Oct. 3, igo3.i 
FOflESt ANb STREAM. 
26^ 
I laving always "saved" it from being uprooted and 
burned. It was riot "in the way" of the plow or scythe, 
the cradle of the wheat gatherer, or the wagon of the 
highways. Not one in ten thousand of the men who 
passed it within a few feet ever even noticed it. Yet it 
was the stump of. a tree felled by the Indians before the 
year 1800, and long before the State was "thrown open" 
for settlement. The man who "took up" that Government 
land and found the stump there in 1834, was told by a 
Wyandotte Indian that the tree whose rotting body the 
settler was cutting into logs to place in the heAp and 
burn as the land was cleared, had once been a noble "bee- 
iree;" and the Indian said, "Got much honey 1" 
Some traces of that stump must be there yet. The 
penholder used in writing this article here in New York 
city was made from a fragment chopped from the root 
cif that stump twenty years ago. Yet,. I repeat, not five 
men of the hundreds of thousands who passed it, knew or 
cared for its history. People were too busy and full of 
planning for the immediate future, to waste time about 
the past. So the stump was only prized by the boys at 
the district school twenty rods west of the cross roads; 
for it was large and hollow, furnishing a good hi'ding 
place while they played "high-spy;" and it was also at- 
tractive to them because around its roots, were "danger- 
ous" bumblebee nests; arid because a sturdy and often 
i-aided patch of daisies flourished around it, as if the very 
flowers came there to do honor to the neglected, decaying 
base of what had been a great monarch of the Michigan 
woods. L.F.Brown. 
A Day in Nebraska. 
With each passing hour now, in these early October 
driy^, come multiplying evidences of summer's decay and- 
ihe advance of the wintry season. We have already had 
a number of hard frosts, and the aspect of things gen- 
erally is such as to justify the belief in an early closing in 
of Old Crimp and his hoary hosts. The wildfowl have 
already arrived in goodly numbers, not only woodduck-s, 
spoonbill, and teal, but mallards, canvasback, redhead, 
widgeon, and pintail, and from this on to the freeze-up 
the sport will be fast and furious. The jacksnipe shoot- 
ing has not been so fine, with the exception of last spring, 
for a good many years, and a few hours' gunning, on al- 
most any of the nearby low lands is "the assurance of a 
good bag of this morccau of all feathered game.' The ' 
geese are flying, too, and only last night, while strolling ■ 
out Farman street, that familiar old cry, Aich-imk! auh- 
tmk! came floating down from high up in the steely sky, 
and looking up I saw a long line of Canadas south. ' 
There v/ere about .sixty of them, as nearly as I could 
make out, and, their extreme height made it evident that ■ 
they had come from a far distant land. The sight thrilled 
me just as if it was the first line of geese I had ever 
seen. Why is it that the honk of this long, white- 
collared raucous throat always stirs our blood so? Does 
it arouse the savagery that still Hes dormant in most of 
us? John Buroughs once said: "I hurry out of doors 
when I hear the clarion of the wild gander; his comrade 
in my heart sends back the call." 
So at last the sportsman's gala time has arrived. The 
numerous canvas-clad rubber-booted men who are to be 
seen on every outgoing and incoming train would alone 
be sufficient proof of this. But I have it stronger still, 
for I was out myself Saturday and Sunday, and had one 
of the greatest shoots on bluewing teal that ever fell my 
way before. Together with Charles L. Thomas, I was . 
the guest of Henry and Jake Carson — direct descendants 
from old Kit — out at Fairmont, and to detail the trip 
would be to tax severely the credulity of the average 
reader. Two hundred bluewings in two days and we 
could have made it five hundred. 
Without a doubt this is the greatest fall for bluewing 
teal ever known in this sectixjn of the coimtry, and every 
ducking ground in the State has fairly swarmed with 
them. Nothing like their plentifulness, the oldest and 
most experienced gunners say, has been known here since 
the earliest settlement of the State, and were it within 
the scope of law and conscience 100 a day to a single gun 
would be anything but an extraordinary exploit. 
Anas discors, as he is known to the wise men, is a royal 
little fellow wherever -found, and with us here, as I re- 
marked in a previous article in Forest and Stream, he 
is the avant courier of all his kind that come down to us 
in the hazy fall days from (he breeding coverts in the 
British Columbias. At the same time there are more 
teal that breed in this latitude than any. others of the 
wildfowl tribe, and joined in mid-September by the birds 
from the north, the local contingent early makes a re- 
markable showing. Blue-wing^ teal invariably make their 
first appearance here in any considerable numbers along 
in the latter part of August,' and by the iniddlg of Sep- 
tember are here in their greatest numbers. They gather, 
in thousands and thousands along the shores of our 
marshy prairie lakes, where they sit in the mud, huddled 
close together, baslcing for hours in the warm sunshine. 
They fly swiftly, and wlien they alight drop down, sud- 
denly, like the jacksnipe,, among the tules or on the mud. . 
They subsist chiefly on vegetable food and are gluttonish 
in their greed for the seeds of the pink smar,t weed, rice 
and reeds. Their flesh is matchless, ■and even the 
northern birds, after a few days upon any of Nebraska's 
favorable grounds, are as fat as butter. After a 
repetition of several hard frosts, such as we have been 
having lately, they get up in a body and hurry south- 
ward, being an extremely delicate bird and as susceptible 
.to cold, almost, as the upland plover. The green-wing 
teal are often found with the blue-wings, but it is gener- 
ally in small numbers, as they are an entirely different 
bird. On Sunday last the ten or a dozen shooters who 
were on the ponds near Fairmont, out of the several hun- 
dred birds killed, there were not more than fifteen or 
twenty green-wings. The fact that so many bird? of ap- 
parently the same family differ so widely in their habits, 
their feed, flight, breeding and character of their cries is 
always a rich subject for speculation, and the observant 
sportsman is always making his notes and comments. 
The education of the forest and ,the . stream is a grnnd 
one, and it is only the true sportsmen who graduate fr«m 
this, Nature's school. Take the several kinds of plover 
and waders, for instance, the snipe, dowitchers, 
phalaropes, killdeers, gray and red-breasted sandpipers, 
no two. have the same range, the same habits, flight or 
cry. With the teal it is the same. The green-wing is a 
decided polaric individual, while the blue-wing thrives 
better in the tropics, and while very similar to the casual 
observer, they are distinctly different in structural con- 
formation, in the markings of their plumage, in diet and 
habitat. While the blue-wing is the first bird down from 
the north in the autumn and the last up in the vernal 
season, it is precisely the apposite with the green-wing. 
He comes down in the fall with t;he main issue fif the 
hardier sort, the canvasback, redhead, merganser and 
bluebill, and up in the spring with the sprig in the boister- 
ous weather of early March, amid sleet and snow and 
cold and rain. The: blue-wing is a delicate, vulnerable 
little creature and easily killed or knocked down, while' 
the green-wing is hard as rubber, tenacious to life, and 
most difficult to stop, and, if but wing-tipped, might as 
well be given up as lo.st. ■ - ■ 
Along from the middle of September up to the present 
time, the blue-wing out here affords the best and easiest 
kind of shooting, especially the young birds, which lack 
almost wholly the" cunning and wariness of the old birds, 
and offer ready prey to even the half concealed gunner. 
Like the jacksnipe, in most instances, a single No. 7 or 
8 pellet is all that is necessary to drop them out of the 
air, and once down they quickly give up and are com- 
paratively easy to retrieve. They are full of play, and 
love to gambol and cavort in the low shallow waters or 
in the open, until long in the morning, leaving for the 
feeding fields along between g and il o'clock, and return- 
ing to the ponds and marshes from 3 until the sunken 
sun crimsons deeply the western skies. 
The morning in question dawned gray and threatening, 
and along about 7 o'clock the rain began to fall by the 
bucketful, and. continued until 9 . o'clock, when, with 
Henry and Jake Carson, Thomas and I pulled out from 
the hotel for the sunken meadows north of the town. 
The heavens were ragged with flying scud, and the prosr, 
pects for more rain were good, indeed, but good fortune 
was with us, and we did not get it. 
I must confess I was exceedingly dubious about finding 
any duck shooting in. that magnificent agricultural region, 
with its handsome modern homes, big red barns,. its limit- 
less fields of gigantic corn, wheat stubble, alfalfa and 
clover .fields, and, much to the amusement of the Carsons, • 
1 animadverted eloquently upon the veracity of some peo- 
ple when telegraphing their city cousins about the enor- 
mous duck shooting they were having in the count-t-y. 
We had traveled a couple of miles or so and were 
bowling along the sloping highway, between two broad 
catalpa-bordered pasture fields, bound for the Ayleshire 
Pond, when my attention was engrossed with the, hun- 
dreds of turtle doves that were constantly in sight. 'I'hey 
were feeding: all over the closely cropped fields, darting- 
through the humid air on whistling wings, and perched in 
rows along the board fences, drying their feathers and 
preening themselves after the downpour, and the exhibi- 
tion was entirely too laiuch for my sensitive nerves. T had 
little hope of ,any duck shopting, as I said before. We 
hadn't seen a feather in the air, and being well posted 
as. to the savory qualities of the broiled turtle dove, and 
being determined to bag a mess of some kind of game 
before going home, I urged Henry to pull up and allow 
us to take a crack at them, remarking at the same time 
that their blue-winged teal were in all probability the 
creatures of an'overzealous brain. 
"We'll find the blue-wings thicker than you ever saw 
blackbirds," indifferently ventured Henry, but, ever 
obliging, he turned into the fence and brought the team 
to a halt, and tossing the lines to' Jake, he and I g;ot out, 
cHmbed over the fence, and began hostilities on the' doves, 
while the Avagbn followed us slowly down the road. 
We had almost reached the end of the field, which 
butted into one of those oceans of standing coth so 
plentiful in Nebraska, and were plodding up over a con- 
siderable of a knoll, when a cloud of birds, with, out- 
stretched necks and vvhizzing wings, came bursting out of 
snace into our very faces. I was so startled that I did 
not recognize those glancing drab shapes, when crack 
.v/ent the first barrel of Henry's Parker, and crack went 
tlie second, and as five azure-winged birds came tumbling 
and gyrating down into the drying clover and blue grass 
stubble, 1 saw • that they were teal, and, as with the 
velocity of a fleeting 'shadow, they swept over the corn's 
whispering tassels, I banged away— both barrels^ — at their 
vanishing shapes. Not a' single cerulean wisp, not a single 
drab feather, responded to my frenzied shots, and you can 
imagine- my chagrin as I picked up a couple of Henry's 
birds,"-looked at them critically, then g-azed off wistfully 
over -the 'waving corn in the directioii the ' flodk had 
flgd in.' 'die hope that they would return. But rhey did. 
not, a'hd picking up the rem-iining three birds I carried 
them^ by their pale yellow legs oiit of the pasture and up 
lo the iwagon wirnout uttering a sin.41e monosyllable. 
'■'What do they call thai disease that always catches 
those green hunters, Jake?" inquired Thomas, as I 
handed him Henry's birds, and climbed up into the seat 
beside' -him. "Oh, yes, the buck fever — that's it. But no 
fever will ever feaze Sandy. You'll have to u.sc an ax 
ic do that. 'However, that was a corking good shot you 
made. Gris. What! you didn't shoot? Well, what are 
you doing with these birds then?" ' • ' 
I wa-s impregnable to Thomas' 'facetious assault, but 
there is- no telling what a burst of oratory he might have 
evoked had we iiot, at this moment, reached the top of a 
slight rise in' the roa-d that gave us a birdseye view of a 
grand expanse of that lovely rcountry. 
"Look there!" 
And Henry pulled the team to a standstill, and, rising 
to his feet," pointed off to the northeast with his whip, 
and together we all caught sight of thousands — millions, 
it seemed — of flying birds. ' What were they? Why, blue- 
wing teal, to be sure ! In great rising and falling flocks, 
one after another, again, again, and again they came, 
until that portion of the heavens was fairly darkened by 
them; They seemed to come up out of the eastern hori- 
zon, and were following each other in one long, ragged, 
irregular stream over the flowing, fields, diagonally .with 
the road we were upon, toward the northwest 
"They are making for the upper pond, Jake," remarked 
Henry,, and plumping into his seat he chirruped to the 
horses and away we dashed. 
The blackish scud had almost vanished, and blue 
patches— li.ke your sweetheart's eyes — were opening in the 
sombre firmament, and it was. not long ere the full lustre 
of the autumn sun was bathing the world m a flood of 
gold. 
And the blue^^wing teal Still they rose and fell, like 
the billows of some angry sea, flock after flock, bunch 
after bunch, line after line, all curving in one direction, 
all on the same errand bent. We soon reached a point 
where we could see them circling round and round over 
a low, basin-like excavation in the universal green, and 
then in sweeping curves settled down with drooping feet 
and cupped wings, and disappear. 
A mile further on Henry swerved to the side of the 
road and with a "Git out boys," tied the horses to the 
trunk of a weeping catalpa and otherwise indicated that 
we had reached the end of our wagon journey. 
"Sandy and I will cut across this wheat field here fqr 
the lower pond, and Jake, you and Charlie do likewise 
for Ayleshire's. Now, don't be in a hurry. We've got 
plenty of time. Take all the shells you can carry, and be 
careful. In twenty minutes, Mr, Griswold," turning to 
me, "we will be among them, and I think vou will have 
the laugh on Mr. Thomas before we get through." 
And I surely had. 
By the time we had crossed the big wet field aritl 
reached an elevated point that commanded a view of the 
lower pond, the scene was one of the most exhilarating 
I had ever gazed upon. 
The thin mists had quite lifted from the little valley, 
and the sun, shedding his bright rays from amid silvery 
fragments of floating vapor, sprinkling corn, grass, reed. 
Aveed and water as with golden rain; setting the myriads 
of twittering blackbirds, yellow-hooded and scarlet 
winged, in delightful motion, while from the little smart- 
weed covered morass came the muffled sound of countless 
thousands of feeding teal. The picture was one well cal- 
culated to enthrall the sportsman for the year the first 
tiine out, and I pulled Iknry back by the sleeve of his 
shooting wammus until, in exquisite rapture, T had drunk 
it in over and over and over again. 
On the other side of the gentle vale there was a grand 
sweep of waving corn, brown stubble, and broken ground, 
now laved in alternate lines of dim gray and topaz, swell 
ing up and back from the very verge of the tule-lined and 
shimmering water. Across the heavens still floated 
rnasses of fleecy vapor, fiery-edged, and dropping their 
lights and shades over the corn, the yellow stubble and 
the blue bosom of the pond, like the play of color on vel- 
vet, while all about October unfurled her flaming ban 
ncrs. A playful breeze came sailing through the tall, 
tawny grass from the south, and, brushing by us, pounced 
upon the open stretches of water, between which the birds 
were working like writhing vermin, streaking the sur- 
face into ripples, fanning the cattails with its delicate 
wings and then melting away in the distant cornfields. 
Sandv Griswold. 
Omaha. 
A 'Summer Shower. 
What matter if you have a day's fishing on Croton 
Point Reef spoiled by a thunder shower? There are 
other days for fishing, plenty of them; so this time, in- 
stead of stowing away your tackle and making posthaste 
for home two miles distant, in a vain attempt to distance 
the storm, you pull your boat well up on the beach and 
take a comfortable position on the bluff overlooking 
Haverstraw Bay. You are here to analyze this storm, to 
.=tudy its moods. You have heretofore viewed them with 
feelings akin to fear, not fear of physical harm that might 
result, but with indescribable mental forebodings. 
Enough. Attention ! The play is on. 
The air becomes still and sultry. The 'sun, which has 
been shining all day with intense brilliancy from a cloud- 
less sky, becomes slightly obscured by a damp mist which 
cannot be seen, but nevertheless is a tangible reality. The 
sun's disk, which but a few moments ago could not have; 
been seen, owing to the intense glare of the radiated light, 
is now shorn of its power, and, like a drouth-moon, can 
be gazed at with impunity. 
The air is surcharged with electricity, the fact of which 
has been apparent since the mist-softening of the sun, 
which, as it thickens, can only be likened to heat con- 
verted directly into electricity — electricity which smothers 
and depresses. Banks of clouds — thunder heads black at 
the base and capped with white, like gigantic cotton- 
balls, begin to steal up from the western horizon — faith- 
ful ' sentinels of the heavens which have done service 
since the world began. 
Up and up they steal till the orb of day, no longer 
glorious, succumbs to their obscuring density. Then, 
from the apex of the crown of vapor, in seeming response 
to the lurid sheets of lightning which intermittently flash 
from the center of the purply blackness of the mass — 
fleecy scudding clouds, like warriors of old on white 
chargers, dart out from the ranks of their massed allies 
and go careening across the sky. A few drops of rain 
patter in the dust of the road and cease — ^harmless mis- 
siles for which, however, the advance guards of the sky 
have given up their existence. 
Our mental and bcdily sensations, heretofore of op- 
pression, give way to feelings of awe at the grandeur 
of the spectacle. The mountains, which, up to this point, 
have stood out boldly, seem suddenly to have shrunk in 
size. The many familiar points and spurs of prominence 
are withdrawn hito the general outline of hazy shadow, 
dark and forbidding. A l)right flash of lightning streaks 
across the sky, closely followed by a mighty crash of 
heaven's diapason whit-h malces the very foundations of 
the earth tremble. 
Suddenly, from the murky cloud bank which has mel- 
lowed to a gray color, low flying feathery clouds laden 
with moisture separate from the parent cloud, to be dis- 
integrated by the cutting north wind, falling to the earth 
only to be reinforced by more, which, in turn are smitten 
and precipitated, till finally the roaring of the millions of 
hosts of rain drops can be heard beating the river and 
shore as tlio ■^loriii advances toward the spot on which 
you stand entranced. 
Reluct;intly you seek shelter, and none too soon, for the 
play of the storm is about you — the beautiful scenery is 
blotted out by a gray pall of swirling clouds and pelting 
rain, F'yer and anon the obscured landscape is relieved 
by bright flashes of lightnin.g, the magic touch of which 
clears the mist, and for the moment restores its beaiilie.s. 
As you witness the light of God's mighty torch clearing 
