Forest and Stream 
A Weekly Journal of the Rod and Gun. 
Copyright, 1904, by Forest and Stream Publishing Co. 
Terms, $4 a Year. 10 Cts. a Copy. 
Six Months, $2. 
( 
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 2 8, 1908. 
( VOL. LXV.— No. 22, 
I No. 346 Broadway, New Y ork. 
The object of this journal will be to studiously 
promote a healthful interest in outdoor recre^ 
ation, and to cultivate a refined taste for natural 
objects. Announcement in first number of 
Forest and Stream, Aug. 14, 1873. 
IN THE LODGES OF THE BLACK FEET. 
We begin to-day the publication of a series of chapters 
descriptive of life with a wild people on the Western 
plains. It is a graphic and intimate picture, such as per- 
haps has never before been written; and its interest will 
prove to be well sustained to the end. 
PRIZES FOR GAME HEADS. 
The Forest and Stream offers three prizes of $20, $10 
and $5 respectively for the best moose heads secured in 
the year 1905 in the hunting grounds of the United States 
and Canada. 
It offers also three prizes of $15, $10 and $5 respectively 
for the best white-tail deer heads taken in the hunting 
season of 1905 in the United States or Canada. 
The heads will be judged from photographs submitted 
to the Forest and Stream. In estimating their merits 
the two qualities of size and symmetry will be taken into 
consideration. With the photograph of each head must 
be sent a memorandum of the place and the time of its 
taking and the name of the person taking it. The compe- 
tition will be open to amateur hunters only ; and with this 
single restriction it will be open to the world. There are 
no entrance fees. The photographs submitted will be the 
property of Forest and Stream. Entries for the compe- 
tition must be made not later than Jan. 15, 1906. The 
awards will be determined by a committee of representa- 
tive sportsmen to be announced later. 
sac at the sides of the neck had some — as yet entirely 
undetermined- — relation to the drumming of the grouse. 
This, of course, remains to be proved. 
Certainly no one has ever had such ample opportunity 
for studying and recording by photography the drumming 
of the ruffed grouse as had Professor Hodge, who, in 
two days, took no less than forty photographs of the bird 
in action, and his account, illustrated by these pictures in 
the Country Calendar, must be regarded as the most im- 
portant contribution ever made to the subject. 
Professor Hodge believes, as has long been agreed, that 
the drumming of the ruffed grouse is a mating call. The 
fact that the bird drums in autumn is no valid objection 
to this conclusion, since many birds produce in autumn 
sounds which we are accustomed to regard as peculiar to 
the breeding season, though such sounds are often or 
usually made by young birds. 
THE BOTTLE lOKE. 
DRUMMING OF THE RUFFED GROUSE. 
Few subjects have been so much discussed by sports- 
men as the whistle of the woodcock and the drumming 
of the ruffed grouse. To the latter sound much mystery 
has always attached. The dull roll of thunder comes out 
of the air, from a distance, in the depth of the forest, and 
excites the wonder of the listener, but its direction and 
its distance seem so uncertain that he is not likely to try 
to find it. Few persons have seen the bird in the act of 
drumming, and of those few, a still smaller number have 
been trained to observe the ways of nature or to draw 
just conclusions from what they may have seen. Never- 
theless, many people — some observers and some mere 
theorists — have expounded their views on the subject. 
It has been declared that the grouse drums by beating 
his wings against the object on which he stands, against 
his own body, or against each other above the back; but 
none of these have satisfied all the conditions and all are 
to be rejected. The best descriptions of the drumming 
ever given is that by Mr. William Brewster, printed in 
the old American Sportsman, in 1874, and the still earlier 
one of Audubon in his “Birds of America.” 
In this year of -1905, however. Prof. C. F. Plodge, of 
Clarke University, carried on a series of observations on 
his domesticated ruffed grouse which point to another ex- 
planation, and which, illustrated by a multitude of photo- 
graphs, appear to show that the sound is made by the 
rapidly repeated blows of the stiff wing quills against the 
erected and expanded feathers of the side, which thus 
form a feather cushion. Professor Hodge says : “In 
fact, the sound, so far as quality goes, can be best imi- 
tated by striking with a wing properly stretched or even 
a concave fan on an extremely light eiderdown cushion.” 
Professor Hodge conjectures, too, that the bird while 
drumming fills the air sac of the breast and abdomen. 
“In this way the contour surfaces of the strong wing sup- 
ports along the sides are made to inclose a large cavity 
filled with air and this acts like the resonance chamber of 
a drum, and yields the booming throb to the air.” 
Many ornithologists, judging by analogy from the 
of other grouse, have conjef^qred that thp 
and in the fall, when their mind turns to dog and guh, 
and perchance between time, when the days wax hottest, 
or the bleak, chilling winds sweep from the north, for a 
good thirst is not a matter of labor or sport, nor is the 
knowledge of what will best assuage it confined to guilds 
or classes. 
To construct a joke which shall be piquant, pointed, 
pertinent and merry, is a matter of no small mental activ- 
ity and endowment. Such witty brightness is far above 
the intellectual compass of the average jokesmith of busi- 
ness, who, with calm premeditation to earn his wages and 
support his family by the sweat of his brow, valiantly at- 
tempts to yank mental glistenings from his foggy sensor- 
ium. Thus come many pointless jokes. 
The joke-maker has unlimited commercial incentive to 
j oke to the limit of his capacity. The trade demand, even 
for fourth-rate wit or humor, far exceeds the supply, or 
the capacity to manufacture it. 
The raw material, unfortunately, is long since second- 
handed, so far as it is available, inasmuch as it has been 
worked over and over from time immemorial. Even at 
that, it is limited in quantity, hence the trade demand, 
even for fourth-rate jokes, far exceeds the supply. This 
is an encouragement to- him who produces the imitation 
or bogus product, and affords opportunity for malice to 
disport itself as humor. 
Of the malicious jokes, none is more flagrant and false 
than the “bottle joke,” that moss-grown play of the fat- 
witted which -portrays the sportsman afield with a bottle 
around which man, dog and gun revolve. This has been 
served up from time immemorial in all its combinations, 
recasts, variants and attenuations, till a certain part of 
the non-sporting public would be justified in believing 
that a well-filled bottle was the essential part of a sports- 
man’s equipment, and that sport itself was a mere pretext 
to betake oneself to the woods where, in seclusion, all 
constraint would be abolished. 
No baser libel could be perpetuated on sportsmanship 
than that which seriously implies that the bottle is an 
integral part of the sportsman’s outfit. The effervescent, 
mirthful joke, full of fun and merriment without malice, 
brightens the moments and benefits mankind ; but the 
malicious joke, which leaves hurt and, false opinion, is 
deserving of condemnation. A sportsman may be a total 
abstainer or he may not, precisely as other men in other 
vocations or avocations may be. Indeed, the sportsman 
of to-day is one and the same man in business and sport. 
In other words, the business men of America are all 
sportsmen, following sport in some one or all of its dif- 
ferent forms of shooting, fishing, yachting, camping, etc. 
However, in this matter, one’s judgment should be fully 
tempered with charity, for the reason that the jokesmiths, 
earning their bread by a racking mental anguish, com- 
pared to which the sweat of the brow is as naught, are 
not unworthy of commiseration, not forgetting a kind 
thought for the public also. They are an ancient, vener- 
able guild, of whom more was expected than their treas- 
ury contained. There are but few elementary jokes, the 
most honored of which are the mother-in-law joke and its 
attenuations, the doctor and his patients, etc., with the 
bottle joke, in all its variants of snakebites, lost key-hole, 
swaying lamp-posts, etc. With this dearth of rough joke 
material on the one hand, and the antiques of thought 
pervading the gray matter of the average jokesmith on 
the other, the true spirit is without doubt to feel thankful 
that the joking conditions have long since reached bed 
rock, and cannot become worse. 
The bottle joke will probably survive, and bounce up 
in due season in the spring when the young man’s mind 
or t|}e old matt’s najiid lightly tttrfi§ to thoughts of fishing. 
AMERICAN AND ENGLISH FOXHOUNDS. 
The recent contest between a pack of American 
hounds, the Grafton pack, of Massachusetts, Mr. Harry 
W. Smith, master, and the Middlesex pack, English 
hounds, of Virginia, resulted in a victory for the Ameri- 
can hounds. With this victory there were associated the 
honors of which the Townsend trophy was the emblem, 
and the $2,000 stake. The official award, after two weeks 
of sport and critical observance of the packs’ doings by 
the expert judges, was rendered as follows: 
We award the match and stake, together with the Townsend 
cup, to the Grafton pack, which, in our estimation, did the better 
work with the object of killing the fox in view. 
The decision was signed by Mr. Charles McEachern, 
of Montreal, and Mr. James K. Maddux, of Warrenton, 
Va. The kill was an essential consideration in the match 
as contemplated, but as neither pack had killed within 
the official knowledge of the judges, that circumstance 
was necessarily omitted in consideration of the award. 
There was a large gathering of fox hunters, gentlemen 
and ladies, who rode pluckily across country-' fegdrdless 
of walls, ditches and rough going. Several' hard falls 
occurred, but fortunately no one was seriously injured. 
The race between the two packs, one American the 
other English, has much more of importance than appears 
on the face of it. For many years past, the American 
foxhound has been sneered at as a frivolity of the hunt- 
ing field, by English fox hunters and by some American 
fox hunters who had seen the English hounds hunt in 
England, or who formed their opinions and derived their 
knowledge from hearsay. Some packs of pure English 
hounds were established in this country; but the rivalry 
between the respective supporters of the two kinds of 
hounds was uncompromisingly distinct. Some informal 
races were run in the past to determine which of the 
breeds was the better, but apart from establishing a gen- 
eral belief in the superiority of the American hounds, 
they were indeterminate. This race between the Grafton 
pack and the Middlesex pack, was run under all the 
formal conditions essential to an authoritative decision. 
For the English hound, nearly all or quite all the, attri- 
butes of excellence were claimed. In particular it was 
asserted that he was much faster, much more enduring 
and much more of a true foxhound than was his lighter- 
built, taller and less robust confrere of the States. Gn 
the other hand, the American fox hunter held that the 
heavy-boned, heavy-bodied and comparatively short- 
legged English hound was physically incapable of com- 
peting with the American foxhound, however much satis- 
faction he may give to English sportsmen on English 
fields. , , , . . J ■ 
This match will accomplish much in officially establish- 
ing the long mooted question of superiority, although 
many more matches may be necessary before thd' matter 
is settled acceptably to all. One match cart hardly be 
said to be absolute in its scope over all. The 'more 
matches there are the better for the sport. Nevertheless, 
up to the present the American foxhound has proved 
himself to be other than the frivolity of sport at which 
he was estimated by some who now know him better. 
Commissioner James S. Whipple has appointed Mr. 
John B. Burnham, of Essex, a district game protector. 
Mr. Burnham has been strongly supported as a Candidate 
for the office of chief protector, and it is assumed that 
Commissioner Whipple has made him a district protector 
in order to qualify him for the larger office, the law- re- 
quiring that the chief protector shall be named frdrii -the 
list of district protectors. If this assumption shall- prove 
correct the appointment will be received with unbounded 
satisfaction by all the friends of the forest, game and 
fish who are cognizant of Mr. Burnham’s qualifications 
for the office. 
«■ 
W hen a rrian says that he prefers dogs to- human beings 
it will probably be fQ'tW4 that humfitt bdligs prefer a „dog 
tp Win- ....... - . 1. V 
