to 
be numbered by ordinary arithmetic. We have all been 
brought up to place too much reliance on the entire 
verbal accuracy and authenticity of the old Hebrew tradi- 
tions, which Ezra collected from memory, after the 
Babylonish captivity, and to believe that the world and 
all its inhabitants were created, just as they now are, in 
some short and definite period of time. Geology has 
opened the volume for us within the present century, and 
we may read the history of untold ages in the story-book 
on which the Creator wrote it, and the "Testimony of the 
Rocks" will show the gradual progress, through untold 
ages, from the simple "monad" of the primitive forma- 
tions to the complicated structure of the apparently per- 
fect animal of to-day. 
in\nl ]§wtartt, 
1 
Foxes and their Colors. 
Editor Forest and Stream: 
There is very little doubt that the singular fox which 
your correspondent, C. M. Stark, so accurately describes 
is what the trade calls a cross fox. If the red patches he 
describes as being on the sides of the neck are the only 
spots of red upon it, it is a very high grade of cross.. If, 
as is usually the case, it also has a red patch behind each 
shoulder, or as is often the case, has also a red patch just, 
forward of each hip, it is a poorer grade of cross. 
Cross foxes are so called not because their temper is 
more irascible than other foxes, but because the red 
patches in front of and behind each shoulder cause the 
black space across the shoulders and the lengthwise one 
along the back to assume the form of a cross. 
One who handles thousands of our Maine foxes sees 
that there is a regular gradation from pure red to coal' 
black. First there are red foxes- having a tinge of gray 
on the hips or lower back. These shade up into what; 
are called mongrels, which have quite a dark stripe along 
the neck and upper back, and sometimes showing quite ; 
plain cross at the shoulders. These again almost im-; 
perceptably merge into the poorer crosses, which in turn 
grade up into the silver, and through many variations 
into pure black, with only a white tuft on the end of the 
tail. Two dark foxes are seldom found which are ex-: 
actly alike. Some black foxes have a gray forehead, some; 
have only a few scattering gray hairs sprinkled over the 
back, others have these white hairs only on the back oil 
the neck, or hips, while some have them all over the 
back. Some are coal black to the middle, and then al 
gray on the hinder parts. 
Foxes which are all black sometimes have a dull slatj 
or leaden color, and the fur seems lifeless; others are i 
shiny black, and the fur looks lively when shaken up 
Those of this class are by far the most valuable. 
Besides all the variations mentioned, one often see 
what might be called freaks. Any large dealer usuall; 
gets a few every year of what are called Sampson foxes. 
These look like a red fox which has had half the lengtl 
of the fur sheared or scorched off. The tail is not hal ! 
the usual size, and seems more like a soldier's pompoi 
than a fox's tail. Such skins are of no real value, an( 
usually sell for about 25 cents, if prime. I do not knov 
of any reason for foxes being so, as there is no sue! 
breed. One often sees only one such in a litter of six o 
eight. 1 have also seen Sampson cross foxes, and onj 
which appeared as if it would have been a good silver i 
it had not been a Sampson. 
I once bought a fox taken in Maine, which was pur 
white except the legs and backs of the ears, which werv 
Maltese colored. 1 also had three one year which wer< 
more of a yellow than a red, and had patches of puri 
white on them, covering about one-third of the back, th 
coloration of a Jersey calf. In buying many thousands 
have seen but these three. I have seen several of 
chocolate color, and one which was a splendid red to 
with about iin. of. the ends of the hair black, making tr 
skin look black at a short distance. 
In Maine the size and color seems to depend coi 
siderably on the surroundings where they live. Fox< 
are far more local than most people imagine, and tl 
greater part live and die near where they are born; a 
though they may be driven many miles by hounds, the 
will return again to their old haunts. 1 have notice 
that those taken in the open country where there are har< 
wood hills were bright red, while those taken on lcri 
swampy land covered with spruce and fir and gray bir<] 
were usually more dingy and apt to be grayish on the hip 
The foxes all along the eastern coast, where they { 
down on the beaches to feed, are much larger and mo< 
heavily furred than those taken inland. As one go 
further east, this is more noticeable. Those taken 
some parts of Nova Scotia, and along the north shore j 
the Bay de Chaleur, near Gaspe, are larger and heav? 
furred than any we ever get in Maine. As one go 
north the proportion of dark foxes increases till th 
merge into the blue foxes, and they in turn in the extra 
north are replaced by the pure white arctic fox. 
M. IJ. 
Brewer, Me. 
