Vol XCII JANUARY, 1922 No. 1 
A SPORTSMAN TO HIS SON 
LETTERS WRITTEN FROM HAMPTON PLANTATION, SOUTH CAROLINA 
CONCERNING THE THINGS THAT ARE NEAREST A BOY’S HEART 
W HEN you left us after Christ- 
mas to go back to your work in 
the North, I promised to keep 
you in touch with all the do- 
ings down home here. Your mother will 
doubtless write you more frequently than 
I shall, and her letters will be of various 
matters ; mine will concern those things 
that are nearest your heart, as I know 
it : the sport-lore and sport-craft and 
sport-news of the plantation. And if in 
my letters you smell some of the black 
sandy loam of Hampton, or scent the 
good smell of pinestraw we haul to bed 
the stock, or come across the beauty of 
the growing corn and cotton, it will be 
because I am a planter and you are a 
planter’s son. 
For the first time this winter great 
clouds of wild ducks and geese have been 
coming up the Santee. They have eaten 
everything that is to be had on the lower 
reaches of the delta, and now they are 
moving up here; but it’s the beginning 
of their spring migration. Soon, now, 
they will be passing over you in southern 
Pennsylvania. It may be that their 
determined flight will not begin until 
March; but when it does, it will be a 
real one. You and I are just six hun- 
dred miles apart: you over the old ob- 
literated (thank God!) Mason-Dixon 
Line, and I down here on the delta of 
the Santee in South Carolina. And to 
think that a wild duck or a wild goose 
can cover the distance between sundown 
and sunrise ! I suppose that I have often 
been a goose, and perhaps a wild one ; 
but I never feel that I want to be one 
until I see those white triangles point- 
ing northward, and begin to think how 
quickly you and I could see each other 
if we had such wings. But Nature 
evens things : it’s better to have the 
brains of a man than the wings of a 
goose. 
Y OU ought to have been here last 
week with that long 12-gauge gun 
of yours; I had need of some one who 
can shoot hard and fast to help me. You 
By ARCHIBALD RUTLEDGE 
know, I have been losing many of my 
best Duroc-Jersey pigs from thieves of 
various kinds : wildcats mostly, and oc- 
casionally an old bald eagle from the 
delta will drop on one. But the other 
day I had the surprise and fight of my 
life trying to keep a flock of turkey vul- 
tures from stealing a whole litter. 
Success 
The young sow, the mother of the 
brood, had made for herself a fine bed 
of pinestraw under those thick-headed 
bull pines on the north end of the corn- 
field. I saw her at work one day, mak- 
ing preparations ; and I took a foolish 
notion noi to pen her in the stable lot, 
but to let her start her little ones in 
natural surroundings. It was to be her 
first brood, and she was a little wild. 
But my plan was more sentimental than 
wise. A man should take no chances 
with his stock when there are vurmints 
about, especially with bacon where it is; 
for nowadays every little pig has a 
meaning and a value of its own. A 
few days after I had noticed the sow, 
when my mind was on going down to 
see her again, my attention was attracted 
in her direction by a great cloud of buz- 
zards sailing and circling over the edges 
of the cornfield. You know what we 
think when we have such a gathering: 
either that some of the stock is dead, 
or that, venturing too far after tcmpt- 
ingly green grass in the muddy riccfield, 
a cow or an o.x has become so bogged 
that it cannot extricate itself. At such 
times we have to be very quick to come 
to the creature’s assistance; for turkey 
buzzards will pick out the living animal’s 
eyes just as soon as it is seen to be help- 
less. The black vulture, our other scav- 
enger, will not touch an animal until it 
is dead. 
Naturally, I thought that the poor 
young sow had not been able to bring 
her young into the world, or that some 
of them died. Anyway, I hurried across 
the cornfield. On coming near the pines 
buzzards began to flap up from the 
ground, while those in the sky veered 
away. What was my astonishment, and 
anger, too, at those black robbers when 
I saw, backed up against the stout bole 
of a pine, the plucky young mother, her 
bristles up, her eyes narrowed and 
bright, and with blood running down 
her face — while huddled beneath her 
flanks palpitated nine little pink-nosed 
babies ! She had been standing off the 
buzzards — the big cowards that had 
come in a raiding party to steal her 
young. And she must have been holding 
her own pretty well, for the little pigs 
were not scarred, while the ground un- 
der the pines was strewed with a goodly 
