Apbil 29, 1905.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
831 
most under the wheels of our wagon, and loped, with 
low hung tail and high borne head, away, quite un- 
afraid. Flowers were everywhere amid the sand of 
the half desert. Tuft grass grew sparsely over the en- 
tire plain, and furnished a scanty grazing for the great 
herds of unrestrained cattle, creatures almost as wild 
as those we were seeking out. Birds were everywhere. 
Our own familiar bluebir(;i fluttered ahead of our team, 
quite as he does at home in June. 
Black specks in the skies, slanting easily to right and 
left and back again, attested to a multitude of buz- 
zards. Hawks and eagles topped the taller patches of 
Spanish bayonet plants, silent predatory figures, which 
scaled away to another resting point, only when we 
came within a few yards. 
We lunched just within the boundary lines of one of 
the greatest ranches in Mexico; the hacienda of Gov- 
ernor Terrasas of Chihuahua, and in- the late after- 
noon we passed the hacienda house with its neighbor- 
ing village of adobe huts, suggesting an almost feudal 
state of government. As we approached the foothills 
and left the level plains behind us, we passed numerous 
whitening skeletons and shrunken mummy-like car- 
casses of drouth-killed cattle. It was told to us that 
on this one property alone. Gov. Terrasas had lost 8,000 
head of cattle the year before, for lack of Water and 
the verdure which the water only can give and main- 
tain. To our right all through the latter part of the 
afternoon, towered a lonely cone-shaped hill of pro- 
portions somewhat greater than its neighbors, and on 
its topmost peak there stood out clear against the 
burnished sky a rectangular object, which our Mormon 
driver told us was an ancient Aztec stone of sacrifice. 
The plains about were eloquent of a vast prehistoric 
population. Countless mounds told of ruined, nature- 
buried, Aztec homes; unopened mounds, almost with- 
out exception, each holding unknown treasures of the 
unrecorded past, for future archseologists. 
As the sun sank in the western sky, and we drew in 
close to the foothills, we jumped, almost from under 
the horses' feet, a pair of antelope hare, strange, swift- 
running little creatures, the like of which I had never 
seen before. They bounded away before us, like wind- 
blown thistle down, their white hind-quarters marked 
almost exactly like the antelope, suggesting their 
namesakes in a most startling and realistic manner. 
Shortly after this we passed a "water-hole" of some 
fifty acres or so, filled by the early autumn rains and 
now fast drying up. Its borders were literally speckled 
with ducks through its entire circumference. I had but 
a moment, but I could not resist springing from the 
wagon and running down to the water's edge for just 
one shot. The ducks rose in clouds, and circled, re- 
luctant to leave the only feeding ground within miles. 
As one little bunch came driving past me, well over 
the shore line, I picked a single bird, and brought him 
whirling down, a quartering incomer, almost at my 
feet. It was a beautiful shoveler drake, the first of 
his kind that I have had a chance to kill for years. 
I had not the time to wait for more, so clambered 
back into the wagon, and pushed on until the gray of 
evening and the chill which comes in Mexico with the 
setting of the sun, drove us into camp on the first 
slope of the real Sierras. We built a great fire of live 
oak dead wood, smoked a slow pipe over the dying 
fire and turned into our sleeping bags to the music of 
far distant bellowing cattle, future champions of the 
bull ring at Ciudad Juarez perhaps, and then — presto! 
It was morning. The gray was creeping through the 
tent roof, and sharply up from the plains came the 
mournful lament of a multitude of coyotes, fleeing be- 
fore the coming sun. 
The nights are chill in the Sierras of Mexico. My 
minimum registering thermometer showed me as low 
as 28 degrees at night, and the maximum which I ob- 
served at high noon in the shade during a two-weeks' 
stay, was 80 degrees, but the wine-like air, almost 
never still, the lack of humidity and the fact that the 
really hot period is comparatively brief, keeps one from 
realizing the high temperatures of the middle of the 
day. 
After leaving the plains country, we saw few Mex- 
icans. The mountain valleys, to which the few passes 
from the plains lead, are peopled with a sparse popu- 
lation of Mormons. 
The Mexican government has granted many privi- 
leges to the Mormon people, and they have established 
in Chihuahua many thriving industrious colonies, which 
went far to alter my preconceived ideas of this strange 
people. 
The wonders of the first early morning tramp up 
from the foothills of the first night's camp, to the 
7,000 feet high summit of the mountain table land which 
we were to cross, is beyond all power of words to 
describe. There was no morning haze, no softening 
of outline, but silhouettes sharp as a cameo, of peak 
towering beyond peak, of rolling hills, and soft pink- 
gray plains land beyond us, all distant outlines tinged 
deeply with that shade of withered rose leaves which 
I had wondered at so often in colored pictures of the 
Southwest,^ and which I realized now not to be im- 
pressionistic distortions, but nature as she is. 
By years of toil and effort the Mormons have built 
so-called roads through two of the passes which make 
upward to the table land. Over one of these our 
Mormon driver urged the patient horses which drew 
the team with our outfits, and it overtook us some half 
hour after we reached the immediate summit. 
As the team came up I had my first sight of that 
wonderful little mountain game bird, Bertram's par- 
ridge. A noble little fellow, he is perhaps over fond 
of sprinting and very reluctant to fly, but offering for 
one who is patient and stout of limb, as magnificent 
shooting as any game, bird it has ever been my lot to 
bring to bag. Nearly twice the size^ of our familiar 
Bob White he is, as our Mormon driver expressed it, 
"most all meat." I killed just two while I was in the 
mountains. Frankness drives me to confess that this 
small number was not entirely of my own choosing, 
however. I can do fairly with Bob White. I do not 
seek too many favors of the North Woods partridge; 
the woodcock, I confess, can balk me badly, but 
Bertram's partridge seems well-nigh beyond me. But 
I was not m the mountains to play with a shotgun, and 
rarely during the trip did I have it from its case. 
We slept the second night in a little Mormon village, 
perhaps forty miles from the railroad, a self-contained 
community of some sixty families, leading a primitive 
and patriarchal existence, in a new and almost un- 
broken region, a region so new to fully civilized man 
and agriculture that it is but two years back to the last 
Apache massacre. 
At the Mormon village of Colonia Pacheco we 
abandoned our wagon, and our pack train and saddle 
horses met us. Never have I dreamed of such saddle 
work as lay before us. I have often heard it said that 
where a man can go, there a horse can go. It is 
true, every word of it, and I know many a man who 
carries a rifle into the woods who scarce could have 
gone on his own feet where our sure-footed horses 
carried us. 
The third night we slept in a log camp, built by our 
so-called guides, just within the western border of the 
last outlying ranch territory, and perhaps some five or 
six miles from the dividing line between Chihuahua 
and Sonora. It was quite obviously the custom of our 
guides to dissuade all incoming sportsmen who in- 
trusted themselves to their care, from venturing into 
the virgin land further on, and to accept, in lieu of real 
hunting, a week or two of real comfortable, kid-glove 
sport in the country immediately surrounding their camp. 
We found in this region deer sign in plenty, not the 
little dwarf deer of Mexico, but the old familiar Virginia 
deer, the white tail, which all of us have hunted, whether 
our ground be in Maine, in Florida or in the countries 
which do lie between. 
We were assured that bear, timber wolf, mountain lion, 
and turkey were also plentiful in this region, but I doubt 
it much, for I saw no sign of them. 
The next day we urged and coaxed our reluctant guides 
to proceed with the scheme we had planned so many 
months before, and by 9 o'clock, despite lost horses, lost 
broncos, lost lariats, and — alas, lost tempers, we were 
pushing on toward Sonora and the sunset land. 
Some fifteen miles (by guess) to the west of our third 
night's halting place, and perhaps sixty miles from the 
railroad at Casas Grandes, a strange and wonderful val- 
ley opens sharply downward from the rolling table land 
or mesa of tlie main Sierras. Locally this valley is known 
to the few who have been there as "The Hole." 
Some thirty-five miles long, and varying in width from 
five m.iles to one-half mile, there are said to be but two 
trails down which one can take horses from the mesa 
above into the depths of the valley, the rolling, hill-strewn 
floor of which is some 2,000 feet below the surrounding 
rim, and probably five thousand feet above sea level. 
Down this valley runs a brawling, boisterous stream, 
suggesting strangely old friends of the Katahdin region, 
realistic even to the darting trout in the clear, cool crystal 
pools below the ripples. 
_ The edges of this valley are half precipice, half crag- 
like towering slopes, almost defying investigation, except 
on hands and knees. 
Along the stream, which is in reality the headwaters 
of the Yaqui River, grow almost unbroken thickets of 
scrub and timber and even many towering trees; syca- 
more, Cottonwood and live oak. 
The valley is filled with a jumble of hills and minia- 
ture, rough-hewn mountains, some conical and smoothed 
by nature's trowel, others mere Olympic fragments of na- 
ture-tossed rock, each one a hill in itself. Thickets of 
cane brake lay along the still running bends of the stream, 
and the smoother hills are dotted thick with live oak, like 
old New Hampshire orchard spots. 
Cacti, long, round pointed and short, with spikes and 
hooks of every known shape, were everywhere. The 
Spanish bayonet towered at every turn, and everywhere 
the tracks of game, big game, the game that I had come 
so far to find, the game of whose tracks I had dreamed 
many a winter night before the flickering fire, and which 
was now, I believed, to be mine. 
There lacks both space and reader's patience to make 
this a narrative of my entire stay within this valley soH- 
tude. It must suflice for me to say to my brethren that, 
never in my whole experience have I been where the 
fresh, plain written sign of a great variety of game of the 
noblest was so plentiful. There never was a day during 
my whole stay that I did not see the deep pressed track 
of the silver tip by the stream side, around ant hills, 
wherever the soil would take the marks. 
More plentiful yet, so plentiful that one could find them 
almost anywhere by searching for a hundred yards, were 
the tracks of the mountain lion, whose numbers must 
h^ve been exceedingly great. 
Close about our camp, day by day, I found the fresh 
marks of the timber wolf. Turkeys were there in plenty. 
I doubt if I saw in all more than thirty or forty, for I did 
not hunt them at all, but I jumped them from under the 
horses by the stream side twice in large flocks, and any- 
where the sand was soft and damp by the running water, 
one could find their marks. 
Had I cared to do so, I believe that I might have killed 
deer at the rate of three or four a day, but I did not 
chance to see a good typical head of the country, and so 
I let them be, and watched them trot slowly and unafraid 
away in front of the horses day by day, in peace and 
comrades-hip. 
They are little fellows these Mexican whitetail, a good 
buck weighing, I should say, not more than a hundred 
and twenty pounds, dressed. So tame were they, and so 
conspicuous in the comparatively open country among the 
hills, that one could not help but see them, and get them 
easily. 
It was typical of the men who were with us, and who 
called themselves our guides, that in all of the times that 
we saw deer when they were with us, never once did they 
see them first or point them out, and once I had to resort 
to inviting a glance along my rifle barrel before my 
"thoroughly tried and experienced" guide could locate a 
standing, unsheltered deer. 
It is a strange thing for a man to return without a 
trophy from a new game region, and to laud it as a great 
game country, but thus it is with me in this case. There 
are two reasons for it: In the first place I had gone on 
my long journey determined to secure a silver tip if I 
could, and, with the exception of one short day, I hunted 
nothing else. 
I realized all too soon that I was huntiiig hopelessly. 
One must have a dog or dogs to find one's quarry, if one 
lust.s for silver tip or lion in this mass of canyons, cross- 
canyons, rocks and pinnacles. Full easily one might pass 
by bruin within ten feet and never see him lurking amid 
the broken cross-canyon mouths, but when I go again, 
dogs will go with me, dogs which can be had quite easily 
at the Mormon settlements through which I had passed, 
and then, so surely as I write this now, silver lip will be 
mine, cinnamon will be mine, lion will be mine quite 
easily, and — visions of triumph and unhoped-for glory; 
there will be a fighting chance for both jaguar and pecary. 
I am not one of those to whom the killing constitutes 
the trip, and there is another reason beside my patient 
bear seeking, which accounts perhaps more fully for my 
emptv-handedness. 
Wending our way upward through the passes to this 
valley we had come upon cliff dwellings, wondrous struc- 
tures of the men of yesterday, of a race gone and for- 
gotten, speaking eloquently of the struggle of a persecuted 
people, clinging to mere existence among the crags and 
fastnesses of the mountains after their plains brethren 
had been exterminated. 
In the first one which I visited, a few moments' dig- 
ging gave up to me a pathetic handful of human bones. 
At the entrance to this cave dwelling I had found a stone 
ax, and almost before we were down in the valley, the 
lust of the archaeologist, dormant in me until now, was 
strong in my blood. 
Who can wonder then, when on the third day in the 
valley my Goerz binoculars revealed to me a vast pile of 
masonry capping the highest of the hills on the valley 
floor, that hunting should have dropped to second place? 
It was a long, hard struggle from the canyon at its foot, 
up the steep slopes of that mountain, work for the hands 
and feet and knees, and lots of work for the lungs in that 
rare atmosphere, but. Oh the reward of it when the sum- 
mit was achieved ! I scarce half understood then, but 
I now know that I had found an ancient Toltec temple. 
The summit of the hill was flattened ofif to an area of 
perhaps two acres, and this summit was sustained by an 
eight or nine-foot retaining wall of massive masonry. 
Below this vertical wall lay a shelf following the contour 
of the top, around the edge of the retaining wall, also 
sustained by a similar retaining wall, and below this yet a 
third, but these shelves or terraces were arranged spirally, 
so that one starting to walk on the bottommost would, in 
a day when the temple stood in better repair than it is 
to-day, have traversed the circumference of the hill twice, 
and would have so, by easy stages, reached the top. 
The lowermost of the shelves lay eighteen feet perhaps, 
or, at the most, twenty feet below the summit. The way 
was much broken, and in some places quite destroyed, but 
there was ample evidence that in days long gone, an easy 
inclined way had led to the basin of the valley. 
I had_ no implements with which to dig, except those 
of primitive man, a sharpened stick, augmented later, as 
my interest grew, by the free and destructive use of my 
hunting knife, yet I secured, in a few short hours, two 
very beautiful examples of Indian pottery bowls or olas, 
each in many fragments, but now restored. 
There had been dozens, or perhaps hundreds of these 
little bowls around the summit. Digging revealed that 
each had rested upon its little fire, the embers of which 
still lingered, almost petrified, and well preserved. Im- 
mediately around one of these bowls, the most perfect 
that I have, I found fragments of deer bones, and the 
hill spoke eloquently of a simple people mounting upward 
on the hill side as the sun kissed the top of the temple, to 
offer, in the morning light, -their sacrifice of food and fire 
to the Giver of warmth and Hfe. 
This is indeed a wondrous land, good hunting, treas- 
ures of unrecorded history, dwellings of prehistoric man 
without nurnber, unvisited and untouched by any of our 
race unto this day, towering mountains, pink in the morn- 
ing light, desert and cane brake, towering pine and 
stunted live oak, all that nature lovers love, all that an 
adventurous spirit can seek, are there. 
Going into this country one might arrange quite easily 
for adequate guiding, and even for most of one's camp 
outfit, with one of half a dozen trustworthy Mormons, 
whose names I shall be glad to give, and of whose attain- 
ments glad to speak so far as I can know them without 
having been with them. 
My time was brief. Fourteen days from my starting 
from the railroad found me back, and the night of the 
fourteenth day I slept in El Paso, and so, laden with 
treasures of Indian pottery, with opals and drawn-work 
purchased in Ciudad Juarez, with a real serape, and other 
spoils of old Mexico I found myself in two short weeks 
from my start, rolling smoothly and swiftly northward 
to Chicago, once more dining in a dining car, once more 
leaving nature^and the joys of the annual hunt behind me, 
once more smoking cigars and not a pipe, but with mem- 
ories which will be a joy forever, and with health brim- 
ming over, sufficient to last me through many a toilsome 
day of office life until the spring fishing and the spring 
fever come together, and once more I "hike" into nature's 
homeland. 
Right soon again I shall roll southward on my beaten 
trail, from Chicago to El Paso, and so on into the sun- 
kissed Sierras, and when I return again it will be with 
trophies of the kind I seek, and I do not doubt, with new 
made vows to go yet again and again until all that I seek 
of the Southwestern mountains is achieved. 
Go ye my brothers and do likewise. 
Ail Austin, Tex., dispatch says that President Porfirio Diaz, of 
Mexico, is a . valiant hunter, and this fact has led the stockmen 
of the country districts of the Territory of Tepic to extend him 
an urgent invitation to visit their region and kill off some of the 
tigers that infest the ranches. The animals have killed many head 
of live stock, and have lately become bold near the larger settle- 
ments. The territorial Government has offered a reward of $10 
for each tiger killed. The main object of the stockmen in inviting 
President Diaz is to impress on him the necessity of affording 
them relief. 
Motors for Scotch Fishicg Boats, 
A noteworthy innovation in the fishing industry of Scotland is 
the introduction of boats propelled by motors. Experiments have 
demonstrated the great advantages of such boats over sailing craft 
in- calm weather or when the wind is unfavorable. Inasmuch as 
the Scotch fishing^ fleet comprises fully 10,000 boats working at line 
and net fishing,^ in addition to 100 or more steam trawlers, the 
demand for marine motors may become important. — Rufus Flem- 
ing, Consul, Edinburgh, Scotland, 
The Magic of the Oaken Branch, 
"Reginald Scot, the author of a work on witchcraft, tells us: 
"That never hunters nor their dogs may be bewitched; they cleave 
an oaken branch, and both they and their dogs pass over it." 
