34 
FRANK FORESTER’S FIELD SPORTS. 
The Mouse and Cariboo may be hunted with more or less 
success in Maine and Canada, as well as in the Eastern provin¬ 
ces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. A few linger yet in 
the north-eastern angle of New York, and on the northern 
frontiers of Vermont and New Hampshire. There is, however, 
little prospect of sport in their pursuit, west of the St. Johns, or 
south of the Canada lines. A few Elk are said to exist still in 
the western districts of Pennsylvania, and also in Kentucky, 
but to find them in herds, and in fact to have a chance of killing 
them, the hunter must go westward of the Mississippi. 
Even the larger species of hare, which becomes white in win¬ 
ter, is becoming rare in New York south of the region of Lake 
Champlain; and, except among the craggy hills where he 
can laugh at pursuit, he will soon cease to exist as an animal of 
chase. 
So that in fact for the great majority of sportsmen, the number 
of varieties of four-footed game is reduced to two species—the 
common Deer, and the common Hare—the small grayish brown 
fellow, I mean, who is erroneously called Rabbit —for be it ob¬ 
served no Rabbit exists on the continent of North America, and 
no Buffalo ; though I suppose to all eternity, men will persist— 
even men of education, who ought to know, and do know, better 
—in calling them by the names applied to them by the illiterate 
and vulgar. 
I have no patience with the dependent provincial vulgarism of 
calling all birds, beasts, plants and fishes, by the name of Euro¬ 
pean animals or vegetables, to which they bear some fancied 
resemblance, when no such things exist on the continent. 
There is scarcely a wild bird or a wild plant in this country 
that does not go by some ludicrous misnomer. Thus a Thrush is 
termed a Robin , a Vulture a Crow , a Grouse a Pheasant or a Par¬ 
tridge , a Quail a Partridge —a Rhododrendon, an Azalia, and a 
Calmia—all three as wide apart from each other, and from the 
thing they are called, as an ivy bush from an oak tree— laurel, 
and so on, of almost everything that runs, flies or grows in the 
woods or wilds of the United States. 
