Sept. ig, 1903.! 
fishing. They are genuine Green Mountain boys of 
fhe sort that followed Ethan Allen, each worth half 
a dozen of our softer valley folk. They are lathy and 
wiry, made of such rock-hardened stuff as was Ger- 
sliani Beach, who on foot made the rounds of the scat- 
tered settlers, sixty miles in a day, to rally the men 
for Ticonderoga. They hardly wait to get themselves 
steady on their feet or more steadily seated on the 
rocks, before they ask if 1 have caught any pickerel! 
Of all fish that swim, these mountain men, past whose 
door stones trout dart, covet most this gaunt, hungry 
and slimy fresh water shark. 
From fishing talk we presently get to hunting talk, 
and it turns out that the captain of the crew is a bear 
trapper when he is not tending a sawmill, for up in the 
mountains there are yet logs to saw as well as bears 
to trap. In the lowlands logs worthy the name will 
soon be as scarce as bears. 
The captain shot a wolf a few summers ago, and has 
trapped many bears, but never shot a free one. This 
lie greatly desires to do, for he says: 
"it don't somehow seem noways lair nor no satisfac- 
tion to shoot a bear in a trap." He once heard his dog 
barking all day, but paid little attention to it, as he 
supposed it had only a hedge hog treed, but found out 
next day what an opportunity he had lost, when, going 
that way, he saw in the mellow soil the tracks of a 
bear, and once he snapped two ineffectual caps at a bear 
running through a berry lot. To-day he is intent on 
pickerel, and 1 fancy he would exult more in the cap- 
ture of a lo-pounder than he would in the trapping of 
a big bear. 
i once knew a hunter of the Adirondacks who had 
iiad an adventure in a bear's den that put in the shade 
General Putnam's killing of the wolf, who wished for 
Lhrcc things to satisfy his ambition as a hunter— to 
kill a pantlier, a moose and a wild goose! More than 
once he had seen the track of his moose, made only, 
the night before; for two days he had followed two 
panthers, twice getting sight of them, just too far ofif 
lor a shot; and once the wild geese had their harrow 
wrecked in a snowstorm within gunshot of him, but, 
alas! his gun was at home, further from him than the 
geese were. 
Our captain's crew, younger than he and unused 
to the hardships of hard-water drinking, cannot stom- 
ach the water of the lake, good enough for us, but 
so unlike their crystal wine of the hills, pressed from 
perennial snow banks. So they propose going over to 
the mainland for cider, for the apple and its juice is in 
favor with highlander and lowlander. When they are 
fairly oft and headed under my direction for the nearest 
cider mill, I take the captain into my boat and go 
trolling about the island shore, he holding the line. 
Presently the glittering spoon flashes past the harbor 
of a pickerel, and Longface, the Pirate, dashes out of 
his weedy port to capture it, The captain's arm is 
suddenly jerked out full length, and his fingers sharply 
cut by the line, which is wound round them. He hauls 
in the twenty yards of it in frantic haste, making many 
a misgrab and getting more excited. Til warrant, than 
he ever was with any but his first bear. At last, by 
taain strength and good luck, he gets his prize aboard, 
a 5-pounder, and is jubilant over it. He "hefts" his 
fish and caresses it and swears by a wood god of the 
'hills, "By gum, he's a lounder!" and asks with little 
doubt of an affirmative answer, "Now 'tain't often you 
git a better one, is it?" 
Seeing that pickerel can make a man so happy, I 
shed my prejudices and wish the tribe may increase. 
,Luck now forsakes us, and after some unprofitable 
fishing we go ashore, and the captain tells me of some 
of his familiars — as strange animals to me, a dweller 
in the lake region, as bisons and bighorns — the "saple" 
or pine marten, and his big cousin, the black cat or 
Pennant's marten. The last, he thinks, lives to a 
considerable age, judging so from the great difference 
in the age of individuals and from the largest ones be- 
ing grizzled about the head. In hunting them, the 
ihunter must go -slowly on the track, to tree them. 
If hurried, they will whip almost anj' dog. They are 
as easy to catch in a steel trap as a skunk or a wood- 
chuck. The best bait for them is roasted hog's liver. 
The fisher ts very tenacious of life. The captain and a 
comrade fired six charges into one without any ap- 
parent effect. At last, the captain found two buckshot 
in his pouch, which brought the fisher down. After 
being so peppered with small shot and brought to 
unconditional surrender with the two buckshot, and 
then carried a mile on the back of his captor, he re- 
mved enough to catch hold of a limb and nearly pull 
himself away from his bearer. Then he was pummeled 
with a club till he went over to that class of fishers 
which are now the majority. The small shot were 
found flattened just under the skin. 
With such discourse the captain entertained me till 
the big line boat comes wallowing past in the old path 
of Champlain's canoes, gay with flags and streamers, 
and belching steam and smoke, and sets my story- 
teller agape with wonder and admiration. On his 
waters are no craft but the mill pond scow and the toy 
boats of children. 
A quarter hour later the swells of the steamer come 
m, lashing the rocks with slow beats, and rolling in 
even lines with the bay. Then we see the boat of the 
cider-seekers tossing over them, and presently it comes 
to port and lands its crew and stores. The captain 
welcomes them joyfully, for his clay is dry, and after 
irrigating it with cider, shows them with modest pride 
the monster of the lake which he has caught. They 
wonder at it and admire it as inland people visiting the 
sea coast might a stranded whale, but are sorrowful 
it was not their fortune to bear a part in its capture. 
To my thinking four men over-populate this small 
island, though last summer a party of twenty-one 
campers were crowding and jostling one another upon 
it; so bidding farewell to my friend, the captain, and his 
comrades, I leave them to hold the island, and embark- 
ing, take my way homeward into the mouth of Little 
River of Otters, and up between its green paling of 
rushes. Rowland E. Robinson. 
All communications intended for Forsst and Stkeau should 
•Iways be addressed to the Forest and Stream Publishing Co. 
Htw York, and not to any indiridual connected witk the paper. 
Klamath and Crater Lakes.— L 
The results of our outing last year were so satisfactory 
and fndmmg, especially from a health point of view, 
that 1 decided to take a similar one this season, provided 
I could secure the first great requisite— a congenial com- 
panion. 
Fortune favored me in the person of Mr. Zerah Smith, 
ail old Nevada friend and cattle man, who had closed out 
his interests there and moved down to the bay to enjoy 
hfe. Southern Oregon was selected as the field of opera- 
tions, and on July 15 we took the train for Ager, Siskiyou 
county, and a few hours later we were whirling along by 
tlie great grain fields of the Sacramento. When we awoke 
the next morning Shasta's mighty #butte was towering 
over us, and for hours this glorious peak, hoary with the 
snows of ages, shadowed our pathway, the serpentine 
character of llie road throwing it at times into every 
point of the compass. 
Although sadly disfigured by the ravages of lumber- 
men since the days when the old sportsman Sisson reared 
his humble lodge beneath its lofty pines, its base is still 
beautiful, and the limpid, bawling streams that find their 
sources here still harbor many a lusty trout. How I 
strained my eyes to catch a possible glimpse of old Ran- 
sacker, one of whose later sketches, in which he savad 
his dog from a watery grave, was such a gem in its way 
that it lingered in my memory for weeks. Quite likely 
I should not have recognized him had he been there; but 
I knew just how I thought he ought to look, and the 
sight of him threading the aisles of that silent forest was 
the only thing needful to complete the picture. 
Shortly after 12 M. we reached Ager, the terminus 
of our railroad travel, and a trip of sixty miles with a 
pack horse lay between us and Pelican Bay on upper 
Klamath Lake. We had wisely provided ourselves with 
pack saddle, kiacks, and most of the more important 
necessities of the trip, as the outfitting facilities of the 
town are not great; but from Mr. Ager, son of the 
founder of the place, we secured a fine pack horse, and 
the two stores there were able to supply all that we 
needed in the provision line. Our arrangements were all 
perfected during the afternoon, and' early the next morn- 
ing we took the road, going fourteen miles the first day 
and reaching the Klamath River, a stream we followed 
inost of the way to the Falls. We were now approach- 
ing the Cascade Range. The country grew rougher and 
was but thinly settled, but as there was considerable 
freighting by wagon from Ager to the Klamath Falls— 
formerly called Linkville— we found ranches five or six 
miles apart, where feed for stock and men could be ob- 
tained. We made our first camp on the bank of a 
stream near one of these ranches kept by a Mr. Lennox, 
where we procured milk and butter. 
The elevation was now steadily increasing, and the 
mountain meadows began to appear, especially on the 
banks of the river; but the wonderful floral display, the 
hummingbirds and butterflies that had made such a dis- 
tinguished feature of the Mt. Kaweah region, were lack- 
ing; nor did we find anything Hke it in all that region; 
but the meadows were of extraordinary fertility, and we 
saw crops of timothy and red-top that would easily yield 
three tons to the acre. Every ranch had its orchard, and 
although the yield this season was very light in most 
places, owing to the cold backward spring, the flavor of 
the fruit was much superior to that of the south. 
A six-mile drive the next morning took us to Shovel 
Creek, where we found an extensive sanitary resort, 
with sulphur springs hot enough to boil an egg. Here we 
caught our first trout. We made a stop of four hours in 
the heat of the day, and then went on five miles further 
to a ranch and teamsters' hostelry kept by Mr. Ways, an 
old pioneer and his wife. We were now fairly in the 
mountains; fine cold streams of water and heavy timber 
were all about us. 
Ways proved to be a most entertaining character; and 
during the evening, as we sat enjoying a smoke on his 
cool veranda, he regaled us with many stories of the 
early days of California, going back to '49. He had been 
present at the hanging of the seven desperadoes in 
Placerville that gave that mining camp its primitive name 
of "Hangtown;" had seen Joaquin Murietta, "Three- 
Fingered Jack," and several other rather celebrated gen- 
tkmen of the road, and he had an inexhaustible supply of 
bear stories, and was so thoroughly versed in the details 
of those stirring times that it was 11 o'clock before we 
sought our blankets. Add to this the fact that his wife 
was one of the best cooks we met, and that the natural 
attractions of the place were very great, and all com- 
bined made this one of the most pleasant memories of the 
trip. 
Before noon the next day we reached a station called 
Topsey, the highest point on the road between Ager and 
the Falls, with an altitude not far from 6,000 feet. The 
forest here was very heavy, and soon after crossing the 
divide we began to find deer tracks in the road with 
abundant evidence of rattlesnakes. In one place six of 
these reptiles had crossed the road within a space of fifty 
feet. We were now in Oregon; off to our left and 2,000 
feet below us the rapid Klamath, here about seventy-five 
yards wide and ten to twenty feet deep, was coursing its 
way to the sea. It is not a clear stream, the immense 
growth of tule around the lake at the source has colored 
the waters until they look like turbid absinthe. 
The next night we passed at Chase's ranch, sixteen 
miles from Ways; and the following day we crossed an- 
01 her timbered ranch at the eastern base of which we 
found a hamlet consisting of two general stores, as many 
saloons, a blacksmith shop and a few dwellings, that re- 
joiced in the name of Keno. Here we crossed the Kla- 
math on a substantial bridge. The valley now widened 
to three or four miles, stretching northeast as far as the 
eye could reach. On both sides near the river it was 
a tule marsh, but the borders were fine meadows, where 
many mowing machines were at work, although the yield 
per acre was not more than half as great as in the smaller 
mountain meadows. We reached Klamath Falls, twelve 
miles from Keno, early that afternoon. 
This queer little town of about 2,000 inhabitants has 
some peculiar features that merit special mention. It con- 
sists chiefly of one business street, which extends for nearly 
a mile down the river, which at this point is the 
habitat of incredible numbers of garter snakes, many 
thousands of which can be seen in a few minutes' walk 
along its banks on any bright summer day congregated in 
horrid squirming masses that would have adorned 
Dante's Inferno," or furnished John B. Gough with a 
temperance lecture that would have thrown his audience 
into hysterics. Even on the main street they can be seen, 
crawling about in the yards and on the sidewalk, regarded 
With equal indifference by the women and barefooted 
children, Strange to say the people pride themselves 
upon this phenomenon, saying that they kill mosquitoes- 
and rattlesnakes, A night's stay at one of the hotels 
made me rather skeptical as to the mosquito part of the 
proposition, but it is said to be a faci that no rattlesnakes 
are found in that vicinity, although the} are abundant in 
every other part of the country. 
Soon after the sun went down myriads of little black 
toads came swarming out upon the sidewalks, which were 
soon highly decorated with large splashes where the 
bactrachians had been crushed beneath the feet of the 
pedestrians. Great white pelicans floated fearlessly like 
tame swans upon the water within shotgun range of the 
bridge, and ospreys, eagles, Canada geese, ducks, shags, 
etc., were continually passing overhead between the 
J.akes. Ihe front portion of a broken shell had jammed 
so firmly m my rifle at Topsy that I could not dislodge it; 
but I found neither gunsmith nor locksmith at the Falls, 
and had to resort to a blacksmith shop, where, by the 
aid of a bent file shank, it was finally removed. The 
town seemed quite prosperous, and at the store of Mr. 
Isaac Duffy, where we laid in a few supplies, we found 
the prices very reasonable, and the goods of a good 
quality, but the postoffice and many of the stores close 
an hour at noon and at night for meals. 
Our destination was the ranch of the Griffith Brothers, 
at the north end oi the lake. They have a large scow 
steamer that makes occasional trips to the Falls, but as 
we could not learn when it would arrive, we decided to 
go there by land. The distance was about thirty miles 
by either route, and I started with the pack horse at 
5 .■30 the next morning, Z. remaining behind to come with 
a saddle horse, as he was getting footsore. 
There is not much timber in the immediate vicinity of 
the Falls, but about five miles out I ascended a w^ 11 
wooded range and went down into a valley on the other 
side which was about four miles long by one wide. It 
was a charming place to look at surrounded by the tim- 
bered hills and dotted with grazing stock; but as I went 
through it I found a number of deserted cabins, which 
indicated that its resources were less than had been ex- 
pected by the settlers. Indeed, Klamath did not seem to 
me to be a very prosperous section outside of the Falls 
and the mam lines of traffic^, and travel; its elevation and 
latitude made late springS|. and summer frosts common. 
Its resources were confineil to lumber, hay, and stock 
raising; and squaw men were more numerous than I had 
seen elsewhere. In some cases the deserted cabins had 
belonged to logging camps ; in others they were the acces- 
sories of fraudulent timber entries, but there were those 
which gave pitiful evidence of the failure of some poor 
settler to establish a home. Little gardens inclosed in 
neat picket fences, milk and chicken houses all falling 
into decay and left to mice and squirrels, told the story of 
wasted years. 
At the upper end of the valley swarms of grasshoppers 
about the size of the Kansas variety, but of a light yellow 
color, had devoured everything but the sage, and were so 
numerous that they changed the color of the soil; and 
the grasshoppers in turn were being devoured by hun- 
dreds of sparrow hawks. 
Again I ascended into the shaded hills and hour after 
hour pursued my lonely way through forests of spruce, 
fir and tamarack. I had left without breakfast, before . 
many of the easy going dwellers at the Falls were astir, 
expecting to eat at some wayside house or to stop and 
prepare my meal by the water ; but I found neither occu- 
pied house, water, or grass until 2 o'clock, when I reached 
the banks of Reck Creek, twenty-five miles from the 
Falls. Here 1 found all the requisites for a camp, but it 
was still early in the day, and I pushed on several miles 
further, only to ict;:rn and unpack for the night beneath 
the great trees that sinded its rocky bed. 
I did not hurry the \u \t morning, as I knew I had not 
far to go, and by to o'clock I reached the ranch of the 
Griffith Brothers, only about three hours ahead of Z., 
who came through on horseback that day. 
As I neared the lake the road passed through thickets 
of young Cottonwood, and in one of these a full grown 
ruffed grouse arose h'kc a rocket at my feet and went 
sailing away over the tops of the trees. It was the first 
I had seen in thirty years, and my heart warmed within 
me at the memories of youth that flooded my breast at 
the sight and sound of this splendid bird. 
We were now at our destination, and a brief descrip- 
tion of our surroundings will be in order. The lake is 
about twelve by thirty miles in area, most of it is from 
ten to twenty feet in depth, the deepest place being about 
160 feet; it has an altitude of 4,800 feet. Around it, 
especially on the north and east, are immense tule 
marshes of many thousands of acres, intersected by 
lagoons, making of it a breeding place for water fowl that 
can hardy be surpassed by the Great Slave Lake of the 
north, and giving its waters the peculiar color noticed in 
the river. There are two prominent islands in the lake, 
each having an area of over 100,000 acres; both had 
families on them a few years ago, but now have only a 
few horses that live there the year round. 
The Griffith ranch, "The Poplars," is located on a 
lagoon that enters the lake half a mile away; this lagoon, 
which is about seventy-five feet wide by eight in depth! 
is formed wholly by springs, and in its upper reaches i? 
perfectly clear and very cold. Half way down on its 
western bank is a clump of large pine trees in which 
there is an immense spring; this grove was for many years 
the summer resort of ex-Gov. Budd, of California, and is 
known as "Budd's Grove." It is an ideal camping spot. 
The scow steamer spoken of was moored to the bank 
close to the house when we arrived. It is about 70 by 14 
feet, with a stern wheel propelled by a threshing machine 
engine and boiler. We were told that next year a new 
boat was to be put on that would make regular weeklv 
trips to the Falls. 
The afternoon was spent in pitching our tent and in 
aranging matters for a two weeks' stay. There were 
six or eight other campers there, and in September there 
