THE PINNATED GROUSE. 
95 
picked none of them up, so satiated with Grouse was he, as well as every 
member of his family. My own servants preferred the fattest flitch of 
bacon to their flesh, and not unfrequently laid them aside as unfit for 
cooking. 
Such an account may appear strange to you, reader ; but what will you 
think when I tell you, that, in that same country, where, twenty-five years 
ago, they could not have been sold at more than one cent a-piece, scarcely 
one is now to be found ? The Grouse have abandoned the State of Ken- 
tucky, and removed (like the Indians) every season farther to the westward, 
to escape from the murderous white man. In the Eastern States, where 
some of these birds still exist, game-laws have been made for their protec- 
tion during a certain part of the year, when, after all, few escape to breed 
the next season. To the westward you must go as far at least as the State 
of Illinois, before you meet with this species of Grouse, and there too, as 
formerly in Kentucky, they are decreasing at a rapid rate. The sportsman 
of the Eastern States now makes much ado to procure them, and will 
travel with friends and dogs, and all the paraphernalia of hunting, a hun- 
dred miles or more, to shoot at most a dozen brace in a fortnight ; and 
when he returns successful to the city, the important results are commu- 
nicated to all concerned. So rare have they become in the markets of 
Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, that they sell at from five to ten 
dollars the pair. An excellent friend of mine, resident in the city of New 
York, told me that he refused 100 dollars for ten brace, which he had shot 
on the Pocano mountains of Pennsylvania. 
On the eastern declivities of our Atlantic coast, the districts in which the 
Pinnated Grouse are still to be met with, are some portions of the State 
of New Jersey, the “ brushy” plains of Long Island, Martha’s Vineyard, the 
Elizabeth Islands, Mount Desert Island in the State of Maine, and a certain 
tract of barreny country in the latter State, lying not far from the famed 
Mars Hill, where, however, they have been confounded with the Willow 
Grouse. In the three first places mentioned, notwithstanding the preventive 
laws now in force, they are killed without mercy by persons such as in 
England are called poachers, even while the female bird is in the act of 
sitting on her eggs. Excepting in the above named places, not a bird of 
the species is at present to be found, until you reach the lower parts of 
Kentucky, where, as I have told you before, a few still exist. In the State 
of Illinois, all the vast plains of the Missouri, those bordering the Arkansas 
river, and on the prairies of Opelousas, the Pinnated Grouse is still very 
abundant, and very easily procured. 
As soon as the snows have melted away, and the first blades of grass issue 
from the earth, announcing the approach of spring, the Grouse, which had 
