Jan. 3, 1903.1 
wanted him badly and offered me a dollar, and 011 my 
refusing it. raised it to two dollars. 
"No. sir." 1 told him "I want to raise liim myself." 
T called him Major, and always fed him myself. He 
began to grow now. and when two years old was one 
of the largest Newfoundlands that I have ever seen, 
and was a jet black; he did not have a white hair on 
Titm. • ^ , . 
After he had got to be a few months old I kept him 
tied in the da3' time when I Avas not. at home, but let 
him rnn at night. One Sunday morning, when he was 
only six months old, he came walking in to Avhere I sat 
at mv breakfast and dropped something on the floor 
beside my chair, then stood looking up at me. It was 
a new eight-blade pearl handle Congress knife,- such 
as sold for $2 then; and this one had not a scratch on 
it. Some one had bought it the night before, then had 
lost it,, and the pup no doubt knew exactly what it was. 
He saw me using my knife every day; so he had 
brought his find to me. I took Major and his knife 
up to the hardware store, where I usually got my 
powder and shot, just as soon as I had time the tol- 
lowine: Mondav, and the dealer here gave me $1.50 in 
tradc"'for the knife; then put it right into his show- 
case; it may have come out of that case last Saturday 
night. X invested half of this trade in the finest collar 
that was here, then gave it to Major, and took powder 
and shot for my half. 
I was a newsboy at this time. The newsboy then 
was quite a diflferent character from what he is now. 
I sold the first papers that were ever sold by a boy on 
the streets of Allegheny City. The editor of the Pitts- 
burg Dispatch. Mr. Reese C. Fleson, had been on to 
New York the last spring and seeing the newsboys 
there, he came home and set three of us at it here. 
I had my own town to myself, the other two boys 
taking Pittsburg between them. One of those boys, 
before he died, owned one of the largest papers m 
Pittsburg himself, the Evening Leader. 
I sold the morning papers and the eastern weekhes, 
and earned more than our laborers did: they got 80 
cents a day then, while a carpenter got $1.25. and had 
to work II or 12 hours to get it, I only worked about 
6 hours. , 
Each day, -about noon, I would come home, then 
turn Major loose and from then until bedtime wherever 
I went Major did also. We put in most of our time 
in hunting. Major was not a hunting dog, but he was 
not gun shy. I would often kneel down and fire, rest- 
ing iny gun on his back; he would not move. I made 
wodden skewers for the butchers, and had a dozen of 
these butchers as my customers. When I was up at 
the market house selling my skewers Major would 
go along also: he was one of the few dogs that could 
go in there without having a steel or cleaver sent at 
him Maior would not touch their meat; a butcher 
would offer him a piece, but I would have to tell him 
to take it before he would touch it. 
' When Major was about thirty months old he and i 
•were up in .the market house one day, and one of my 
patrons wanted to buy him for a playmate for his chil- 
dren "He is- the dog you want," I told him. He 
will let a baby crawl all over him and never even 
growl at it. I will sell him to you; there are but few 
other men though that could buy him. I know he 
will have a good home with you; he will cost you $20, 
though." 
That was a big price for a dog, he thought. It was; 
$20 bought a good cow then. 
"Well," I told him, "I would as soon keep the dog. 
I am not anxious to sell him.'-' , 1 ■ j 
. He counted me out the $20, and I tied Major behind 
liis stall; then going home handed my mother the 
money, and was given a raking down for selling Major. 
"We have no use for $20 dogs," I told her. ^A 
year's flour will suit us better; that $20 will buy it.' 
This man had a fine place just beyond the city limits. 
He had one pet, a black bear, that he had raised from 
a cub and kent chained at the slaughter house. I 
often naid the bear a visit, taking a stick of candy 
for him to hunt all through my pockets for, and he 
and Major were friends already. After the butcher 
had got Major I would often find them side by side 
fast asleeo. The bear was two years old now, and a 
stranger would not have any business withm his reach: 
but I had known him since he was a cub and still 
ould handle him as I would a dog. 
1 started to raise another dog right off now, a mon- 
grel that I got the day his eyes were open. His mother 
belonged to the bull family, his father may have been 
a registered dog, but I doubt it. I called this one 
Brandy, and used him to kill snakes. He could hnd 
and kill them as fast as 1 could count them. He finally 
o-ot to be so bad tempered that no one but me could 
do anything with him. He stood in deadly fear of 
me. though; he was the only dog I ever owned that 
T had to whip; I gave him a whipping once a week. 
Finally he changed from snakes to sheep, and some 
fanner shot him. . , . 
After I had sold Major I paid him regular visits, 
'itopping to see him at least once every two weeks. 
He would climb all over me in his yard, but never 
offered to follow me. His owner said that he would 
not take $50 for him now. A stranger could not enter 
his grounds after night; the dog paid no attention to 
theni in the day time. , 
While the war was going on I did not see Major lor 
fnur years, but in January, 1865. I came home and 
about the first thing I did was to hunt up Major, ihe 
man I had sold him to had been dead for several 
years, but his sons carried on the business here. The 
lady told me that Major was still here. "He is nearly 
blind now," she said, •'"and the boys wanted to kill 
him, but he will die here of old age if I don't die before 
him." _ , , ., , 
■ She was feeding him now as if he were a child. 
He lay out in the sun fast asleep, and going to him 
I stooped down and called, •'Maior!" He raised up his 
liead; then, after he had stnelled me, began to lick 
my face and hands. He had not forgotten me. _ 
He Hved for two years after this, then died of ex- 
treme old age, and his mistress had him buried in the 
orchard. 
I was not in that country again for twenty years, 
and when I next went back this family still lived here; 
but the place that had been a mile out in the country 
was now in the city, closely built up. The house had 
the orchard yet, though: and going to it I had no 
trouble in finding Majors grave. The daughter, who 
had been the baby when Major first came here, had 
flowers growing all over his grave. 
Cabia Br.ANco. 
Erie, Pa. 
The Overdraft on Nature* 
CoKTrGUiTY suggests comparison. One smiles at a de- 
partment store advertisement in which a new edition 
of Xenophon's "Anabasis," among other books, is fol- 
lowed with a line of breechloaders. Yet the juxtapo- 
sition causes one to wonder what the leader of the 
Ten Thousand Greeks would say, were he now alive, 
to the alarming overdraft upon animal and bird life 
largely througli these same weapons. 
It is true that hunting nowhere finds a better apolo- 
gist than that genial essayist and military expert. He 
declares in his "Essay on the Chase" that it is among 
the pleasures "productive of the greatest blessings," 
insists that it is a necessary part of a liberal educa- 
tion, an indispensable training for the soldier and a 
stimulus to patriotism, as well as contributing to 
health and happiness. "There are many benefits which 
the enthusiastic sportsman may expect to derive from 
it-^ pursuit — in health which will thereby accrue to the 
physical frame, the quickness of the eye and ear, the 
defiance of old age. and the warlike training which it 
insures." 
Even those who think that hunting is no business 
for women get no support from the author of the 
"Arabasis." "What," he queries, "has sex to do with 
it? It is not only men enamored of the chase, but 
among women there are those also to whom nur lad}"- 
Arfimis has granted a like boon — Atalanta, Procris, 
."nd many a huntress fair." Indeed, the pupil of 
Socrates seems to have been as ardent a sportsman 
?s he was expert as a soldier, as desirous of being in 
at the death as he was to bring his retreating armj^ 
j"'»felv to the loud-sounding sea. He might have stood 
for the country doctor of sporting tastes in the old 
hunting song: 
'To the poor he advice gave away, 
I'or the rich be prescribed and took pay; 
But to each one he said, 'Yon will -surely be dead, 
jf you don't go hunting to-day!" 
- There is no doubt, moreover, that in this fondness 
for the chase he had the support of public opinion in 
Greece, even though, when horses and hounds be- 
came badly mixed, his language may not always have 
been as chaste as that of the "Memorabilia." A little 
nation devoted to sports and games would share his 
belief in the healthfulness of hunting; and in any 
event an institution established by the aristocracy in 
a state ruled hy aristocrats would die hard. 
But the hunting which Xenophon praised was, in 
its disastrous effect upon animal life, a harmless sport 
compared with much of that practiced in this country. 
No doubt a military expert like the Greek leader 
sought game which tested his courage, and gave him 
the "wild joy of strife" whenever he could. But while 
an occasional wild boar may have rewarded his 
search, the hunting of which he discv.urses so pleas- 
antly in his "Cynegeticus" was largely that of the 
hare, varied, perhaps, by a wolf or bear driven from 
the thicket-bordered hills by the baying of the hounds. 
Greece, so far as the larger quadrupeds were cnv- 
cerned, was an exhausted land; and expansion, which 
elsewhere has often furnished a remedy for such ex- 
haustion, was there impossible. 
It thus happens that we are deprived of the retlec- 
tion of Xenophon upon the wasteful selfishness which 
had stripped his country of its larger game, with the 
improvement in weapons contributing thereto. Tf 
warnings there were of the inevitable limit of such 
selfishness, thej' must have been given long before 
Xenophon's time, and disregarded, just as they largelj' 
have been in this country within the last fifty j'ears. 
It is discouraging to think that in another half century, 
despite our game laws, many of our larger wild ani- 
mals will have passed so completely out of knowledge 
that some accomplished writer and sportsman may, 
like Xenophon, sing the praise of hunting the hare, 
as if larger game had never existed. 
Unhappily, it is toward this condition that we are 
tending. If expansion as a remedy for exhaustion of 
soil and animal life was impossible in ancient Greece, 
it has not been so in the United States. The hunters 
and the fishermen have steadily moved outward 
toward the frontiers, leaving the center of the ring 
largeljr denuded of fish, animal and bird life. Warning 
of the final limit of this selfish and irrational policy 
has fallen upon unheeding ears, until some of the 
quadrupeds and birds once quite comm^jn on this con- 
tinent, have disappeared as utterly as the great auk. 
It is an old story; but in the later sixties an officer of 
the Hudson's Bay Company told the writer at a ford 
of the North Saskatchewan that, a few years before, 
he had camped on the same spot when the north- 
bound buffalo herd was crossing the stream. The 
crossing began in the evening, and at 11 o'clock the 
following day he could see, though standing on a cart, 
no end to the herd in either direction! In* an early 
year in the same decade the Hudson's Bay Company 
was reported to have purchased and stored in its lint, 
of posts along the Saskatchewan 32,000 bags of 
pemmican. As the flesh of two buffaloes is required 
for each bag, the output, with the requirements of the 
Indians and hunters, represented a slaughter of about 
75,000 animals. In all that country to-daj' no vestige 
of the buft'alo remains save its whitened bones amid 
the dark grasses of the prairie. 
But the hunters were, of course, only following the 
old bent of the Caucasian in his treatment of wild ani- 
■raals. For when Columbus's sailors, searching for the 
imaginary province of Cipango, climbed to the top of 
an islet to scan the horizon for their missing ships, 
the first thing they did was to kill eight "sea wolves" 
they found there. Now these "sea wolves" were 
neither more nor less than the West Indian seal, com- 
mon enough at that time throughout the Caribbean 
group, and off the Gulf and Florida coasts, but now 
virtually unknown along the mainland. 
About a decade ago a report of the Smithsonian. In- 
stitution, prepared by Mr. Frederick Lucas, called at- 
tention to the quadrupeds represented in the National 
Museum which had recently vanished or were men- 
aced with destruction. Roused by its statements; 
other museums throughout the country instituted a 
search for the missing specimens, only'to find theni-^ 
selves, in many cases, unable to secure them. More- 
OA^er, the discussion w^hich followed threw a new light 
on the extent and rapidity of the process of extermina- 
tion as it was then, and still is, going on. 
To recall some of the statements of Mr. Lucas's 
report seems a good deal like repeating what every- 
body already knows. Yet it is only through publicity 
and repetition of those and kindred facts that there 
is any hope of checking and preventing the wasteful 
destruction so long in progress. Perhaps the most re- 
markable disappearance noted is that of the Arctic 
sea-cows, or rytinas, an animal from twenty to thirty 
feet long, wnth a girth of twenty feet. A sluggish 
beast, resembling the manatee, and feeding on sea- 
weed and shore grasses, it was so much sought for 
food by sailors that in fourteen years after its dis- 
covery by Behring's men, in 1745. it had become en- 
tirely extinct. Much the same rapid disappearance 
was noted in the case of the great walrus, fairly com- 
mon half a century ago along the coast of California. 
As they were rather ponderous creatures, their vanish- 
ing should have attracted some attention. But it did 
not, a search for them in 1884 disclosing the fact that 
they had passed away unnoticed, not a single specimen 
remaining. 
It may be said, of course, that in point of rapidity of 
extermifation, these are unusual instances. But read- 
ers of Forest and Stream past middle age will re- 
call many others in which, though the process of de- 
struction has been less rapid, the result has practically 
been the same. This has notably been the case with 
some species of deer, and with a very consideralilc 
varietur of other game now seldom seen in sections 
where it was once plentiful. 
Turning to the birds, perhaps the greatest havoc 
has been wrought with the passenger pigeon, Hocks of 
which used, fifty years ago, to fairly aarken the sky: 
though the fact that a single American dealer is .said 
to have sold two million bird skins in a year gives 
some idea of the destruction of bird life. In the 
Smithsonian report the statement is made that Au- 
dubon once counted in twenty-one minutes 163 flocks 
of passenger pigeons, and an estimate of the number 
passing over an area under observation places it at 
1,115,136,000. Such a number seems incredible; yet 
a German naturalist asserts that he saw a piece of 
limberland nine miles long, in which every tree was 
occupied by nesting pigeons. 
In some towns of the Northern ^Middle States, forty- 
five years ago, pigeons were exposed for sale by the 
wagon load. The writer remembers to have seen 
farmers thus bringing in birds netted by them about 
their nesting places a few miles awaj^; and the wagons 
in which they w^ere brought to market Avere piled to 
the top. In these same sections of country a pas- 
senger pigeon is now seldom seen, the great flocks 
which once passed twice every j^ear having disap- 
peared as if they had never been. 
Of course not all the disappearances can be laid to 
the selfishness of the hunter. That of the California 
vulture, the larpest bird on the northern continent, is 
due to its sharing the poison which farmers place in 
sheep carcasses to kill wolves and coyotes. The 
Pallas cormorant in the Behring Sea islands is said 
to have been destroyed in its chief haunts hy an 
earthquake: and the total disappearance of the Labra- 
dor duck, whatever its cause, cannot be charged to 
the hunter. 
But enough can be laid at his door to show that he 
1 as. and is. making a hca^^y overdraft on animal and 
bird life; that unless Time is allowed to aid Nature, 
the date \< not far distant when the exhibits at the 
sportsmen's shows will be only those of extinct 
species. With the growing craze for furs, the skin 
hunters are killing everything with fur on it, the price 
making little difference. And though the Audubon 
societies seem for the time to have gotten the bett-^r 
of the bird skin sellers, only the utmost vigilance will 
prevent an evasion of the laws that will prove dis- 
astrous to the feathered tribes. If the skin and pot 
hunters can be eliminated from the problem, time 
may do much to restore the balance which they have 
destroyed, though in many ways t1->e i^-^m-^ee nb-f^-dy 
done is irreparable. H. M. Robixson. 
A Cotfection. 
Editor Forest and Stream: 
As I would not willingly do injustice to anyone, 
please allow the following statement: 
In my recent "Notes"' I stated that my friend (Case 
I. of the Notes) shot and finished the moose that had 
been wounded by Case II., and that a guide held the 
torch for the killing shot. My friend informs me it 
was he who held the torch for Case II. to finish his 
own job, and that Case II. regretted the suffering of 
the moose as much as any one could. It was the fault 
of the guides that the quietus was not given sooner. 
I gladly make this correction, and wish I could as read- 
ily make one of another sort that is much needed. 
My friend tells me that on a certain Canadian river 
he and Case II. saw the bodies of six cow moose ^hat 
had been shot in fly time by a certain man from New 
York, and their bodies left to decay in the water and 
pollute it without so much as a steak having been cut 
from one of them. The shooting was simply from the 
love of killing. Such wanton destruction of animal life 
should debar the perpetrator from ever thinking of 
himself as a sportsman until he repents and "brings 
forth fruit meet for repentance." Juvenai.. 
