Forest and Stream. 
A Weekly Journal of the Rod and Gun. 
Copyright, 1900, by Forest and Stream Publishing Co, 
Terms, $4 a Year. 10 Cts. a Copy. ) 
Six Months, $2, ( 
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 1900. 
J VOL. LV.— No. 18. 
i No. 846 Broadway, New York 
^The Forest and Stream is the recognized medium of entertain- 
ment, instruction and information between American sportsmen. 
The editors invite communications on the subjects to which its 
pages are devoted. Anonymous communications will not be re- 
garded. While it is intended to give wide latitude in discussion 
of current topics, the editors are not responsible for the views of 
correspondents. 
Subscriptions may begin at any time. Terms: For single 
copies, $4 per year, $2 for six months. For club rates and full 
particulars respecting subscriptions, see prospectus on page iii. 
THE PARIS GOLD MEDAL. 
The Forest and Stream has been awarded the Gold 
Medal at the Paris Exposition for its exhibit, in the 
Palace of Forestry and Fisheries, consisting of fifty-three 
bound volumes from the beginning in 1873 to the close 
of 1899. - - ,1 
In addition to the first prize of a Gold Medal, it has 
been awarded a Bronze Medal in Class 51 — Hunting 
Equipments, etc.; and recognized with two Honorable 
Mentions, one in Class 49 — Scientific Forestry — and the 
' other iri Class 52 — Products of the Chase. 
IDLENESS AND INDUSTRY. 
Times change. In the old days the average sportsman 
would have found it difficult to convince people who did 
not know much about him that he was not a mere time- 
killing idler when he deserted his bench or desk and 
took to the woods to get a deer or resorted to the 
marshes to circumvent a duck. But in this year of grace 
7900 the Louisiana Legislature has given formal expres- 
sion to a recognition of the fact that a sportsman is not 
an idler, but is and must be an industrious worker. The 
Legislature has enacted a prohibition which declares that 
"no idler shall kill any game in the State." The distinc- 
tion here drawn by implication is of course complimen- 
tary and gratifying. In Louisiana the idler is one thing, 
the sportsman quite another. One is by official decree 
denied venison steak and quail on toast unless he shall 
put his hand down into his pocket and buy them, while 
the other is free to wing the good things as they fly. 
It might be suggested that the Legislature acted upon 
a mistaken asstimption when it adopted the theory that 
an idler could do any damage to the game, for unless 
the deer and the wild ducks of Louisiana differ from 
those of the country at large they may be depended upon 
to take care of themselves against any idlers, whether or 
not oliicially so designated. At this stage of training the 
game of America has become so well educated and is so 
wary and circumspect and given to getting up and dis- 
appearing upon the slightest provocation that something 
much more arduous than idling is necessary to reduce it 
to possession. Your sportsman must be a hustler. 
One might mistakenly imagine from the accounts oc- 
casionally printed describing the ease and celerity and 
dead certainty with which a moose hunter goes into the 
woods one day, kills his moose the next and comes out 
the third, that a moose stalk a la mode was akin to 
reclining on flowery beds of ease, and that bringing 
down a pair of antlers was an achievement as simple as 
the proverbial falling off a log. As a matter of hard, 
cold, solid fact, so far is this from being true that every 
moose hunter of experience knows that the days or 
weeks that he spends in quest of his trophies are likely 
to be the most arduous of his life. Indeed, so hard is 
hunting as a field of physical exertion that it is one of 
the mysteries of human nature that a person will undergo 
the self-imposed punishment involved in it. To kill a 
moose means to trudge through the hardest kind^ of 
country; to bear back-breaking burdens; to tax one's 
strength of endurance to the utmost; to be wet, tired, hun- 
gry and — happy; and it is not for one carry only and 
one day> hut for mile after mile and day after day until 
the end is accomplished. 
Doubtless by reading the easy reports of easy hunting 
trips many a trusting novice has been lured into under- 
taking a moose hunting expedition as a pleasure jaunt 
and has been most grossly deceived as to what was in 
store for him when he should leave civilization behind 
m i depend upon his musdes and fortitude and grit to 
carry him through. For the one fortunate hunter of big 
game who brings out his prize quickly and without hard- 
chio there are a hundred others who put forth the most 
strenuous exertions and undergo extreme hardship; and 
a large proportion of these return home without any re- 
ward except the consciousness of having done their best 
in the face of hard luck and the satisfaction of knowing 
that there will be another season and another chance to 
do it over again. 
ANOTHER ADIRONDACK TRAGEDY. 
The Adirondacks have supplied their deer hunting 
tragedy again this season, and it is of the kind now so 
distressingly familiar of a man mistaken for a deer. On 
the preserve of the Tahawus Club, in Essex county, on 
Thursday of last week, Dr. Bailey, of Philadelphia, and 
Mrs. S. A. Kerr, of New York, were in the dusk of the 
evening stationed on the edge of a clearing watching for 
deer. Mr. Bailey was standing, and Mrs. Kerr, rifle in 
hand, was sitting on a rock a few feet from him. The 
clearing was known to be a favorite haunt of the deer. A 
New York sportsman looking for game approached along 
the road and caught sight of Mr. Bailey's hunting coat 
through the bushes 300 yards away. He mistook it for 
a deer and fired. The bullet struck Mr. Bailey in the 
small of the back, passing through the body and striking 
Mrs. Kerr in the right thigh. Aid was summoned and 
the wounded persons were taken to the Holloway Camp, 
where there happened to be among the guests a New York 
city surgeon. Mr. Bailey's wound rapidly healed, but in 
the case of Mrs. Kerr blood poisoning set in and it was 
necessary to amputate the leg. 
The ready reflection is that what happened here was 
precisely what might have been expected. If a man wear- 
ing a coat that looks like a deer's coat is in the bush where 
deer are looked for, his coat is an invitation for the 
bullet of the hunter who shoots before he knows what 
he is shooting at. Whether the wearer of the coat shall 
be shot for a deer or shall escape depends upon whether 
or not providence sends along the premature shooter. 
In these days the prudent person will stay out of the 
woods, or, if he must go deer hunting, will make a long 
journey into some distant wilderness where he will have 
the country to himself. 
The whole art of shooting as it needs to be taught to-day 
may be summed up in the one injunction — Don't shoot 
until you know what you are shooting at. This ought 
to be dinged into the hearts of shooters so continuously 
and so persistently tliat the \yords would be forever ring- 
ing in their ears and the caution ever uppermost in their 
minds when they go shooting. 
BEARS IN MASSACHUSETTS. 
It is certainly a curious incident that in the old settled 
State of Massachusetts, in some of the less thickly in- 
habited districts, the bears should have reappeared in 
such numbers to have prompted any one to contribute to 
the local papers plans for ridding the community of the 
unwelcome intruders; yet Mr. Chas. Hallock tells us 
that in some parts of Hampshire county bears have been 
seen so frequently of late that the school children who 
have to make long journeys to school have been terrified, 
and we observe that Mr. Hallock has been instructing his 
readers in the mysteries of bear trapping and in the lore 
of bear dogs— this in Massachusetts in 1900. The bears 
are not the only vermin which have multiplied to an 
unwelcome degree; foxes have killed as many as fifty 
turkeys on one farm in Plainfield, and there are raccoons 
and woodchucks galore. This recrudescence of savagery 
in New England is probably accounted for by the re- 
aforesting of large areas of what was formerly farm land 
or country which had been cleared as woodland. With 
the new growth of forest upon the hills, the old-time 
frequenters of the wil(ierness, as they existed fifty years 
ago, have come back. The new condition will not be for 
long — certainly not when the ambitious amateur hunters 
of the Bay State learn that they may win their bear 
pelts at home. And as for the foxes, there are kennels 
of hounds in Springfield and Westfield and Worcester 
and thereabouts that may be depended upon to protect 
the turkeys of Hampshire county. With the growing 
refuge the game haunts should have their old-time quotas 
of game ; and there are stories of stray deec having- been 
seen, not many to sure, but enough to account for 
the name of Deer Hill as» > amin|^on. 
MARSH FOLK.— I, 
The marsh borders a great river which flows through 
a wide, straight trough on its way to the sea. Alternat- 
ing on either side the stream — and occasionally as islands 
in the middle — are wide alluvial meadows, but little above 
the level of the highest tide and often submerged in 
spring and 'fall by the conjunction of high water and a 
heavy easterly storm, when wind and tide combine to 
dam the river's motith and to raise the stream. The bor- 
ders of these meadows slope gradually down to low water 
mark, and here the marsh is covered with tall corn 
grass, brown fruited cattails and low sedge, while a 
little above the ordinary high water's level grow in rank 
profusion a thousand other moisture-loving plants. 
Narrow, tortuous creeks, often dry at low water except 
for a trickle which drains from the soil above, wind 
through the meadows and sometimes carry a little stream 
from springs on the higher land. In their waters one 
may see shoals of the tiny fish, called mummy chubs, 
busily hurrying here and there, or lying at rest in 
the shallows, or if startled by the approach of boat or 
by a shadow falling across the surface, darting away in 
wild terror, sometimes in a close mass or perhaps scat- 
tering in all directions, or even jumping out of the wafer 
in their efforts to escape they know not what. Here, too, 
are frogs not a few, and painted turtles, falling clumsily 
from the bank where they have climbed to sun them- 
selves, and occasionally one of the so-called terrapins or 
"snappers." many of which no doubt find their way to 
the markets of the great cities under the name "diamond 
back." In these creeks our little friend the green heron 
has fine hunting ground, and often in the mud of the 
bottom at low water may be seen his four-pronged foot^ 
prints, and as you pass around the bend he may spring 
into the air from almost under your feet, struggling and 
kicking in his efforts to make time and distance, almost 
as if he were weak and wounded. 
If we try to imagine" how the great wide trough was 
formed through which the river flows we must go back 
thousands and thousands of years to the time when the 
great ice sheet covered the land. Then over all the 
northern country there was no life, for an unbroken 
Arctic winter brooded over these solitudes whose silence 
was never disturbed save by the cracking of the glacier 
or the rush of the avalanche. But gradually the ice 
melted, its margins drew back from the ocean, and it 
retreated more and more to the northward, leaving bare 
a hideous confusion of rocks and boulders and pebbles 
and finer drift, through which and over which poured 
torrents of water that flowed from the glacier's breast. 
The margin of the" ice sheet was not even. It was 
I'agged, melting in one place fast, in another more slowly, 
and stretching out long fingers of ice which clung to the 
drift below, as if unwilling to yield its hold on the land 
it had possessed so long. One of these long fingers lay 
in the great trou.gh where now the river flows, a bed 
carved out through many ages by the passage of a part 
of the glacier, which now had become an ice river, always 
growing shorter, always retreating and now being eaten 
away by the waters of the salt sea. The marks of that 
carving may yet be seen, for on the rocks which now 
form the sides of this trough, and which for the most 
part are covered with soil, still carpeted with fairest 
green, may be seen the deep scratches made by the ice 
as it rubbed against the rocks, and sometimes turned 
over and over against them some huge hard stone it 
was carrying along in its unyielding embrace. Rising 
out of the midst of one of the meadows is a great island 
of rock covered now with ancient forest trees still wear- 
ingr their »livery of dark green. In ancient times this 
stood as a great nunatak or island of rock, projecting 
above the ice of the retreating glacier, which split the 
old ice current into two branches. 
The centuries went by. Slowly the ice retreated, slowly 
the earth became bare, slowly vegetation made its ap- 
pearance: at first plants of the lowest form, and these, 
as they died and rotted, made soil which nourished other 
life a little higher in the scale. After a time the banks of 
the river and the hills which bound it were clothed with 
grass and shrubs and trees, not very different from thbse 
they now bear. The mastodon, the elephant, the great 
horse, the musk ox and the moose and the caribou roamed 
over them now. Later these creatures disappeared. Some 
became extinct and some moved away northward, follow- 
jnpf the retreating ice, and other more faipili^r forms 
