January, 1922 
FOREST AND STREAM 
7 
with one barrel, just a “chance lick,” 
and old Lucy took after the animal. By 
good fortune she overhauled it before 
it got into the woods. When I came up 
to her in the moonlight I found that we 
had bagged a big wildcat — an old male. 
He tipped the scales at forty - four 
pounds; and if I hadn’t arrived on 
schedule he would have added the weight 
of at least one spring lamb to his own. 
When I got the cat to the house I called 
your mother to look at it. Never had 
we seen the head of any animal have 
the Satanic quality of that wildcat’s. 
Well, one more marauder will maraude 
no more. When the cat’s skin is suffi- 
ciently dry for tanning, I shall send it 
on to you to hang on your wall. 
enemy of the wood-duck here is the alli- 
gator. This old armored U-boat cruiser 
captures many of them ; and such a trag- 
edy in nature seems a real one of Beauty 
and the Beast. 
In your late letter you mentioned snow 
flurries on April 8. Here all is warmth, 
activity, brightness, and lusty growth is 
going on everywhere. I have planted 
the whole Mainfield in rice on shares 
with the negroes. In doing so we had 
a narrow escape from the blackbirds. 
You know that unless a ricefield happens 
to be very dry, we have to broadcast 
rice on the prepared land. It sticks in 
the mud, and there is really no way in 
which to cover it. 
In order to keep the birds off until the 
floodgate. From what he said about the 
thing’s cold, scaly hide, I guessed it to be 
an alligator. 
We got two boathooks and went to 
work; and after about an hour we dis- 
lodged a huge bull alligator, fifteen feet 
long and weighing close on five hundred 
pounds. In attempting to pass from the 
river to the canal in the ricefield, he had 
used the floodgate as a convenient short- 
cut. In that he had become wedged fast 
against some blunt pins that old Cud jo 
had left in making the trunk. His bulk 
occupied all the space available, and so 
effectively shut out the water. 
We killed the ’gator, and inside him 
we found the remains of two of my 
Duroc-Jersey pigs. The negroes skinned 
Starting after a covey of quail on the wide fields of Hampton 
V^HEN I wrote you in February, the 
^ first migrating birds were begin- 
ning to move northward. Now nearly 
all of them are gone. A few of the 
warblers, the tanagers, the orioles and 
the goldfinches are still with us ; but they 
are so restless that they are on their way 
somewhere. All our wild ducks are gone 
except the crippled mallards and black- 
ducks (that will breed here) and the 
wood-ducks. These latter are very plen- 
tiful, and they promise to be more abun- 
dant this season than they have been for 
many years. You know, they nest in 
the swamps, in fresh-water reservoirs 
and in cypress ponds in the woods, plac- 
ing their nests in shallow hollows or on 
the flat crutches of limbs. I have found 
several nests of late years. All of these 
were deeply lined with feathers from the 
mother duck’s breast. Some of them 
were quite high above the water. These 
young are as black as little Plymouth 
Rock chicks, and from birth they are 
lively. When only a few days old the 
mother pushes them out of the nest and 
into the water. I am told that when a 
wood-duck nests away from water she 
will fly to it with her young upon her 
back. I have not seen this, but it is not 
unlikely, considering what we know that 
the woodcock and the willet will do with 
their young. After the eagle, the worst 
rice sprouts, we flow the field to a depth 
of about eight inches. The rice sprouts 
under the water. When the stalks are 
about four or five inches high we draw 
off the water gradually. Well, we sowed 
one afternoon, expecting to flood early 
next morning. But when Will came up, 
not long after daylight, he reported that 
the floodgate had become jammed. He 
said that there was something fast in it. 
I knew that the blackbirds would find 
the rice just as soon as there was light 
enough to see it. The marshy river edges 
along the whole length of the plantation 
are regular nesting places for them. I 
like to hear their liquid notes — their 
“o-g-l-ee’s” — at this time of the year. 
But they are a pest on sown rice. 
I hurried down to the big floodgate, 
at which several negroes were already 
gathered. Both gates of the gate were 
wide open, and the pressure of water 
from the river was tremendous ; but 
only a muddy trickle was coming through 
the trunk. Old Cudjo, who is the man 
who made the floodgate, volunteered to 
crawl in to examine the innards of the 
thing. We watched while he vanished 
into the black hole. Suddenly w'e heard 
him cry out. Then he reappeared, gain- 
ing the bank with extraordinary quick- 
ness. He was badly frightened, and de- 
clared that a live creature was in the 
the brute and cut from his muscular 
tail heavy slabs of steak. They love to 
eat this. They declare that alligator 
meat makes a man courageous. If that 
is the only road to courage, I fear that 
I am not going to travel it; for eating 
a reptile is something like eating a cat : 
I can’t make myself believe that it will 
go down ; or, going down, will sit easy. 
Your friends may not believe this story 
of the alligator, but it happened just as 
I’m telling you. 
To return for a minute to blackbirds. 
I must mention to you a nest of theirs 
that was a beauty. You know the little 
stream that runs down into the ricefield 
out of the pinewoods? Just where it 
cuts through that spouty corner, long 
grass and reeds overlap the narrow rib- 
bon of water between abrupt banks. Len- 
der the tallest reeds for a shelter, and 
bound to the grass stems that moved 
back and forth in the eddy of the water’s 
flow, I found this nest. It was so set 
that it moved continually on the stream: 
and the mother bird sitting on the nest 
did not seem at all to mind the motion 
of this wild-ficld cradle that rocked so 
long before her babies were born. As 1 
watched the pretty sight the old male 
redwing flew in slow, erratic circles over 
my head, lamenting my intrusion. But 
