S04 
FOREST AND STREAM, 
[Sept. 12, 1903. 
many an undisputed thing; but he shall never lay hold on 
the big, eternal truths of life until he lets emotion play 
under intellection, even as the flame plays under the 
crucible of cold minerals in his laboratory. Then the 
gold Cometh. 
"Your city man comes forth encrusted with materiality, 
commonly functioning brilliantly enough on the mental 
plane, but lacking in that close sympathy with his brother 
men and his brother beasts and birds and that tender 
interest and consideration for their lives and comfort 
which the quiet, observant rustic displays. 
"The city for intellect, the country for genuine human 
feeling. The city for smug, refined hypocrisy in half the 
acts of life, the country for uncouth candor and unraani- 
cured sincerity. 
"For the most astounding examples of ironed and per- 
fumed savagery, commend me to the urban product. The 
countryman — particularly the mountaineer, who has time 
for meditation — ^may wear clothes that do not fit him; he 
may mispronounce some of his words ; but, as a rule, he 
is genuine and tender-souled and humane ; and he never 
shoots a deer if he does not need it. 
"The city either breaks or hardens the heart. It is 
forever the grave of innocence and wholesomeness and 
rest. Forever the unnatural conditions of modern city 
life, the development of low cunning, the mad scramble 
for pelf and place, make brutes of men, and encase what- 
ever of soul there may be left in them in a crust of heart- 
less materiality, thick, impenetrable, hke the hard, bitter 
shell of the pinon nut that rattles down upon me from 
yonder pine tree. All nature is beautiful, save human 
nature. 
"Civilization has ever developed the physical and the in- 
tellectual at the expense of the psychic, the humane and 
the spiritual. 
"Such are a few of the reflections that crossed my 
mind as I laj'^ last night, rolled in my blanket on a 
luxurious and fragrant bed of yellow pine needles and 
blossoming wild buckwheat in a gloomy rhus thicket on 
the lonely summit of the Sierra de la Liebre range. The 
sun had dabbled his bloody fingers across the horizon be- 
hind the blue frondage of sugar pines and firs on the dis- 
tant Alamo, and sunk to rest an hour before. 
"Range on range of sun-baked mountains, covering 
hundreds of square miles to the west and south, practi- 
cally uninhabited save by the deer, the puma, the wildcat 
and the quail, had melted into hazy blue and now had 
merged into the general blackness. 
"It was the heart of the deer country, and my duties as 
Government Ranger in the great forest reserve had been 
rendered doubly arduous for a month by the necessity of 
keeping a watchful eye on the bands of deer butchers from 
the cities, and in seeing that forest fires were not started 
from their camp-fires. 
"These conscienceless hunters seem, many of them, to 
take a vicious pleasure in seeing how rapidly and com- 
pletely they can pull off their veneer of urban civilization 
and revert to their true characters of irresponsible 
savages, as soon as they are out from the sight of the 
blue-coated policemen. Time after time, in ranging up 
and down the mountain streams of Ventura, Los Angeles, 
San Diego, and San Bernardino counties, I have found 
the outlets of the trout pools dammed up where these 
sportsmen from the city had waded in and thrown all the 
fish out on to the banks, in order that they might carry 
into camp a great catch of seventy-five to one hundred 
trout, and so make a record. 
"It is these same gentry ^\ ho boast of shooting a hun- 
dred doves a day, whether nesting or not; who slaughter 
mother-does and tiny milk-drinking, spotted fawns, when- 
ever the ranger or the deputy game warden is not watch- 
ing; who scatter leaden death among the mockingbirds, 
the orioles and the little families of half-grown quails, 
piping behind their mothers around the waterholes in the 
canyons ; and whose motto is Kill — kill ! No matter what 
it is, kill! 
"And so, as I drowsed under the stars, I remembered 
how, a few hours before, in following the trail of a puma 
or California mountain lion over the Liebre, it had led me 
on to the recently abandoned camp of a party of four 
deer-slaj'ers hard by the only waterhole in that region. 
I caught a glimpse of the tawny terror of the mountains 
as he slunk away, waving his long, black-tipped tail ^vith 
• quick jerks as an angry house cat does. At the same time 
two coyotes and a family of silver foxes scampered away 
into the buckthorn chaparral at my approach. 
"All had been devouring fragments of venison and 
gnawing at the half-stripped carcasses of deer surrounding 
the abandoned camp. 
"In all I counted portions of the carcasses of fourteen 
deer, large and small. Two spoiled hides lying near were 
clearly those of does, which it is never lawful to kill here. 
I am "told they admitted killing twenty deer, in two weeks, 
by the murderous and unsportsmanlike method of lying in 
wait at night at the spring and shooting them down as 
they came to quench their thirst. 
"And these sportsmen are the highest product of our 
urban civilization. All of these four veneered savages are 
professional men, two being physicians who, having 
broken down their own health in a mad scramble to build 
up the health and deplete the pocketbooks of other people, 
had sought retirement in the wilderness to commune with 
nature with repeating rifles and pump guns loaded with 
buckshot. Health to them spelled death to every wild 
thing within range. , , , , r ^ 
"Yet (curious commentary on the helplessness oi man), 
were these banal lead-slingers to be deprived of their 
breechloaders and be compelled to wrestle with the wil- 
derness for an existence, they could not for a day compete 
with the chipmunk or the blue cottontail. 
"Were we to dub such sportsmen beasts we would owe 
an apology to the four-footed ones, for none, save the 
puma and the grizzly bear when angered, will kill more 
than it needs. Only man kills for the mere sake of kill- 
ing. Onlv civilized man swings the besom of annihilation. 
It was not the Indians who annihilated the millions of 
bison on our plains. It was sportsmen such as I am 
dcscnbin*^. 
"Last night I was awakened at two o'clock by the 
blood-chilling cry of a mountain lion. A little later, from 
a distance came the sound of squealing, and the 'woof- 
woof !' of terrified pigs. On my way down the mountain 
this morning I passed the spot— an ancient hog corral 
built of chemisal brush, in which possibly two dozen wild 
^ogs \md ta^en refuge. Here the Uo|a Jiad found them 
in the night, and with a savage ferocity almost equaling 
that of the college-bred deer-butchers, he had struck 
dead eleven of the pigs. I found five or six others wan- 
dering about in the canyon, some with their throats or 
.sides torn open, others with eyes scratched out; for the 
puma strikes with extended, rigid claws, and the results 
are frightful. 
"And so I have found does wounded and left to die by 
the heartless gunners, and birds and fishes killed for the 
sake of killing, and thrown away, 
A friend of mine, a mountaineer, had half a dozen pet 
does and fawns which fed with his cattle, and which he 
prized highly. While absent one day some city sportsmen 
killed them all. 
"Speaking of swine, the only hogs indigenous to the 
mountains have bristles down their backs and travel on 
four cloven hoofs; but as for the city, it has a super- 
abundance of two-legged things filled with the hog-spirit. 
"All sounds are musical in the woods save the crack of 
a rifle. There is nothing more terrible than case-hardened 
Pavement-Civilization with a gun. It is not the settlers 
(many of whom do not kill one deer apiece per year), but 
the kid-gloA^e type of hunter from the city who slaughter 
remorselessly, and sweep the California hills clear of 
every form of wild life. 
"They are as senselessly destructive as the ravening 
kangaroo rats which carry off my spoons and pencils — ob- 
jects entirely useless to them. They are the pickpockets 
of nature, nor have they the excuse of the wild justice 
of revenge, or the necessity of self-protection. Ancestral 
blindness wraps them up. They wear beards and eye- 
glasses, but morally and spiritually these profaners of 
nature are babes and sucklings. 
"To remonstrate with such sportsmen is like feeding 
meat to a horse. Had they other eyes than those of 
corded fat and gristle they might get a far greater pleasure 
out of hunting the wild creatures of the wood with a 
camera ; and they would find it would require greater 
patience, knowledge and acumen in stillhunting thus than 
in making the ground wet with the blood of fawns and 
orioles. 
"Yet year after j'ear these cultivated victims of the con- 
tinuous calamity of bloodthirstiness are permitted to roam 
the woods and mountains, blind to all the real beauty 
about them, forever gripping a long-range gun and grop- 
ing about, like the puma or the giant in the nursery tale, 
with his 'Fee-fo-fum,' smelling blood and prey. At this 
rate it is only a question of a few years when there will 
be left in California neither game nor songsters larger 
than the cicada. 
"May the gods endow such Goths and Huns of the 
fields with a conscience, equal, at least, to that of the 
wolf, which kills only what it needs !" 
Aficnt all of the foregoing, here is an item showing 
to what depths of depravity or cussedness the human 
animal may sometimes descend to get the best of a harm- 
less little creature : 
"A so-called hunter, but one who is a disgrace to the 
name, set fire to a tree on the August Guilliauriie ranch, 
near Indian Springs, Friday, in an attempt to bring down 
a squirrel. Only timely help prevented another disastrous 
forest fire, as the fellow walked off, leaving the flames to 
spread where they might." 
That happened near Grass Valley, almost on the very 
site where the sportsmen of Eastern California hold their 
annual celebrated "camp stews." Needless to say the 
affair has caused loud expressions of indignation. 
Wm. Fitzmuggins. 
San Francisco, August, 1803. 
Our Feathered Game. 
Under this title Mr. Dwight W. Huntington has 
published a most interesting and useful volume of over 
400 pages devoted to bird shooting, and illustrated in 
a copious "and beautiful manner. These illustrations 
consist of eight full-page shooting scenes in colors, 
which are distributed through the book, and of twenty- 
nine full-page plates of photographs of mounted birds 
which we shoot, the number of figures being no less 
than 135, and including everything from the wild 
turkey and swan down to the least sandpiper and the 
bobolink. The specimens are well mounted, and the 
photographs for the most part exceedingly good, and 
enable the reader to identify each species beyond a 
pcradventurc. 
The colored -shooting scenes cover a variety of 
forms of sport — partridge, grouse, woodcock, snipe 
and various forms of duck shooting. All are interest- 
ing, and show much familiarity with the use of a gun 
in a great variety of situations. 
Mr. Huntington is a sportsman of long experience. 
His memory goes back to the days when game \yas 
far more abundant than it is at present, and having 
seen the extraordinary decrease in the number of our 
birds, he has very clear ideas of what should be done 
to preserve what we have left, or even to increase it. 
Mr. Huntington's work is introduced by three chap- 
ters which have to do with the present conditions of 
things, so far as the numbers of our birds are con- 
cerned, with guns and dogs and with game 
clubs, parks and preserves. He believes thor- 
oughly in the establishment of National and 
State parks, wherever these can be set aside, and 
feels there should be refuges for game in the north 
and south alike. He says, "There should be parks. 
State and National, in Minnesota, North Dakota and 
Montana, to include small lakes and ponds, where the 
wild fowl still build their nests and where the north- 
ern grouse, the sharp-tailed and the great sagecock 
could be safe from persecution. There should be parks 
of refuge for the swans, geese and ducks adjacent to 
the Gulf of Mexico, where these birds might safely 
pass the winter. . 
"The wild fowl which now nest m these Northern 
States, in a very few years will be found there no more. 
The Southern refuge is equally important. The 
slaughter, not alone in our marshes, but on the 
haciendas of Mexico as well, is something beyond 
belief. Many of the ducks which go to winter to the 
armadas of Mexico, to seek the peace and quiet which 
precedes the slaughter, are driven from our Southern 
marshes by continued persecution." 
Louisiana, Oregon, Washington, I^ortherti and 
Southern California, Maine, the sounds of North Car- 
olina and the everglades of Florida, are all places 
where such refuges should be established. Mr. Hunt- 
ington believes that the bag should be limited, as in 
fact is now done for many States; but it should also 
be limited for clubs alnd private associations. 
Writing of a grouse preserve for the sharptail grouse, 
Mr. Huntington says he can imagine no better territory 
for this than the country from Minnesota and the valley 
of the Red River of the North, to eastern Oregon and 
Washington. "The vast number of small lakes and 
ponds, and the little streams and sloughs overgrown 
with reeds and rushes and wild rice, are .full of the best 
ducks that fly, both the sea ducks, such as the canvas- 
backs and redheads, and the shoal water mallards, teal, 
wood duck, and all the river ducks or dabblers. Many 
remain in North Dakota to build their nests, and when 
chicken shooting I have often seen a pond full of young 
mallards and teal, and once made a double shot, killing 
a duck and a chicken, a large mallard and a swift-flying 
sharptail. The sharptail grouse is very similar in its 
habits to the prairie grouse. It struts and scratches 
and fights in the spring; many performing at a time 
on the scratching places, and as the birds bow and slip 
past each other with their tails up they present an 
amusing appearance, which has been compared to the 
dancing of a minuet." 
The volume is divided into books, the first of which 
include the Gallinaceous Birds; the second the Wild- 
fowl; the third the Shore Birds or Waders, and the 
fourth, the Cranes, Rails, Reed Birds and Pigeons. 
To the different groups chapters are given, the length 
varying according to the importance of the subject. 
Something is told in each of the life history of the 
species, of its distribution, and the time when it may 
be shot. Thus, to the wild turkey and the imported 
pheasant, brief chapters are given, and much longer 
ones to the various grouse, beginning with the different 
prairie species, then treating of the ruffed grouse, 
dusky grouse and spruce grouse, and lastly of the ptar- 
migan, which really hardly falls under the observation 
of any sportsman. 
America is well recognized as the land of the par- 
tridges, which have their greatest development in the 
Southwest, while the sportsmen in the Northeast know 
only of the Bob White, often called the typical game 
bird of America. Mr. Huntington enumerates and de- 
scribes the chief species of these birds and the method 
of hunting them. 
_ Swans, wild geese and ducks, divided into sea ducks, 
river ducks and mergansers, occupy 100 pages of the 
volume, and something is said about the pursuit of 
each. The author has much to say about the danger of 
shooting behind wildfowl, and gives numerous ex- 
amples drawn from his own experience to reinforce 
his advice. This, in fact, is one of the charms of the 
volume; that it is full of bits of personal experience, 
which are both interesting and useful. 
The Shore Birds form a long list, and while much 
space is given to the pursuit of woodcock and snipe, 
the shooting of the smaller beach birds is less full. 
The last division has something to say about mis- 
cellaneous birds, and this is followed by an Appendix, 
giving the names and descriptions of the 135 species 
figured in the plates of the volumes. These descrip- 
tions are taken from standard works, and are entirely 
reliable. 
Mr. Huntington's volume contains much natural his- 
tory, and above all much information useful to the 
gunner, young or old. It is quite the best book on 
general bird shooting that we have seen for a long 
time. 
The Maine License. 
A. B. F. Kinney, of Worcester, Mass., has partially 
planned a short hunting trip to Newfoundland for the 
last of the month, Mr. Kinney going in quest of cari- 
bou and moose in preference to deer, of which he has 
already killed a large number upon his previous nu- 
merous trips into the great game regions. 
Mr. Kinney voices the sentiments of practically all 
the Worcester sportsmen when he says that a com- 
paratively small portion of New England hunters out- 
side of Maine men will hunt the Maine woods the com- 
ing season. "In an average year," said Mr. Kinney 
to a Worcester Telegram reporter yesterday afternoon, 
"about $3,000,000 is carried into Maine and left there 
by visiting sportsmen. About $r,ooo,ooo of that amount 
comes from the fishermen, and the rest from those who 
are in quest of deer and moose. I venture the asser- 
tion that less than three-quarters of a million will be 
left there this fall and winter by the hunters of big 
game. The greater part of this loss falls directly upon 
the guides and the stores where supplies and hunts- 
men's articles ,are sold. 
"I hear the 'same story on all sides. Sportsmen arc 
going to give Maine a wide berth this fall, and hunt 
in Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and the Provinces in- 
stead. I have usually gone into Maine, but have no 
thought of troubling them there this year. I wouldn't 
be willing to 'baby' them enough to pay the license 
fee, which the State Legislature there saw fi't to adopt 
at its last session in the very teeth of all kinds of oppo- 
sition, not only from sportsmen outside of the State, 
but from guides and keepers of supplies who were 
themselves citizens of Maine. Think of the number of 
Worcester county men that spend a week or two, and 
in some cases a longer time, every fall in the Maine 
woods, spending their money and having a good time. 
From what people tell me, not more than one man in 
four of the old guard is going to hunt Maine^ preferring 
to keep on to the Provinces." 
Labor Day Rail Shooting. 
Stratford, Conn., September 7.— Editor Forest and 
Stream : Hitherto the rail shooting on the Housatonic 
River has not been good. The birds killed are neither 
numerous nor in good condition, so far as I can learn. 
The best of the early bags was 23, and later there was 
one of 26. For the rest, most of the shooters got two, 
three, four six, and so on. A few reed birds are in 
the marshes, but they are protected by law and 1 
are not 0Benl:f si^t^t At the same tirpe, a day or twq 
