i^OREST AND STREAM. 
tOcT. 1^, 1903- 
haunt of the turtle dove and chickadee. Later, here, 
Bob White will find his banquet board. By the road- 
side the starwort is blooming, and the tangled grape- 
vines in the creek's bottom burn with the yellowish- 
red arils of the bittersweet, and down along the mucky 
shores of the marsh a rain of wild rice pellets is fall- 
ing I 
Quack! Quack! Quack! 
Do you recognize that sound? Is it not alluring? 
Can it be successfully resisted with the sportsman's 
blood leaping in your veins? Along the low-lying 
nieadows of the sprawling Platte the tluffjr flag is fad- 
ing, and a rufous tinge is stealing over the stately heads 
of the cattails, and the lance-like leaves of the squaw 
cane; the plumes of the goldenrod are drooping, and 
the heart-shaped leaves of the cottonwood are floating 
down the stream. The sounds that oftenest strike the 
car are the clamoring of the marshalling crows, the 
chucking of the blackbirds, the bickering of the jays, 
or the answering chatter of the fox squirrel, never luo 
engrossed in his nut rasping, down on that old butter- 
nut limb there, to indulge in a little habitual scoffing. 
Louder still than these, though not the voice of any of 
nature's wild things, yet so common at this time of year 
that you so class it, from marshland, wooded valley, 
lake shore and prairie, echoes the crack of the hammer- 
less; now close by and starthng, now away off, far 
out of sight, like a puff of the south wind. To one 
idling under October skies, these are sounds that open 
up vistas of stirring pictures with which the whole 
country is moving. Here on the gaudy prairie, where 
the versi-colored grasses and brown sunflower stalks 
mingle, it is a prairie chicken bursting like a gray 
rocket from its shriveling covert, the fluffy feathers 
floating like thistle down behind him; and then again 
it is one of those furry, bob-tailed, long-eared clowns 
of the plains, a jack rabbit, limping off on three legs 
through the purple tangle of frosted bluestem and fox- 
tail, or a belated upland, with long-pointed, down- 
curved wings, frantically turwheetleing and endeavor- 
ing to catch up with the dim ranks of his departed kind. 
Off yonder on the broad level of the tule-hidden marsh, 
you catch but a wisp of whitish smoke in these days of 
the nitros, and then the faintest report, and a bunch 
of bluewing splash to flight from their sedgy feeding 
beds, or a big, fat mallard, with lagging orange legs, 
reluctantly leaves his natatorium among the smartweed 
and the rice; or a flock of tinkling yellowlegs, travers- 
ing, on slow, flapping sails, the bends and reaches in 
the tules; or a skaiping jack, in his rosewood dress, 
leaping from the flag-shrouded ooze and zigzagging 
away across the sunlit marsh, or mayhap, a lonely bit- 
tern or slovenly mudhen! When it comes from the 
woods, the hurtling wing of Bob White wliirs through 
the trenchant air, or it is the leafy crash of a squirrel 
as he leaps from bough to bough, tree to tree, in a 
frantic scramble for that old hollow elm down there, 
or the yelp of a skulking coyote, late slinking home 
after a night's marauding around the rancher's abode. 
These are the pictures with which the sportsman's 
vision in fancy are filled in accompaniment to the 
sounds of October days. 
Omaha, Neb. SanDY GriSWOLD. 
Kipling's "Red Gods/' 
Editor Forest and Stream: 
It is assumed that, in demurring to L. F. Brown's 
crushing analysis of Kipling's "Red Gods" lines, Mr. 
Hardy is not a Kiplomaniac, nor swayed by reason of any 
personal acquaintance or friendship for the Kiplings, who 
once lived in New England, and took several journeys 
into Maine. 
So Mr. Hardy should, on reflection, see that the criti- 
cism is unanswerable, and that a defense of the lines 
after such a demonstration that they are the result of 
ignorance, may run the risk of being ludicrous. 
For convenience the "poetry" is here reproduced : 
"Do you know ilie blackened timber? Do you know tliat racing 
stream, 
With the raw, right-angled log-jam at the end. 
And the bar of sun-warmed shingle, where a man may bask and 
dream 
To the click of shod canoe poles round the bend? 
It is there that we are going with our rods and reels and traces, 
To a silent, smoky Indian that we know; 
To a couch of new-pulled hemlock, with the starlight on our faces, 
For the Red Cods call us out, and we must go." 
Any canoeist and camper knows that this is not only 
nnsdescription, but such entire folderol as to make it 
laughable to real sportsmen. 
Kipling speaks of a log-jam as "raw," using the word 
as synonymous with unfinished. A log-jam is an aggre- 
gation of tree-trunk sections. No more finished and ex- 
quisitely fashioned creation of nature than a tree trunk! 
No painter ever even approximated the indescribable fine- 
ness and delicacy of the lines and work on the trunk of a 
tree. As Ruskin says : "Nature has taken wonderful 
pains with its forms, sculpturing it into exquisite variety 
of dint and dimple, rounding or hollowing it into con- 
lours which for fineness no human hand can follow; then 
she colors it, and its whole substance is full of hidden his- 
tories, concealing wonders of structure which, in all prob- 
ability, are mysteries even to the angels." Kipling, in 
his blindenss to, and ignorance of, Nature, calls such a 
structure "raw." Texture of bark, anatomy of muscle 
beneath, reflected lights in recessed hollows, stains of 
mosses and lichens, and wonderful delicacy of hues— all 
this is "raw." By similar reasoning the rough board 
sawed from that log, which is raw, should be called fin- 
ished. As well call a steak cut from a quarter of beef 
finished. 
And Kiplirig calls a log-jam "right-angled." When one 
side of an angle is perpendicular to the other, it is a right 
angle. And it is manifest that no log-jam can be right- 
angled either to itself or the stream; nor can its logs be 
right-angled to each other, for the ends point in all direc- 
tions. The pictures of log-jams used by Mr. Hardy 
demonstrate this. 
The truth is that the words "raw" and "right-angled" 
are cheap, premeditated alliteration which was preferred 
to accuracy. Thus the intelligent reader gets a painful 
sense of profound ignorance on the part of the writer. 
Nothing is left for him but to reject with contempt the 
claim that this sing-song is wonderful knowledge — the 
rare insight of a genius. 
And of course no log-jam was ever "at the end" of a 
"racing stream." Kipling states that this is where his 
impossible log-jatn is located. 
And Kipling's "Indian" used "shod" poles. 
Here is what a man who has camped and slept under 
canoes for weeks during half the summers of the last 
forty years says to me on this subject: "The 'shoe' of a 
real canoe pole is a hollow tip or socket into which the 
end of the pole is inserted to keep the wood from split- 
ting on rocks. But such shoes are exceedingly rare. I 
have never seen one used by an Indian, and only two 
pairs in use — one on the Margaree River in Cape Breton, 
and the other at John Connell's Camps on the Tabusintac 
River in New Brunswick. In each case I was told that 
the metal would slip on rocks, and so the shoe of metal 
was not satisfactory. This you will find to be the view 
of the best Maine guides, and of such British Columbia 
men as Brewster Brothers, of Banff, and the Abriels, of 
Nakusp. I have had three summer outings in a canoe on 
Maine streams, including the trip down the entire St. 
John's River, and I did not see a single shod canoe-pole; 
and 1 do not believe that white guides, much less one of 
Kipling's 'Indians' use a shod pole. 
"Canoe-poles, as used by white guides for shoving 
canoes up quick waters, are usually made of maple or 
ash, 12 to 14 feet long, and about an inch in diameter at 
each end, and a little larger in the middle. Over one end 
a few white guides place, not a shoe, but a sleeve about 
three inches long, of copper, and adjusted so that the 
wood of the pole sticks out two or three inches, because 
the wood will 'hang' to a rock where any metal shoe 
would slip. And such sleeve (not shoe) does not strike 
the bottom, while the wood does. So the 'shoe' (sleeve) 
cannot 'click,' even when the pole is used on rocks that 
are not submerged." 
As for myself, I have yet to see my first shod canoe- 
pole, and I doubt if I ever will see one outside of a 
museum. The genuine Indian certainly does not use 
them. Instead, when he has to pass up rapid water that 
precludes paddling, he selects and cuts a pole from the 
nearest suitable tree, and uses that in its "raw" state. 
When he reaches quiet water again, overboard goes the 
pole. He would no more think of carrying a canoe-pole 
on a trip than he would think of carrying tent-poles. He 
makes them as the occasion requires. 
Trying to be "versatile" as a professional writer, Kip- 
ling thought it would be fine to pose in print as a canoe- 
ist, angler, and gentleman sportsman who had an "In- 
dian" guide. He knew enough of metre and rhythm to 
get the proper number of feet into his "poetry." The rest 
is falsehood paraded as truth. He counfounds the well- 
known semi-handspike of the laborer who "drives" logs 
in streams (which is tipped with an iron point or pick, 
and is often used around lumber camps to shove canoes 
up quick water) with the canoe-pole proper of the sports- 
man that he assumes to personify. 
But suppose the canoe-pole that Kipling really did not 
use at his unlocated and imaginative scene that never ex- 
isted (and could not as he describes it) ivere "shod." 
The dilemma and falsehood would only be greater. How 
could the shoes, immersed in from two to three feet of 
water, be heard to "click" as they touched the bottom? 
Worse, how could such "clicks" be heard "around the 
bend," even when they were being used in comparatively 
still water, instead of a "racing stream" that is full of 
turmoil and uproar? More inaccuracy! More offensive 
posturing as a proclaimer of special knowledge! It is 
a pitiful strut worthy only of a very common literary 
hack who is thinking of his audience instead of an out- 
ing which he never took. 
It is intimated by Mr. Hardy that, as Mr. Brown writes 
from Sand Lake in his native Michigan, he cannot know 
conditions in Maine. It is, therefore, proper to state that 
Mr. Brown has spent eleven summer vacations along 
angling waters on the west slopes of the Canadian 
Rockies, and has camped in August above the snow-line, 
sleeping in a bag, in the Yo Ho Canyon region beyond 
Emerald Lake. He has fished in many lakes of Minnesota 
and Wisconsin, taken trout from the Campbell River on 
Vancouver Island, been poled up the Peribonca River, 
had a canoe smashed on Rupert's Stream, knows the 
Margaree in Cape Breton, some of the salmon waters of 
southern Nova Scotia, and has taken trout and salmon 
from several streams in western Newfoundland. Thus 
he has studied canoes and their poles and the "smokiness" 
of a half-dozen tribes of Indians, widely separated, as well 
as along the Manistee and Au Sable. Add that he spent 
three long vacations in Maine, and took the canoe trip 
from the headwaters of the St. John's River down to 
Conners, and that he has studied and written of Nature's 
aspects for thirty years, and it would seem that he should 
know just a trifle more than Kipling about log-jams and 
canoe-poles. 
Mr. Hardy even says when he was a child, fifty years 
ago, he saw "Indians" so "smoky" and malodorous that 
he could tell with his eyes shut that one was in a room. 
If Kipling chose such a guide he lacked taste. For such 
a "smoky" Indian is very rare. The average Indian is 
never "smoky," but dark-skinned, tanned. 
Mr. Hardy tells us that he "basks and dreams" in a 
hot Sim on his comfortable seat of coarse "shingle" — 
water-worn stones- — forming a "bar" from which the 
water has taken the only material of which a bar was 
ever formed, viz., dirt, mud, alluvium. He says that a 
bar is "anything which obstructs." Then, of course, his 
log-jam is a "bar," or, better still, so is a mill-dam. And 
he prefers jams of "second-year" logs, stripped of bark. 
His logs "grow" no moss except when in the water; and, 
as they do not there, moss was never on any log. A log 
is "raw" because it is "in its natural state." If a log: in 
its natural state is raw, so is a rainbow, cloud, wild- 
flower or star. And he prefers Kipling's "couch" of 
hemlock, with its sweat and heat under the body of a 
sleeper, and its hardness and acrid odor, to the balsam- 
scented and cool, easy bed of spruce boughs ! Further, 
he has seen canoe-poles that were "shod" in Maine (a 
merely provincial experience) ; so all over Maine and 
everywhere else, all canoe-poles are shod ! And these 
shoes, very hammers of "railroad iron," always "click." 
Mind, he is defending Kipling's line stating that they can 
be heard on "racing streams," and he says that these 
small iron tips of his "shod" canoe-poles, as they touch 
the bottom under several feet of water, can be heard 
"hundreds of yards," "long before the canoe comes in 
sight," and "often nearly as far as the human voice can 
be heard." The writer knows a dozen "racing streams" 
where even the human voice could not be heard fifty 
yards because of the turmoil, uproar, thunder and hiss 
of the water. Kipling never heard "clicks" of "canoe- 
poles" "around the bend" of any "racing stream." 
And this "versatile" writer masking as a gentleman 
sportsman has his "couch" of "new-pulled" hemlock! 
placed so that he lies on it to sleep, it will be "with the 
starlight on our faces." Balderdash ! The real sports- 
man sleeps under his canoe, in a tent, cabin, "shack" or 
"lean-to," or at least while protected by thick foliage 
above his head, to keep off dews and rain. He likes the 
starlight on his face as he angles at night for big trout, 
or mingled with the light from the camp-fire as he smokes 
with a comrade beside it, or as he sits in the canoe while 
he and his guide return to the camp; but never while 
sleeping on his bed of boughs. 
Mr. Hardy does not try to answer the charge that Kip- 
ling's "Red Gods" are pompous poetic license gone mad. 
No "gods" of red, white, black, Prussian blue or chrome 
yellow, or of pepper-and-salt or brindle, "call out" the 
woodman. But wild Nature does beckon to him. Her 
blue lakes, emerald forests, music of streams, plashing of 
waves on beaches, wondrous saffrons and grays and ten- 
derness and delicacy of purples at dawn, voices of foliage 
and winds, evening twilights, and above all, the mystery 
of her life, are not deities of any hue, much less "Red 
Gods." They are manifest messages from the only God 
telling us of blessings, beauty and grace of the earth 
made for man's enjoyment. 
Neither is there any attempt to defend Kipling's sense- 
less statement that he is "going" to some unlocated "rac- 
ing stream" with "traces," which are sections of spinning 
tackle that are never used on "racing streams." Yet Mr. 
Hardy knows of no other such truthful "description." 
One of the qualities of error is that it can trust to 
some self-styled prophet to proclaim it as a new and won- 
derful discovery of truth. And another quality is that 
when this "truth" is exposed as falsehood, it can further 
trust 10 some one to defend it. 
R. ASHCROFT. 
Kew York, Oct. 9. 
Lewiston, Me., Oct. 6. — Editor Forest and Stream: 
I have just received the issue of Sept. 26 and note the 
"musings" of L. F. Brown, of Sand Lake, Mich., to which 
he gives the sub-title of "Spurious Writings About 
Angling and Nature," the whole being a furious arraign- 
ment of the poet Kipling for almost every kind and de- 
gree of violation of truth and true poetic duty in his 
A^erses entitled, "The Feet of the Young Men." 
He is "astounded" at "so much counterfeit writing 
about sport and nature," and "mistruth" and "inexact- 
ness" are the mildest of his terms of rebuke of Kipling. 
To me, and I cannot doubt to the majority of the 
readers of his article, the only truthful and enjoyable part 
is the double quartrain which he quotes from the poem. 
But still it seems not well to let such an utterance pass 
without comment. 
Ever since Chaucer wrote of the "Longen to gon on 
pilgrimages," and probably long before that, ever since 
the feet of young men have turned irresistibly to adventure 
in the wilderness, there have been those to whom Kip- 
ling's words would have come with ample response and 
answering thrill. I am this moment longing inexpressibly 
to be down in the woods and among the laies I know so 
well — only a very few hours' journey from where I am 
at this moment — and to me no words could be more 
deeply stirring than, 
"Who hath smelt wood-smoke at twilight? Who hath heard the 
birch log burning? 
Who is quick to read the noises of the night? 
Let him follow with the others, for the young men's feet are 
turning 
To the camps of proved desire and known delight!" 
Then follow the words — ^to me equally full not only of 
lilt and go, but also of most apt and accurate description 
and truth to nature — but which to Mr. Brown are a 
"splotteration" "surrounding and befouling" the true 
piture: 
"Do you know the blackened timber? Do you know that racing 
stream, 
With the raw, right-angled log-jam at the end. 
And the bar of sun-warmed shingle, where a man may bask and 
dream, 
To the click of shod canoe-poles round the bend? 
It is there that we are going with our rods and reels and traces. 
To a silent, smoky Indian that we know- 
To a couch of new-pulled hemlock, with the starlight on our faces. 
For the Red Gods call us out, and we must go." 
Now, I will not say there is no finer descriptive 
poetry than that, but really, if challenged at the moment, 
I could not readily put my finger on anything better. 
It is "right as a trivet," every word of it, yet not a word 
of it escapes the railing abuse of Mr. Brown. 
He claims to know all about log-jams and canoe-poles, 
not only at "Sand Lake, Michigan," but iit the whole 
"United States" and also in "India, Norway, British Co- 
lumbia and the Maritime Provinces of Canada," and will 
have it that "no actual log-jam is 'raw,' 'right-angled,' or 
'at the end' " of the vista, and that "not one canoe-pole in 
a thousand" is "shod" or "clicks." He has never heard 
of a sand bar in his life, but deliberately states that "a 
'bar' is always a deposit of alluvium earth-sediment 
which has gathered and formed a mud bank or island" ! 
After such a statement no sort of statement can be too 
extraordinary, and we need not be surprised at his saying 
that "there never was a 'bar' of 'shingle,' " and if there 
were, "no sportsman would ever dream of reclining on 
such a hard, hot, uncomfortable seat as a 'sim-warmed 
shingle.' " 
He says there is no "smoky Indiati," evidently suppos- 
ing that Kipling's exquisite epithet refers to the Indian's 
complexion alone, although it is true of that. 
It is impossible to understand how any man can write 
in this way with serious intent, 
