260 
FOREST AND STREAM 
MAY, 1920 
ITHACA WINS 
This is A. A. THOMPSON, the 
break 
more targets 
with an 
ITHACA. 
Catalog free. 
Single barrel trap 
guns,$75.00andup. 
Double guns, $45.00 
and up. 
Address Box 25 
ITHACA GUN 
CO. 
Ithaca, IM. Y. 
Canadian who won 
the Grand Interna- 
ti onal Handicap 
with an ITHACA 
Gun because any 
You missed — you could have had 
another shot with a 
MAXIM 
SILENCER 
Price, .22 cal., $6.00. Send 6c in 
stamps for catalog and booklet of 
humorous stories of noiseless shoot- 
ing. 
THE MAXIM SILENCER CO. 
69 Homestead Ave. Hartford, Conn. 
* Hunters -Trappers -Sportsmen! 
GET A BIG MAIL 
W E supply publishers, mail order houses, manu- 
facturers of fishing tackle, guns, ammunition, fur 
buyers and many other lines of trade with names 
and addresses. 
If you want to keep posted and save from 10 to 40/5 
on everything you buy. send us your name and addres$ 
with 10 cents to cover registration fee for one. year* 
SPORTSMEN'S SERVICE BUREAU * 
30 Qijiton Sl/td Newwt. N. J. 
WILDERNESS DWELLERS 
HUNTING BIG GAME WITH A CAMERA IN THE HEART 
OF THE NEW BRUNSWICK WILDS-CHAPTER THREE 
By THOMAS TRAVIS 
E were called in the 
gray dawn of next 
day. The sky was 
still overcast yet we 
thought it would 
clear, so we started. 
But the rains de- 
s c e n d e d and the 
floods came, so after 
a four-mile pole, we 
turned back to our 
snug camp at Aaron 
More’s, and spent the 
day watching the little woods folk. We 
even tried for salmon again, but no rise 
rewarded us. None the less we got some- 
thing from the pools, for in a back-set 
nearby were a couple of beavers, shy, oh, 
very shy, but exceedingly interesting to 
watch as they worked and floated on the 
surface: 
Take a photo? Remember the light? 
Alas we could only lie there in the wet 
and with heart full of envy watch, watch 
till at some slight sound or scent they 
dove with that startling smack of tail, 
which, in the silent wilderness sounded 
like a brick dropped into an echoing 
cistern. 
Early next day, the thirtieth of July, 
we started once more on the long pole 
upstream. I put the date down because 
it was for me a big RED-LETTER day. 
We saw many beaver cuttings, also a 
muskrat or two paddling cunningly 
among the roots, stream swept, and fur- 
nishing deep caves for the refuge of 
these furry cousins of the beaver. We 
dug out a kingfisher but got only some 
egg shells. 
And the inevitable sheldrakes! Almost 
was I tempted to draw gun and plaster 
them right and left. There were the 
parent birds, and a big family of flappers. 
And never shall I hear that word in the 
Broadway sense again without seeing 
these flappers of the wilderness. Unable 
to fly, fools to the center of their stupid 
duck souls, they squawked and flapped 
ahead of us, simply yawping to all the 
world of our coming If only we could 
have passed them it wouldn’t have been 
so bad, then the wilds would have been 
undisturbed until we got within range. 
But the miserable flappers would neither 
fly nor run past us, they insisted on 
screeching to heaven in warning to their 
wild kin. 
So we planned a flank movement. Two 
of us left the canoes behind, and taking 
a faint shore trail, walked some half 
mile back from the river, then went 
ahead till we had left them behind. And 
thus it was that the flappers really 
caused our great good luck. 
The trail on which we walked was 
here a sort of lumber sled trail, and with 
its dirt pages was a thrilling book. Note 
that up to this time on our tramps we 
had been eagerly watching for moose and 
deer tracks, excited when we saw fresh 
ones among the tracks of men on the 
trail. Now the case was reversed. A 
human track would have set us speculat- 
ing, for here there was no spoor of men, 
but all kinds of furtive wild folk, their 
marks furrowed, cut, printed all over till 
the road became a veritable book of the 
wilderness. There were the droppings 
of fox, the furry morsels regurgitated by 
hawks and owls, there were neat tracks 
of deer, so new that the moisture was 
even now cozing back into them. There 
was the spoor of porcupines, the marks 
of the fisher. But one thing we marked 
by its surprising absence, scarcely a 
squirrel showed its refuse of nibbled nuts 
and seeds. There had been an epidemic 
of some sort that almost cleaned out the 
little red squirrel which once was such a 
comrade of the trail here in the silent- 
land of Christmas Trees. 
Huge trees towered from the trail side. 
From the thickets came the truly ineffable 
and sweet song of the “Old Sam Peabody 
Bird,” the vesper sparrow of the orni- 
thologists, that seemed, more than any 
other sound to incarnate the spirit of 
these woods. So clear and individual that 
song was, it still stands out in my mem- 
ory as the song par excellence. 
(CONTINUED ON PAGE 275) 
On the further shore a cow moose was splashing at the edge of the water 
