Dec. 'j, i0br.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
443 
in either of them ; only the sage hen and the coyote hold 
revel there, if so minded. 
But we have not yet reached Galena. We are at the 
Bar. Here M^e made a fine camp in the firs, and after 
receiving and disregarding some mistaken advice about 
the haunts and habits of game animals, we set out on a 
hunt. Our friends at the Bar had lots of stories, but no 
venison, and we hoped to supply both. 
By mid-day we had left our horses well up the m.oun 
tain, and had passed on foot up a long wooded basin fur 
rowed by a frozen stream. There were quite a number 
of tracks, as if a band of deer on the march had passed 
that way, but there were no indications that we were on 
a regular feeding ground. We advanced, noting a small 
bear track and a squirrel nearly black, which I collected 
later, thinking him an instance of melanism. He was not 
a perfect specimen, however, for ilie middle of his bade 
was only a dark brown. 
And now as the sun began to decline rather fast, we 
were thinking of return, when Lon's sharp eyes saw a 
deer dart from the timber far in front of us and go 
quartering up the steep slope on our right. When he got 
high enough to feel secure, he stopped to investi£.ate, 
though he had really come much nearer to us than his 
.30-30 about an inch less. The wood was froz6n, and 
this may have influenced the result. 
These incidents summarize our pleasant drive. The 
October weather was cold and splendid. Ice formed 
nightly on the pail in our tent, sometimes very thick, but 
we had a stove inside, and the morning fir& made the bath 
a luxury instead of a mere sanitary shivering fit. The 
inhabitants of Idaho that we met were, in the language of 
Brigham Young "a white and delightsome people," and 
the dogs were fine, cordial tail-waggers, who would put 
their heads on your lap and look at you with eyes full of 
brown benevolence. 
Game v.'as either absent or scarce and shy through- 
out, yet we got enough, except, perhaps, for trophies, and 
were able to give much meat to deserving friends. We 
delighted especially in seeking sheep. Though we got 
few, we went joyfully wandering amid their haunts, the 
high, rockj'^ swales with frozen tricklets of water and 
scanty grass and moss, the stunted trees below, the snowy 
steeps above, the lofty cliffs, the slants of slide rocks with 
the sheep's nests hollowed out in them. We saw their 
network of trails up the ridges and their tracks, and we 
felt that we had lived among the mountaineers. 
Some wise man has said that if he held all truth in 
last glowered at her from the thicket of hollyhocks, nor 
has she felt his presence ; yet without any heln of witch- 
craft he may have come near, for black cat skins have a 
market value and there are mercenary boys and furriers 
who are no honester than other people. 
A lady told me that her furs were "river mink." They 
were handsome enough, but not the thickest. When 
blown upon, there was a wide parting of the fluffy under 
fur upon the skin. I knew who originally wore them-, for 
1 had been at the first owner's house, a well-built if not 
handsome structure in the edge of the marsh, with plenty 
of water on one side and an abundance of food, hly-roots, 
and sedges, on the other. 
When the mink has eaten his Hesh tliat perhaps be- 
comes mink, but his fur is always that of a muskrat, and 
though in his life and habits he is much more interesting 
than the mink, his raiment is not so fine nor valuable. 
Yet it has long been in great demand, formerly for the 
manufacture of hats, now mostly for export, to be made 
up into cheap furs, its offensive name and dull color 
changed to more attractive ones that better suit the taste 
of fashion. 
If these humble creatures could know to what estate 
their furs would be exalted, the sounding names given 
starting point was. With kis flank presented and his 
high head turned to gaze, "he stood like Germany in 
arms facing embattled France." 
His distance was at least 250 yards from us, and any 
friend who wagers that I will consistently hit the center 
at that range, will probably want his money back very 
soon. On this occasion, however, the shot struck home, 
to the loud astonishment of my companion, and perhaps 
some silent surprise of my own, and the deer, after trying 
to steady himself a moment, toppled over backward and 
rolled a hundred yards down the slant. We climbed the 
rest of the way to meet him and found a fine buck with a 
rather good head. 
I Avill not estimate his weight, but when he was dressed, 
headless and frozen stiff by a night's exposure, two men 
had hard work to get him on to a pack horse. The tips 
of the two most distant tines of his horns (the second 
ones) were 28 inches apart. 
Both the deer killed on this trip were mule deer, and 
I noted that the body of the tail above the black tip was 
entirely white in each case— that is, that there was no 
black line down the back of it such as is usually or always 
seen in the small California variety, and sometimes seen 
in other individuals. 
It was my intention to take measurements for the sake 
of getting a basis for comparisons, but I found that my 
steel tape had been left behind, so I only got some dimen- 
sions of the horns, and the breadth of one forefoot, which 
the men brought down; and which was three inches across. 
While at the Bar we made a brave endeavor to pene- 
trate another province of sheep land, and after a climb. 
\\hich I confidently estimate at 3,000 vertical feet, we 
reached an eminence that gave us a view of cold, snowy, 
rocky basins of encouraging appearance, but the land 
of promise, though not very far in an air line, was a great 
way off if measured by hours of effort, and we did not 
reach it. 
From the Bar we went to Stanley Basin, and made two 
expeditions in that vicinity, looking for the foundations 
of certain bear stories told us by scarred veterans of the 
cliase. Wounds made by fangs or claws of bears were 
!-hown me on the person of one old gentleman, though 
1 am bound to say that the stains of his daily toil had 
hidden the scars. At all events, we searched for these 
foundations, and though we discovered that they had been 
used up in propping rainbows, and that more bears would 
he usually seen on Fifth avenue. 
We prospected in several places and panned out clean 
gravels and desperately pure granite sands witliout a 
trace of color; we also looked casually at some mines run 
on the assessment plan, though we did not have time 
10 visit the good ones, and, among other curious things, 
we saw in a little lake on the verjr crest of the divide 
between Cape Horn Creek and the waters of the 'Payette 
River, a lot of good-sized fish that looked like trout. Now 
this lake had no inlet nor outlet, and was quite a distance 
from any running water. Were; the fish planted? Did 
they come overland or are they relics of the glacial age? 
There are two other fish problems of interest near 
Stanley Basin. One is the existence of a redfish netted 
annually for about a month in Redfish Lake, one of the 
supply reservoirs of the upper Salmon; and another is 
the existence in another similar lake of a fish 9 or 10 
inches long, which the natives call a smelt. This fish 
limits his season to ten days each year, when he runs up 
the inlet to spawn. Except for these brief periods the 
fish go into retirement, and are not seen or captured. 
A few penetration tests were made with .30-40 and 
.30-30 rifles, using soft-nosed bullets at close range. A 
flat surface was hewn on a fir tree, which was afterward 
cut down. The .30-40 had penetrated 6 inches and the 
THE GOODNIGHT HERD. 
his hand, he would let it go that ntenkind might be 
ele\'ated and strengthened bj' searching for it. 
So, if I held in my grasp the whole tribe of mountain 
sheep, I would, after taking certain measurements and 
photographs, send them back to their securest fastnesses 
that future generations might behold the ideal of self- 
reliant freedom. H. G. Dui.oo. 
Fact and Fancy^ 
A FAIR fur-wearer, day-dreaming over her soft wraps, 
lets her fancies run far northward and gives her thoughts 
an arctic airing. In the shadowy frost pictures she sees 
a Hudson Bay Company's hunter making the slow round 
of his traps in a wintry waste beyond the farthest post; 
then, bringing in his furs and spending in one reckless 
week the hard earnings of months; or Indians in Alaskan 
wilds, setting their primitive springes for their four-footed 
brethren but little wilder than themselves; or exiled 
wretches begrudging their traps the meagre bait in the 
frozen hell of Siberia. 
It will take some of the romance from her pictures to 
make them more truthful, but it may not entirely spoil 
them. New England mountains from which the lumber- 
man and wood-cutter have reaped their tall harvests 
these fift}'' j'^ears. grassy hillsides of farms, trout brooks 
known to many a city angler, meadow rills where school- 
boys catch minnows with pin-hooks, marshes shorn by 
the husbandman's scythe when the upland hay crop is 
short, and streams troubled by the frequent keels of 
traffic, shall form the tamer landscapes of these pictures. 
The figures, less picturesque than the half wild Hud- 
son Bay hunter and the wholly wild Alaskan savage, and 
with nothing of the tragic in them, shall be only a matter- 
of-fact Yankee who is a farmer many more months of the 
year than he is a trapper; the ruddy and tan farmer's boy, 
whose few .steel traps and deadfalls furnish the purchase 
money for his new jack-knife, his, skates and his first 
gun; an Indian of St. Francis, briefly visiting at rare 
intervals the hunting grounds of his fathers; these are our 
trappers, and their spoils make a considerable share of the 
furs exported and manufactured. 
The -one who bv birthright first wore the mink furs 
of the fair lady, took his frequent baths and fares of small 
fr}- in the same stream wherein her brother casts his 
fly every summer, ov^y a day's journey from the city. 
The original wearer of her "Alaskan sable" two years 
ago was doing the farmer good service in diggi-ng the 
.a;rubs in his fields and an ill turn by sucking his eggs 
and stealing his young chickens. He was always in bad 
odor, yet his fur, deodorized and dyed, does not proclaini 
his name to ears polite. The trimming of her cloak was 
once the coat of a robber of cornfields whose call to his 
brother bandits maj' have been mistaken in August even- 
ings for the screech-owl's uncanny note. 
The fashionable boa of a year ago, with the pointed 
black ears and the fluffy white-tioped b-ush, when 
adorning its first owner, never coursed over Russian 
snows in the long Arctic night; but once clad a cunning 
thief who stole the soring chickens our lady's host had 
raised for her and the turkey which might have found 
its wa3' to her Christmas feast. That bright Christmas 
was a holiday for her. but not for him, with the farmer's 
hounds bellowing on his trail, a melodious storm that 
drove him to destruction. With his life and. his tawny 
pelt he paid for misdeeds and a still more satisfactory 
price in the sport of his oursuit. 
Of the rural l ousehold, she may remember one of whom 
she stood in awe, for he was a witch's familiar, black as 
a starless night. The has had no tidings of him since he 
them, and the gentle wearers they would warm and grace, 
possibly a sigh of content would mingle with the shriek 
and moan as the trap's jaw pinches or the trapper's 
blow descends. Rowland E. Robinson. . 
Adventures in Tropical America* 
VII. — A Race Against Advefsities. 
Contention is rarely of any benefit, yet who can al- 
ways avoid it? On one of my expeditions to Central 
America I found myself in the depths of the jungles of 
Spanish Honduras, miles away from where I should have 
been. I was striving to serve the interests of some New 
York capitalists, yet I was not the leader of this expedi- 
tion, my mission was sirnply to smooth the way, and make 
an effort to see that the party reached certain mines, 
where it was supposed a fortune awaited. We were in the 
jungles now, and to the best of my calculations were 
trying to reach the mines by an impossible route with 
no prospect of getting on. Then contentions arose. I 
wanted to go on with the Indians, who offered to take 
us in canoes up the Rio Patuca, and then across countr}^ 
to the mines; but the leader of the expedition had de- 
signed some clumsy boats, which he now declared in 
tragic words should be forced up the river even if the 
expedition remained there for months; and, in order to 
accomplish his purpose, he now demanded that I should 
make heavy drafts on New York. Fle had about ex- 
hausted our supplies of money, and his proposition did 
not look like good business; I agreed, however, that if 
he would go on with the Indians I would sign the drafts, 
but how he expected to get money for them in the jungles 
was past mj' comprehension. Nothing would suit his 
purpose except money to spend in efforts to force his 
clums}^ boats up a river in whicli all the Indians said 
such boats could never live. I consulted carefully with 
the Indians, and finally decided that no more money 
could be spent on those boats. • 
Then there was a scene, threats and wild language; 
the leader had been drinking, and was little better than a 
mad man. Presentiv his thoughts centered on an idea 
that he would go back to the settlements, and up the road 
to the interior, and there revoke certain transfers of 
property before I could have them registered. This reg- 
istry was one of the most important matters that had 
been intrusted to me. The question was rather serious, 
and I consulted with others before answering him; while 
he. all complacent, thought I was cornered. 
I was assured that if he went back to the coast he 
could not get through the dead line, because yellow fever 
was raging in the settlements. The dead line is a rather 
peculiar though effective quarantine; a line is drawn 
across the road from an infected places and a notice is 
posted up; a guard stationed to protect the line, and who 
ever attempts to cross from the infected side is im- 
mediately shot. I hardly believed this statement, but I 
was convinced that there was some impediment to travel, 
and that to reach the interior from the infected coast 
would be difficult, and probably slow work. Fortunately 
we were above the dead line, and I determined to make 
my way across the wilderness to the capital; if my com- 
panion came with me I could claim the right of registry, 
and if he went by way of the coast 1 could probably 
beat him in. 
Once more I tried to persuade him- that our best inter- 
ests were to go on, but words were useless, and a race 
for the mines was in order. 
I arranged as best I could. Of the money we had. T 
took $150 in silver, and gave the balaiice, several hundred 
