June 3, 190S.I 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
438 
when the snow lay on the ground, and they had not been 
) shot at mueh sinee. These were young ones which had 
;:been hatched since last winter, of course, but I suppose 
h the fact that the old ones did not take the alarm kept 
i, them from doing it. At any rate, I had to throw a stoHS 
1 among them more than once to get them to fly; I was 
! not shooiing quail that were huddled together in a bunch 
on the ground. 
An old stubble field lay next to Mr. M.'s pasture and 
T at last got into it. I was out of Mr. M.'s bounds now. 
There were plenty of quail here; I was getting one or 
more for every shot I fired, when a young man came run- 
ning down here calling on me to stop. Coming up to me 
he said, "You will have to get out of this. Did you not 
see my warning notices? You must have seen them, I 
have enough of them up here." 
"Yes, sir, I climbed the fence alongside of one of them, 
f but Mr. M. told me that you would not object to my 
; being here. I ought to _ have gone up to your hoilSe, 
I though, and asked permission." 
"Oh, if Mn M. sent you it is all right; you are wel- 
1 come heffi; YOu Can shoot across my place and the next 
one above hetej that one is rriy fatller*s; if his marl tries 
to stop you tell him I sent yoii. Wfe have these quail 
here for anyone who acts like a gentleman. I shoot a 
few now and again. Some of us who feed them in win- 
ter do not shoot them at all. But we don't want our 
cows shot, ,or our fences burned, so we are obliged to post 
our places. Some men think we do it to make 
money by it. I would about as soon think of charging a 
man for a few quail that don't belong to me as I would 
for the water he might drink at my well." 
"Boys probably start most of these fires with their old 
muzzle-loaders, shooting the quail on the ground," I said. 
"Boy.S are not so bad; you can tell a boy to, be careful 
and he will. It is men who do it. They don't mean to 
do it but when 1 have a few panels of fence burned, it 
don't help me much to know that they did not mean to 
start the fire/* 
I bade the youhg rtian , good-bye, then kept oil, liiitil I 
had fired my last shell ; I only had aboiit two dozen_ tb 
i begin with. I had a nice lot of quail now, and stopping 
for the same reason that Pap had to stop, when he was 
hunting that coon, my powder was all gone. I went home 
now, then cleaned up the young man's gun ready to turn 
it over when I had got to him. Mr. M. was going into 
. Butler the next morning in a light wagon after groceries 
^and I meant to ride in with him. 
Bill and Pap were on hand early the next morning; 
1 they came j ust as we had sat down to breakfast. Pap 
did not want any more breakfast, he said; Bill did, 
though, and put a second one--he had eaten the first one 
at home, of eoufse^eiit of ,sight yery qniekly. 1 had 
an in;erview with Bill while Pap was hitChiiig up a teaitl 
■ at the barn. 
"Did Pap whip you last night?" 
"No, sir,"he told Mam what you had said and Mam told 
him he had better keep his hands ofi" me, she said you 
could put him in jail or fine him. Mam reads the papers, 
she does. Pap can't read, and Mam says that the Society 
I you told Pap about could fine him if he whipped me; 
then Pap said he had no money to pay fines, so I am all 
right now, ain't 1 ?" 
, "Yes, but you do just what Pap tells you and don't try 
an^ tricks on him. Play them on some one else after 
tliiS; Can yoii read yet, Bill?" 1 asked. 
"Oh, yes. Mam learned me to read, and t go to sdlodl 
Soinetimes." 
T noticed that Pap treated me with a good deal of re- 
spect; he had arrived at the conclusion that I must be a 
lawyer, arr! Pao, while he prnbablv h^d but little use for 
the law, did not want to collide with it. 
I was not a lawyer, though I had been one for two 
hours once, when a judge in New Mexico admitted me 
to his bar long enough to defend a man charged with 
horse Ftealing, as has been told in Forest and Stream. 
My client had only stolen two-thirds of this horse, he 
owned the remaining one-third, but I persuaded the jury 
that he had not stolen any of hml, and got him oi¥. Theit 
the District Attorney told ffie that I would make a good 
Tombs lawyer. Pap thought I muSt be a "dod gas ted" 
One, So 1 wag a lawyer of some kind or other. 
I rode into town, or I suppose I Should call it a city 
now, it has got its railroads and did not look now much 
iike the old town of Butler that I had known twenty-five 
years ago. Then taking a train in a few hours I was in 
Pittsburg, and after I had got shells to replace the ones 
■ I had shot away, I took the young man his gun. 
Cabia Blanco. 
Storage of Featherless Game. 
Philadelphia, Pa. — Editor Forest and Stream: One 
of the great, if not the greatest obstacle, to the success- 
ful prosecution of the cold storage companies which are 
violators of the game laws by having game birds illegally 
in possession in the close season, is the extreme difficulty 
encountered in identifying the cold storage birds as game 
birds. They are stripped of every feather when in cold 
-Storage, thus the distinguishing marks essential to legal 
identification are destroyed. 
It occurred to me that by securing proper legislation 
to preserve the essential markings of birds, the cold stor- 
age companies would be deprived of the large and pro- 
fitable business, and the immunity they now have from 
prosecution in dealing in game birds out of season. If 
the game laws were so amended that it would be illegal 
to pick all the feathers off game birds before they were 
placed in cold storage, identification and consequent con- 
viction would be a matter of course in cases of illegal 
possession. The largest game birds average less m 
weight than the smallest of domestic poultry. By the 
necessary number of weighings to strike an average, these 
weights could be accurately determined for business pur- 
poses. Then it should be illegal to remove the head, m 
whole or in part, and the feathers of the head, tail, wings 
and enough should be left on the back, say a bunch the 
size of a quarter-dollar, so that enough would be left on 
each iMrd to render identification easy. In cases where 
birds were oicked clean nevertheless, such clean birds 
should be- considered as prima facie evidence of illegal 
storage and possession in contravention of the game laws. 
,\s°it has been established beyond material question, 
thpt tin-, ownership of the game birds lies in the State, 
and that the State can impose any restrictions it chooses 
as to ownership, in my opinion, there could not be any 
greater restriction tending to the proper protection of 
game than to destroy the illegal traffic in it, and without 
the illicit participation of the cold storage warehouses, 
the traffie in game out of season would be a physical im- 
possibility. 
So frame a law that game birds, shorn of all their 
distinctive markings for purposes of cold storage and in 
possession in the close season, would be an illegal act in 
itself, and the problem of game protection would thereby 
take an immense stride for the public good. L. N. 
Wolverine Number One. 
In a young lifetime spent in the Far West it has been 
my fortune only once to kill a wolverine. It was not / 
that the animals were lacking in abundance— for there 
were plenty of them— but that it seems that circumstance 
never Cast one in my path but the one lime. That one 
instance will, perhaps, serve to show some few things 
about the animal that has furnished it with the suggestive 
title "glutton;" 
At the time of which I wrote Idaho, and especially the 
most northern part of the State, was an untracked wil- 
derness. Settlements wefe extremely sparse and cities 
and towns there were none, an isolated hamlet here and 
there marked the centers of population. The game con- 
ditions were all that the heart of the sportsman^ could 
wish. Deer fed in the door-yard, and elk and bear were 
as common as ground squirrels. The annual deer hunt 
was an event looked forward to with a great deal of in- 
terest, and was quite an important feature in our frontier 
life. We spent several weeks every year in killing and 
preparing the meat for winter use. This meat so killed 
furnished the Staple of our table fare. At that time v/e 
resorted to the very reprehensible practice of chasing the 
deer whh hounds, For that purpose we kept a well train- 
ed paek of foxhounds, and after the hunting was over 
used them in the chase of bear and lynx. These animals 
were made to yield a considerable portion of our scanty 
revenue, their Warm furs selling for a good figure on the 
Eastern markets. The fall of which I write was a very 
prolific one as far as bruin was concerned. The snows 
tarried late and he wandered over the hills quite late be- 
fore seeking his winter retirement. Some friends visited 
us from what is now the State of Washington, then a 
Territory as was Idaho. They brought along a brace of 
thoroughbred bloodhounds of which they were justly 
proud. They vaunted these animals as sure bear killers, 
and 1 must confess that our mongrel hounds looked very 
commonplace alongside these specimens of canine aris- 
tceraCy. Their every lineament bespoke endurance and 
ecufage.- The gomparisons made by the owners of these 
handsome animals were not in the least modest. The 
morning of the hunt opeiied with ideal tracking weather. 
It was dark and cloudy, with a white mist hanging over 
the mountains, the very day for the scent to lie well. We 
set out, every nerve atingle, in the direction of where we 
fch sure there must be bear if any were in the country. 
A deep gulch that had been worked out for its cedar 
and whose hillsides had overgrown with roses, the bright 
red hips of which were still clinging to the bushes, fur- 
nishing excellent forage for the bears. Then underneath 
the rotting logs were to be found colonies of red and 
biaek ants and their larvae, and woods mice with their 
yfefutig. ioon after leaving the ranch house we separated, 
each one taking his course through the deep woods. The 
master of the hunt took the nack and set out due north 
toward the head of the gulch in the hope of striking a 
fresh track. Allow me to narrate what now transpired 
from a personal standpoint, and I trust the reader will 
forgive the frequent use of the pronoun. 
I was armed with the then new 38-55 and was as proud 
of the weapon as a boy is of a new top — and I was then 
only a boy. For several miles I held my course through 
the woods, startling a feeding partridge, a nutting 
brown squirrel, a foraging white rabbit. The temptation 
to shoot at these was very strong but the master of the 
hunt (my father) had forbidden us to shoot at anything 
this day lest it be a deer or bear. The desire to set at 
naught the old gentleman's mandates was at times very 
strong when I saw a particularly tempting mark, but I 
reflected that in childhood's happy days it was a very 
dangerous undertaking to disobey the worthy pater's 
mandates and an undertaking that was only hazarded 
about once in a year, and somehow the thought occurred 
to me that it might be so still. At any rate, the denizens 
of the forest lived unmolested by my murderous bullet. 
At last away down in the deep woods at the bottom of 
a cedar gulch where the sun hardly ever shone, I heard 
the deep-mouthed bay of the hounds. Experience told 
me that they were "treed" ; that is, that the game was 
brought to bay. Upon the silence of the autumn air rose 
the belling of those dogs. Never, until my enfranchised 
spirit listens to the Divine symphonj^ struck by the im- 
mortal choir (supposing I am so fortunate as to arrive 
there) shall I listen to music one-half so stirring as the 
deep-mouthed tonguing of a pack of trained hounds. 
. They were not far away when I first heard them, so I 
hastened in the direction of the sound. In my haste to 
be the first to "kill" I paid little heed to the route over 
winch I trod. Nearer and clearer came the . sound, and 
now I could distinguish the voice of our old lead hound, 
Trailer. Poor old Trailer, you are gone to the great be- 
yond, and if the All-Father has prepared a place for your 
land then I know you are there. The hoarse voice of 
the vaunted bloodhounds now broke upon my ear. At 
the bottom of a long ridge, in a dense thicket of fir and 
cedar undergrowth, had once lain an immense cedar 
blown down by a storm and its body had been worked 
up into shingles. Beside this stump was where the dogs 
had brought their quarry to bay. I broke through the 
timber and saw them circling about a dark brown animal 
who was crouching against the earth at the foot of the 
stump. My first impression was that the animal was a 
bear, and my second that I did not know what it was. 
The blooded dogs were striving to make their reputation 
good by endeavoring to get at the animal. Their efforts 
were somewhat frustrated by the object of their atten- 
tions.. Whenever one of them would rush in and attempt 
to seize, the besieged would make one sweep of his paw 
and the overzealous dog would be compelled to retire 
some dozen or more feet, heels over head. The lighniiig- 
like claws cut like a knife, and the beast seemed tO' well 
know how to use them. The common dogs, trained in 
woods lore, were chary of rushing in upon the animal 
and were contented to bay him at a safe distance. The 
dogs were circling about the animal so that I found it 
impossible to secure a safe shot without the risk of in- 
juring a dog. 
For some little time I waited until a favorable chance 
presented itself. The animal discovered me at la.st, and 
reared up on his haunches. I called sharply to the leader 
of oitr pack and they all paused. Hastily dropping the 
bead upon the white spot so favorably exposed I pressed 
the trigger. He sank to the ground with hardly a quiver. 
I hurried forward to prevent the dogs from destroying 
the fur, but found only a stubby growth of brown hair. 
It was not a bear but a large, dark brown animal with 
an aldermanic stomach and feet armed with four-inch 
claws, that lay there. I recognized the description as 
fitting the wolverine, and this the first one I had ever 
seen. Beneath the fallen log the wolverine had made 
his home and had evidently been very busy furnishing 
his winter larder. There was a miscellaneous collection 
of slain animals and birds there, enough to keep an aver- 
age restaurant supplied for months. Not one of thcmt 
eaten, or at most only the heads were gone. The hair 
of the animal was not fitted for fur, so I left it where it 
lay, but felt that, while my shot had not found its mark 
in the body of a bear, I had done well ridding the coun- 
try of so rapacious an animal as the wolverine. 
Charles S. Moody. 
Idaho. 
Massachusetts Fish and Game. 
Boston, May 26. — Editor Forest and Stream: Some 
new legislation and changes in fish and game laws made 
by the Legislature the past winter are as follows: 
The close season on pheasants has been extended to 
the date of the "open season for partridge and quail" 
in the year 1907. Since this law received the Governor's 
signature, the date of the opening on quail has been 
made Nov. i, instead of Oct. i. The intent of the 
farmers doubtless was to forbid the shooting of pheas- 
ants prior to Oct. i, 1907, the date on which partridge 
shooting opens. 
Shiners for bait in the Connecticut and Merrimack 
Rivers and their tributaries may be taken in nets or 
seines during October and November, all other fish 
taken in the same to be returned alive to the waters 
from which they were taken. 
On the island of Nantucket, quail are not to be killed 
prior to March i, 1908, as the law reads; but as the 
period from March i to November i is included in 
the close season for the entire State, it will be illegal 
to kill quail on Nantucket prior to Nov. i, 1908. 
Chapter 190 fixes the minimum length of trout for 
the entire State (including Berkshire county) at 6in. 
The law covers taking, having in possession, selling or 
offering for sale, but does not change the present laws 
that relate to persons engaged in rearing trout. 
Chapter 196 provides for the compensation and ex- 
penses of the commissioners on fisheries and game as 
follows: Salaries of the three members, $5-6jo; for 
traveling, printing, etc., $2,550; clerk hire in office. $975; 
enforcement, propagation and distribution of fish, birds, 
etc., and maintenance of hatcheries, $33,210; for stock- 
ing great ponds, $500; for stocking brooks, $300; for 
protection of lobsters with eggs attached $4,000; total, 
$46,665. The yearly expenditures, prior to the appoint- 
ment of Capt. Collins to the chairmanship of the board, 
were about $14,000. , 
A comparison of these figures speaks eloquently for 
the grand services rendered by the late chairman. 
A'Toreover, it indicates the great advance in public 
sentiment in Massachusetts that resulted from the or- 
ganization of the "Central Committee for protection of 
fish and game," and the incorporation of the Forest 
and Stream "No Sale" platform into Massachusetts 
laws as relates to woodcock and partridge in 1900. As 
one thoroughly familiar with all the work done for 
more than a quarter of a century in our State for the 
advancement of fish and game interests, I do not hesi- 
tate to say, that, during all that time, no event has 
awakened an interest so wide-spread or done so much 
to strengthen the fish and game department of our 
State goverrfment as the enactment of the non-sale 
law. In a previous letter I have referred to a state- 
ment made by the late Capt. Collins before the 
Greenfield Sportsmen's Association only a few weeks 
prior to his death, regarding the great influence of 
such clubs. Your readers are aware that at the time 
of his last illness he was engaged in writing the re- 
port for 1904. In that report he says: "The increased 
number of sportsmen's clubs is of advantage to the 
State; they can do much to mould public sentiment in 
their neighborhood, and by example and precept make 
for greater respect for law and the rights of the various 
classes of the community." * * * "They inculcate 
an intelligent interest in the fish and game problems of 
the State." 
In another portion of the report it is declared that 
the "notable work" of the fish and game protective 
associations deserves the "interest and support of all 
loyal citizens," and it emphasizes the benefits of their 
efforts in perpetuating the quail, "without which," he 
says, "this bird might long ago have disappeared from 
our State." 
In view of the history of the work of propagation 
and protection accomplished in Massachusetts since 
the advent of Captain Collins to our commission, arid 
the formation of the Central Committee of clubs in 
December, 1899, no one conversant with the facts would 
have the hardihood, to call in question the views ad- 
vanced in the report as above stated in reference to the 
grand resuhs that have ensued from the harmonious 
and united action of the clubs through the Central 
Committee. The passage of the anti-sale law and the 
sentiment aroused all over the State in that memorable 
campaign of 1900 was the opening of the vista of 
possibilities for the organizing of a plan of warden 
service so ably developed by the late chairman of the 
commission. To the clubs belongs the credit of 
sowing the gopd seed, and to Capt. Collins we are iii-- 
