806 
backward over its shoulder, as if it expected every 
moment to have a stone thrown at it. But if you happen 
to be without a gun when you meet it, there is no animal 
on the prairie more unconcerned and impudent. They 
will bark at you from a nearby hilltop, or trot a few paces 
from the trail you are following, and lie down and yawn 
as you ride by with an assumption of being bored that 
would be aggravating if it were not so comical." 
In the old days on the plains country when one would 
no more have thought of shooting at a kit fox than at a 
buffalo bird, these little animals were extremely tame. 
It was a very common thing to come upon them lying 
at the mouths of their burrows or indeed anywhere on 
the prairie, and to see them get up and walk about for a 
moment or two with the tail held absolutely vertical. 
After a brief inspection they would commonly retreat to 
their holes, or trot off to a distance; then carrying the 
tail straight out behind them. 
I do not venture to say why some dogs carry their tails 
in one way and some in another. 
In the same volume, "Trail and Camp-Fire," from 
which these quotations are made, President Roosevelt 
has an interesting paper which treats of wolves at some 
length. G. B. G. 
The Sqaitters Bite, 
Editor Forest and Stream: 
It seems somewhat amusing — at least to me — that your 
correspondents on the subject of squirrel inigration 
should be led from the point at issue into a discussion of 
a subject on which there is no grounds for contention. 
As I understand it, the criticism on the original story 
was not as to squirrel migration, but in reference to row- 
ing along in a boat, picking the squirrels up by the tail 
and dropping them into a bag, or bags. Now, if it had 
been reported that the party picking the squirrel up by 
the tail had at the same time rapped it on the head, there 
would probably have been no criticism offered, though 
seme doubting Thomas might have wondered if the said 
rap fractured the skull. 
The fact of the matter is, while a squirrel lives its 
propensity is to bite, as anyone will find to his sorrow 
if he picks an untamed one up even by the tail. Imagine 
.a sack partly filled with live squirrels, held open for the 
reception of another that is being lifted from the water 
by the tail ! Even if they were nearly exhausted, it don't 
take a squirrel long to get his wind, and he could get out 
cf an open sack quicker than you could say scat. 
G. W. Cunningham. 
0dtti^ mid 0m 
— * — 
Proprietors of shooting resorts will find it profitable to advertise 
tbem in Fokxst and Stxkak. 
Ducks Among the Sand Hills. 
Omah.\, Neb., .\pril 8. — I have just returned from my 
annual wildfowl shoot among the western sandhills — 
probably the greatest ducking grounds in the world to-day. 
With my boy Gerard, I was at Stillwell's ranch in the cen- 
tral southern region of Cherry county. Stillwell runs a 
hunters' hostelry — a commodious sod structure — and en- 
tertains large numbers of sportsmen during the wildfowl 
season, spring and fall, as well as in the black bass 
season, from May till October. George A. Hoagland, 
Omaha's millionaire lumberman, and one of the oldest 
and best known sportsmen in the West; Rev. Edwin 
Jenks, a shooting minister, and a cracking good one, 
Chester Jenks, Wilber Favvcett, Fred Goodrich, Tom 
Foley and Walt Miesner, of this city, as well as Major 
Doolittle, of Lexington; the Hon, R. J. Green, Judge 
Holmes, George Holmes, Douglas Frye, De Forest Moore 
and Billy McClay, of Lincoln, were also guests of Still- 
well's at the same time I was. 
But the spring ducking has not been what was antici- 
pated, and yet good enough for any rational gunner. 
While the northern flight, which is still on, by the 
way, was one of the biggest and most picturesque seen in 
Nebraska for many years, there was too much water, too 
much latitude for the birds. Since the first rain and 
thaw early in March, the whole State — and think of it, 
once designated on our geographical maps as the Great 
American Desert — ^has been almost entirely under water. 
The Platte, the Elkhorn, Loup, Rawhide, Snake, and 
Blue rivers have been rushing and roaring, brim full for 
more than a month, while the overflow and back water 
cover large expanses of the prairie, and the lakes have 
been changed into sprawling marshes almost immeas- 
urable in extent. Thus a haven was furnished for the 
birds, and the most ingenious hunters were set at de- 
fiance. It requires plenty of water to make good wild- 
fowl shooting, but this spring, out this way, we have had 
too much of it, and yet many good kills have been and 
are still being made, and the sport promises to extend on 
through the month of April. 
The Omaha party at Stillwell's this spring, however, 
was a full ten days too previous. We arrived there on 
March i8 and it was not until the 27th that the lakes began 
to open. Everything, even to the deepest and coldest creeks, 
was frozen tight, and what birds were in — and there wexx 
thousands of pintails and geese, with a spattering of 
canvasbacks and redheads — put in their time sitting idly 
on the ice or on the highest slopes of the distant plain. 
For the ten days' freeze-in we barely managed to kill 
enough for the table, but what we did kill were in fine 
condition, and enjoyed beyond measure. In the crops of 
the geese we killed, and the two or three mallards that 
fell to our guns, Mrs. Stillwell and "the girl" took out 
several pints of undigested corn, showing conclusively 
that these birds had traveled something like ninety miles 
from their feeding time to the moment they were killed — 
the nearest grain fields being fully that distant. In the 
crops of the pintails and canvasbacks and bluebills was 
found a mixture of green grasses, wild parsnip tops, 
gravel, dried rosebuds and the desiccated polyps of the 
slough umbellaria and smart weed, the grasses predomi- 
nating. I examined the crops of most of the birds that 
were prepared for the table, and found all of them toler- 
FOREST >AN D STHEAM. 
ably well filled with the exception of the pintails, many 
of which were empty. 
On March 27, when the ice in the lakes began to crack 
and boom, and to recede from the northern shores, the 
real flight from the overflowed valleys of the Platte and 
the Loup, a hundred miles to the south, began to manifest 
itself, and I must say I never saw^ such flocks of canvas- 
backs and redheads since my days at Koshkonong, twenty- 
five years ago. There were plenty of bluebills,. too, and 
pintails and geese all the time, but precious few mallards 
and widgeon. Sheldrakes, the lesser and the greater, 
were more profuse than I have ever known them, and 
the sight of flocks of swan were of daily occurrence. 
We saw also, off on the low lands north of Hay Lake, a 
bunch of ten or a dozen big whooping cranes, rare, indeed, 
even out here nowadays. The sandhills just began to 
show themselves the day we left. 
But before going further I desire to impart a bit of 
information to the readers of the Forkst and Stream, 
and, as incredible as the statement, mayhap, may sound 
to your eastern readers, it is nevertheless incontinentlv 
true, and that is that as fine canvasback grounds as are 
to be found in the length and breadth "of the United 
States are situated right here in the desolate heart of 
Nebraska's great sandhills country. 
Years ago, and many do yet, for that matter, eastern 
sportsmen and authorities on game birds held that the 
Chesapeake canvasback was really the only canvasback, 
save from the standpoint of the naturalist, to be found in 
this or any other country— that the Illinois, Texas and 
California canvasback could no more be compared in 
gastronomic merit to the bird that frequents that legend- 
ary Maryland waterway and its myriad of tributaries, 
than a mud hen can be likened to an acorn-fed mallard. 
But this ridiculous opinion has gone for naught these 
many years with us sportsmen who have enjoyed the 
facilities for teaching them better. 
I have shot canvasback on the Chesapeake and at Cur- 
rituck as well, and I know the bird taken there is season 
is a beauty, a good thing and a joy forever; but I have 
also shot canvasback at Koshkonong, Wis., English Lake, 
Ind., and above Liverpool on the Illinois River, as well 
as right here, over the waters of the Missouri and Platte, 
and out on the sandhill marshes, and I assert with the 
most uncompromising emphasis that the latter bird has no 
superior in the world, and if anything he is bigger, fatter, 
more luscious and succulent than the bird that makes his 
vernal and autumnal habitat amid the estuaries and 
friths of the Atlantic seaboard. More than this, I be- 
lieve that the evidence could not be produced, even by 
culinary art or science, that would make the Nebraska 
ducker confess that there is a bird in the world that can 
hold a candle to the tawny-headed, ashen-winged beauty 
he brings to bag every March and October along the 
Loup, Platte and Elkhorn, and on the marshes at Still- 
water, Waubuncey, or out in the dear old lonely sandhills. 
The Chesapeake and its companion waters are assuredly 
the oldest canvasback grounds in the country. It was 
here that the birds were evidently first found in their 
greatest numbers, and for a long time it was honestly be- 
lieved that they could be found nowhere else. Why, at 
one time the Eastern savants (and I was one of them) 
went so far as to claim that the bird shipped in to the 
Eastern market from the West was only an ally of the 
true canvasback, Aythya vallisneria. 
The aristocratic shots and gourmets were extremely 
jealous and refused to be convinced that this feathered 
raorceau, so long distinctly their own, could be knocked 
oyer by hundreds by even an ordinary shot along the 
rivers and streams of the plebian and vulgar West. 
But such was, and is yet, incontrovertibly the case, 
for if anything these royal birds are appearing ' here, 
especially in the springtime, more numerously than ever, 
and of the countless millions of wildfowl that make a 
transitory halt here at this season, none seem to be more 
plentiful than this king of them all, and their favorite re- 
sorts seem to be the lake country within the yucca- 
covered sandhills of the western sections of this State. 
If this region, then, is the chosen home of these royal 
birds, it is but natural that sportsmen will want to know 
something specific about it, and, impelled by the obliga- 
tion which rests upon every follower of the gun to give 
his fellows in the craft the fruits of his own experience 
and knowledge, I will tell them something of this won- 
derful country. 
The sandhills territory extends somewhere from the 
middle of the State, both north and south, a couple of 
hundred miles west until a high plateau bordering Wy- 
oming is reached, when the character of the country 
materially changes. What I denominate as the "sandhills 
wilderness," however, begins with central Cherry county 
and stretches west into Cheyenne and Dawes county, 
Deuel county being its thoracic center. There is range 
after range of sandhills in this country, undoubtedly left 
thus by .the receding of prehistoric oceanic waters, and 
presenting in the main such a homogeneousness of scene 
that actually, at times, it becomes bewildering to the 
senses. Still, there is exceeding beauty in all this 
monotony, and a wagon ride through the seemingly limit- 
less waste is full of interest to all those who love nature 
in any of her many and varied forms. The sandhills 
present the rounded dome-like summits of all sand- 
hills, though at times, notwithstanding there is nothing of 
the hypersthene in their formation, they are cloven into 
jagged, whitish, chalk-like peaks, which in height some- 
times touch many_ hundred feet. In the summer time 
they are clothed with matchless verdure, with myriads of 
flowers, including the yucca, with its fragrant golden 
blossoms, and the cactus in many forms. Lying within 
the basin of the hills from the Dakota line clear south 
through Deuel county to the South Platte River, is a re- 
markable chain of lakes and insignificant streams, filled 
with pure, cold water, save through the alkalescent belts, 
which frequently cut through the country, but in almost 
every instance devoid of piscatorial life, excepting the 
pure waters that have been stocked by the State. In this 
sea of sterile hills there is no stone, no timber or ore of 
any kind, but instead it is one vast pasture of hay land, 
as extensive, probably, and as luxuriant as any in the 
known world. When I use the word "wilderness" in 
connection with this region it must not be taken in its 
literal sense, for all the valleys east of the plateau are 
capable of supplying most all of the agricultural products 
indigenous to the State, even corn, rye and buckwheat 
and peas, beans, turnips, horseradish, cabbage and pot? 1 
toes. The soil, however, is especially adapted to grazing 
and haymg, and a cereal patch is an oasis, indeed. Among 
the hills there is absolutely, almost, no arable land. 
I will not attempt to enlarge upon the weird grandeur' 
and picturesqueness of this strange region, as that i't 
something that must be seen to be appreciated. Settle- 
ments throughout the hills of any considerable size there 
are none Here and there, under the protection of a 
choppy chain, are occasional clusters of rough adobe 
habitations, and along the lakes and streams are the sod" 
palaces of the ranchmen, cattle dealers and hunters an<f 
trappers. Muskrat trapping in the hills is quite an ex- 
tensive industry. The tent of the sportsman alone, in ad- 
dition, dots the boundless sweep of grass and sand. AC) 
of the wild animals of the western country were here ii'i 
swarmmg plentitude up to within a very few years, the 
elk, black and Avhite-tailed deer, antelope, wolf," both the 
big gray and prairie, badger, otter, swift, mink, weasel 
skunk and muskrat. The elk has entirely disappeared 
and the deer and antelope are following fast. Still not a 
season passes but what a number of these are slain within 
tliese melancholy wastes, which were once their favored 
haunts. Of the feathered family, there is an abundance 
ot hfe, from the huge golden eagle, hawks of all species.'l 
owls, loons, swans, cranes, geese and ducks, chickens and 
grouse, down to the swamp sparrow, meadow lark, black- 
birds and finches. A robin is but seldom encountered 
and while the magpie abounds, bluejays and members of 
the woodpecker genus are rare occurrences. And this is 
the region where the canvasback and redhead duck to-day 
IS to be most plentifully found. 
A few days before we left the sandhills this spring the 
birds came in by thousands and the sport was fine ' On 
Monday morning last Gerard and I, from a hole on the 
she vmg shore of Dewey Lake, bagged thirty-two canvas- 
back and twelve redheads, the biggest kill made by any 
of the hunters there, although Mr. Hoagland and Rev^ 
Jenks, on the whole, killed more than all the shooters' 
combined. > Sandy Griswold. ' 
Deer in Colorado Wilds. 
Editor Forest and Stream: ' 
We are, as a whole, a plenty selfish people, and yet 
would It not be better if we were in some respects 
more selfish. For mstance, when relating a successful 
hunting trip in your columns, would it not be better 
tor the game and for posterity if we withhold the exact 
location of our successful hunt. I know that when 
contemplating a hunting trip I usually go over ray 
files of Forest and Stream to find the location of some 
other hunter's "patch." This would be all well enough 
if every reader of your journal was a true sportsman 
and not a game hog, or market hunter. But thercj 
are too many hunters who go to the woods to kill, and^ 
kill only. So, before we give the exact location of our 
game pockets, let us know who is listening. 
Last fall I was "unchained" for a month, and went 
to Colorado for an outing, and was successful so far 
as the killing of game goes. I would be pleased to 
give anyone the exact location if they will furnish 
Forest and Stream credentials. No Chicago parties 
need apply unless they come recommended by Mr 
Hough. Our party of four was made up of Prof., Jim 
G. and the writer, and a royal time we had, camping, 
loafing, fishing and hunting "deer with horns," grouse 
sage hens and jack rabbits. Our success with the deer 
was all we could wish; in fact, all the law allowed us. 
We killed our two bucks each, with just the proper 
amount of hunting to make it enjoyable, and I am 
glad to state that no one of our party fired a shot at 
a doe or fawn, although we saw from one to twenty- 
five every day we hunted. 
We could not bring any meat out with us, but we 
wasted none, and knew the residents of that section 
will welcome us another year. 
Not so as to some parties camped near us. One 
Chicago outfit, camped about a half mile below us, was 
shooting at does to our knowledge, and our teamster 
told us that they had been there the year before shoot- 
ing does, and when remonstrated with, simply said 
they shot the does for practice. The idea of slaughter- 
ing does and fawn simply for practice! 
Another Chicago party, camped near us, consisting 
of two young men and their guides, were the produc- 
tion of the yellow novel, as they dressed like bad men 
with revolvers and full cartridge belts on them at all 
times. When they moved on they left a half of a deer, 
a doe, I think, rotting in the roadway. Then a party 
from Georgia camped near us for four days; when 
they left we found, on the site of their camp, a full 
carcass of a deer untouched and ten whisky bottles 
much touched. 
The only gentleman sportsman that camped near us 
during our stay was a Mr. Miller, of Chicago; he with 
his guides camped across the creek from us for four 
or five days, killed his two bucks and was greatly 
pleased and satisfied. To such as him you may give 
the exact, location of your "game pockets"; but not 
to such as the others mentioned above. I have men- 
tioned three bad parties that we met; there were per- 
haps 300 in a radius of 100 miles in that part of Colo- 
rado just as bad. Is it any wonder that our game is 
about gone? 
On this trip happened the most touching incident 
of my hunting experience. I was going up a gulch 
alone one day when I heard a peculiar throbbing 
sound, and upon looking around I discovered a little 
spotted fawn lying near a pile of rocks, getting its 
breath in gasps. I kneeled by it and lifted its head in 
my hands; as I did so it rolled its innocent eyes toward 
me, gave a few feeble gasps and died. It may be that 
I am a little too tender-hearted, but I admit that I wept 
for that poor innocent, as for a dear friend. What 
caused its death I could not tell. Its tongue was swol- 
len until it forced the mouth open. 
One day three of us were climbing a steep mountain 
and had stopped to rest on a log that lay in the trail, 
when we heard a noise, and looking around saw two 
small fawns coming toward us on the run down the 
trail. They ran up to within five or six feet of us be- 
