1887 
THE SPORTSMAN’S JOURNAL. 
391 
XX V/// 
7 ^ /X. 
much smaller, and about eight or ten inches may be taken 
as the average length. 
The trepang, when prepared for market, is an ugly look- 
ing, brown colored substance, very hard and rigid, and can 
be eaten only after being softened by water and a lengthened 
process of cooking, when it is reduced to a sort of thick 
soup by the Chinese, who are very fond of it ; and when 
cooked by a Chinaman who understands the art, it makes 
an excellent dish which the Europeans at Manila regard 
very highly. 
The preparation of the trepang for market is very simple 
They are to be boiled in water, either salt or fresh, for about 
twenty minutes, and then slit open, cleaned and dried. 
Those dried in the open air or sunshine bring a higher price 
than those dried over a wood fire, which latter is the usual 
process adopted' by the Malays. Some varieties require 
boiling for only a few minutes, or till they become firm to 
the touch. They must be dried thoroughly, as they absorb 
moisture readily, and are then liable to become moldy and 
spoil. 
No one has yet attempted this fishing in the North Pa- 
cific, although trepangs abound in the waters along the 
northwestern coast of America, particularly In the region of 
the Queen Charlotte Islands and the Alexander Islands of 
Ala-ka, as well as on the west coast of Vancouver Island. 
Some time ago an Indian brought me two good specimens, 
which he had caught at low tide near the end of the mill 
wharf at Point Hudson. I showed them to several China- 
men, who at once pronounced them to be the best quality of 
“whetong,” one of the Chinese names for the trepang. 
When properly cured they are a valuable food product, 
and will sell in Canton for about forty-five dollars per ton. 
This indicates that there may be a deal of money in 
the business, if rightly conducted, as a cargo of a hundred 
tons could easily be cured at some place in a few months 
with a sufficient force of Indians to collect them. The cost 
is simply to gather the trepangs at low tide, or have the In- 
dians do so, and then have them properly dried, which is an 
easy process, though one requiring some care and skill. A 
few inexpensive experiments will enable one to ascertain 
the correct way of preparing these slugs, which will be 
likely to find a ready and lucrative sale to the Chinese mer- 
chants. — James G. Swan, in the Bulletin of. the U. S. Fish 
Commission. 
MASc.iLONGE Fishing with Light Tackle. — St. Paul, 
Minn . — Editor American Field : — A gentleman of my ac- 
quaintance recently gave me an account of a long and very 
exciting fight he had with a sixteen-pound mascalonge 
which he had hooked when fishing for bass. His tackle 
consisted of a light eight-ounce rod and very thin silk line, 
while his hook was baited with a large minnow, about five 
inches long. The fish after being hooked sprang out of the 
water like a salmon, showing its whole form above the sur- 
face of the water. It made fierce dashes and would run the 
line out forty or fifty yards, although the angler constantly 
kept a firm pressure on the reel. Finally, after a constant 
warfare for thirty or thirty-five minutes, the noble fish gave 
up the fight, came up to the boat and turned belly up. It 
seems to me this must be very exciting sport ; more so than 
trolling, by which method I have always been accustomed 
to fish for mascalonge. However, should a twenty-five or 
thirty pound mascalonge be hooked when using such light 
tackle, I am inclined to think the odds would be too much 
in favor of the fish to make it enjoyable. D. B. 
NOTES. 
St. Joseph, Mo. — A circular has been issued by the 
Fish Commission of Missouri as follows: “On October 10, 
we will be ready for the distribution of young fish. We 
have a full supply' of bass and carp at our St. Louis ponds, 
and a large supply of carp at our hatchery at St. Joseph, 
Mo. Orders addressed to Elias Cottrell at St. Joseph, Mo., 
or to Philip Kopplin, Jr., at St. Louis, Mo., will have 
prompt attention. Terms as follows for cans and cartage 
to express offices: $1.25 will be charged, when you send a 
can only 25 cents will be charged for cartage. Money must 
accompany each order. No fish sent out C. O. D. Send 
name of postoffice, county and nearest express office. We 
have also six million wall-eyed pike fry, and several thou- 
sand California trout that will only be distributed from our 
state car in public waters we think adapted for the same. 
Upon receipt of 3 cents postage Mr. H. M. Garlichs, 
Chairman Missouri Fish Commission, St. Joseph, Mo., will 
mail you 120 page circular on fish culture, and how to con- 
struct ponds and feed fish.” The state fish hatchery has 
never been more successful than the present year, and the 
results are very satisfactory. H. C. C-aktek. 
Jlaituiffol ^IsIcFjr. 
THE GROUSE FAMILY.-NO. 4. . ^ 
BY W. B. 
The Ruffed Grouse. 
To leave the crowded streets of the city or town in the 
Autumnal season of the year — a season in which the hum 
and attractions of business are to most minds the one thing 
needful, the summum honum of human life, and to retire 
into the quiet woods, after the beautiful Indian Summer has 
touched them with its brightest colors, from the scarlet and 
crimson of the sugar maple through many intervening 
shades to the soberer yellow and brown of the oak leaves ; 
to wander along gun in hand, through the silent sequestered 
shades, watching on all sides and momentarily expecting to 
start your game; to dart down into glens flashing at the 
bottom with running streams which you cross at your peril, 
and then to climb cautiously up the hillsides, with the aft- 
ernoon’s sunbeams, brighter than the maple’s leaves, strik- 
ing you in the face slantingly from the beech holes, in 
such a way as to make you hurry your footsteps, as if the 
sun were already setting; to plunge still deeper into the 
gloom of the forest, where many a darkening inanimate ob- 
ject, seen in the distance, sends a thrill through your soul, 
and causes you to pause and to raise your gun to your face, 
as if now, now, the darling o’oject of your pursuit were 
actually in sight ; to get your whole being wrought up to 
such a iiitch of expectancy and frenzied excitement that the 
perspiration starts at every pore, and your nerves shake like 
the leaves of the aspen; and then to have a whole covey of 
your prized “partridges” spring up under your very feet, 
with that startling whirr! whirr! whirr! darting off in every 
direction, some straight up in the air, some sideways, where 
the leaves are thickest, and some again in a straight line 
from you ; and then with a mighty impulse and resolution, 
so far to regain your consciousness and self-control as to 
send a brace of them flattering to their fall through the 
dense evergreen branches, and to be able to pick both of 
them up, after an anxious search— if all this is not happines, 
if the world has got anything more satisfactory to 
offer, I must confess, for one, I despair of ever finding it^ 
for I do not know where to look for it. “Some place the 
bliss” in wealth, honors and other worldly advantages. But 
all these, I hold, even in their best estate, are tame in com- 
parison with the hunter’s rapture of soul under such cir. 
mjFFKD GKOHSE. 
cumstances as I have tried to depict. Others again hold up 
to view the passion of love as the highest guerdon of hu- 
manity. And for a brief season, while no cloud casts its 
shadow across the lover’s path, this will favorably compare 
with the hunter’s heaven. But then the clouds will come^ 
and what is worse, often, too often, they come to stay, and 
the lover is left disconsolate and in darkness perhaps for 
the balance of his days; while in the true hunter’s soul, 
there is always the “silver lining” shooting across and gild- 
ing all his disappointments. His love never grows old or 
cold. Whenever and wherever the obj ect of it appears, in 
the mountain or the lea, there is a plighting of the old 
troth, a surge of the old tempest, a renewal of the old 
rhapsody, a meeting that calls forth all the intensity of 
early passion, and more too. Others again will point to the 
religious enthusiast as the highest type of human happi- 
ness. But I doubt if even he, except in some odd moment 
of emotion-al ecstacy, ever reaches the highest pinnacle of 
the hunter’s beatitude. And besides he is alwavs subject to 
the same vicissitudes which mar the lover’s joys— a pro- 
pensity to harden his hetirt and let his zeal grow cold, to 
lose grace, to slip and slide from his first faith. But your real 
“blooded” hunter never allows his zeal and aflections to flag. 
They increase in intensity, year by year, and every day in 
the year; and, through his passionate love of Nature, they 
constrain to a worship, which your ordinary religionist but 
seldom feels — a worship begotten of the hunter’s uncon- 
strained intercourse with the outer world— a worship 
which, like that of some Eastern nations, is not offered in 
temples made with hands, and which is so beautifully set 
forth in the following lines, I am tempted to quote the 
whole of them : 
“ Not vainly did the early Persian make 
His altar the high places and the peak 
O: earth-o’ergaziag oionatalas, and thus take 
A lit and unwailed temple — there te seek 
The Spirit, in whose honor shrines are weak 
Upreared of human hands. Come and compare 
Columns and idol-dwellinge, Goth or Greek, 
With Nature’s realms of worship.” 
“And all this,” some of my readers are ready to exclaim, 
“ail this inordinate pleasure comes, you say, from the quest 
or the flight of a covey of ‘partridges.’ ” Not all — not ex- 
actly all. But yet we must acknowledge the partridges con- 
tribute a good part of the pleasure ; or to speak more cor- 
rectly, they furnish a stimulus to the pleasure, and give it 
wings to mount so high. But the hunter's paradise in these 
still Autumn woods is compounded of so many essences, so 
many elements, that no one is able to enumerate them all, 
much less analyze them all. The partridge may he said to 
give us the key to unlock some of the mysteries of this par- 
adise, a clue to direct us through some of its wide labyrinths 
of, enjoyment. Or it may be said that the partridge is the 
tie that binds together so many sheaves in this rich Autumn's 
harvest of the hunter’s experience. It is the loadstone to 
draw him away from the noisy haunts of men, out of his 
daily cares, out of himself, out of the purlieus of business 
and politics, into the seclusion and solitude of .the forest, 
into a communion with natural scenes and objects, into, the 
healing odors of the country air, to open his eyes to new and 
better sights, his ears to sweeter sounds, his heart to all 
those genial influences which are wrapped up in the heart 
of Nature, and which she showers with so bountiful a hand 
upon the head of every one of her true votaries. 
In my own hunting experience, few have been the quests 
for game that have afforded me more unmixed satisfaction 
than taking the woods for ruffed grouse (called, in the East, 
the partridge, and, in the South, the pheasant) at the proper 
season for hunting them. And the season of the year, as we 
have already seen, has much to do with the enjoyment of it. 
How vividly come hack early recollections of this sport, as 
I think of “old Windmill Hill” and “Mt. Independence,’* 
towering so much higher above their fellow peaks in the 
chain of romantic hills that encircle the beautiful valley 
where J first saw the light. These formidable heights were 
my ultima tJiule in all my partridge-shooting expeditions, 
and my favorite resorts when the sport was to be tried on a 
large scale, and when I was not to be choked oil by disap- 
pointments. If I was to be cut short with a few hours’ hunt- 
ing, “Ripley’s Woods,” nearest the village, afforded the 
best opportunity; if I had a half day, I spent it in “Camp- 
bell’s Bush,” among the maples, or better still, in the beau- 
tiful “Still Woods,” farthest off of all (and O ! what a little 
paradise!) called the “Still Woods,” not because of any 
hush in the atmosphere of their dense shade and foliage, 
but because of the old distillery, whose ruins and remains 
continued to haunt the place for years after its “usefulness” 
had departed — an old tumble- down roof, with immense 
beams and rafters braced and spiked with iron, all tottering 
to their fall, and one or two great rusty copper vats, that 
looked as if they had done service for ages. At these 
minor resorts, particularly the lovely Still Woods, my good 
dog Boze, would generally manage to “tree” a partridge or 
two, and “Old Bundy” long and single-barreled and cap- 
looked, could be depended on to knock them down from 
their loftiest perches in the tall beeches and oaks. Well I 
remember one of my earliest feats in these woods, was 
shooting a partridge off the top of the old “Still” roof, and 
having a long search for him among the ruins inside where 
he fell. It was the only time I ever knew this bird to perch 
himself on any building. 
What romance, what rapture there was in even these half- 
holiday visits to the Indian Summer forests after par- 
tridges! But when it came to a whole day’s roving and 
climhiag up the sides and along the brow of ‘‘Old Wind- 
mill,” on the same errand, “no tongue its beauty might de- 
clare.” Old Windmill was a sight in itself, gnarled on its 
sides, like an old oak, scarred, seamed with rooks, and by 
no means prepossessing to the stranger who saw it for the 
first time from afar. But once near it and on it, and all its 
apparent ugliness vanished at a glance. Its sheltering 
groves, its mossy carpet, and that long stretch of level green 
on its very summit, lined with white poplar, and flanked, 
where the rocks began to shoot out, with a thick covering 
of ground hemlock and pine, made it a delightful picture. 
I used to prepare for these all-day jaunts the evening be- 
fore, so as to be off in the eariy morning; and there being 
only about four or five miles to walk before reaching my 
partridge ground, I used to get there almost as soon as the 
birds were up for their breakfast. Many of these mornings, 
the air on the mountains was as cold and crisp as it is in 
the lowlands in November; and the leaves underfoot as 
well as over head were spangled and sheeted with ice. Al- 
most always the early morning air was full of frost, which 
dissolved after an hour or two of sunrise, and gave place to 
that most intoxicating of all morning draughts, the Indian 
Summer atmosphere, after it has been mixed with a few 
degrees of sunshine. The first loud sound heard after 
reaching the border of the woods was almost invariably 
Boze’s barking, which meant partridge flushed and “treed.” 
I dreaded a rise among the hemlocks, which often hap- 
pened, as th'at meant an anxious and often long search for 
my game through the thick branches, and very likely after 
the search ended, a still neck, that night or the next morn- 
ing, from craning and bending it into so many unnatural 
shapes gazing up the tree. Ten to one the partridge on 
alighting, especially if an old one, will perch on a limb 
close to the body of the tree, and sit there perhaps for 
hours without moving a muscle. Then your search may be 
entirely in vain, or you may blaze away several times at a 
stub, mistaking it for your bird, which really makes no 
more movement than a stub, unless it happens to be hit. 
There was one place on the top of old Windmill among 
