Forest and Stream 
A Weekly Journal. Copyright, 1906, by Forest and Stream Publishing Co. 
3SS5; 1C °”"\ NEW YORK . SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER ,, , 906. j No . 
Terms, $3 a 
Six 
NEXT WEEK. 
Crusoe Land —Its Tragic Tale—Its Thrilling 
Past. By. Dr. J. A. Woodcock. 
The Mexican Ocelot. Illustrated. By Harry 
H. Dunn. 
OUR ILLUSTRATED SUPPLEMENT. 
Our illustrated supplement to-day contains 
another one of the admirable flashlights of wild 
game by Hon. Geo. Shiras 3d, picturing a deer 
in the darkness on the shore of Lower White 
Fish River, Mich.; a panorama of the famous 
fishing waters of Les Cheneaux near Mackinac 
Island in Lake Huron; some rarely interesting 
pictures of the East Indian sport of pigstick¬ 
ing; and a reproduction of Mr. Burton’s artistic 
photograph of the start of the Astor cup race 
for sloops in the recent New York Y. C. regatta. 
THE DOG DAYS. 
In reference to the dog the dog days are 
fraught with many perils of deadly significance. 
In duration, the period of the dog days is 
not precisely limited, but in a general way it 
comprises the latter part of July, all of August, 
and the early part of September. Those days 
include the period of the year’s greatest heat 
and humidity. They have from time imme¬ 
morial, in popular belief, been held to exercise 
baneful effects on the whole dog family. This 
belief is grounded on silly, irrelevant myth; 
nevertheless, in the dog day season, the public 
has a lessened esteem for man’s best friend, and 
views him with a sinister suspicion which on 
small pretext changes to virulent hostility and 
slaughter. While this dog day hostility of man 
has its origin in a myth, its effects upon the dog 
are as disastrous as if the belief were well 
founded in fact. 
The dog days, in the special sense in which 
the public considers them as directly affecting 
the dog's life, are fictitious. They have no more 
to do with dog life than with the life of any or 
all other animate beings. 
In days of excessive heat and humidity, man 
and dog alike suffer intense bodily discomfort. 
They are more irritable and pugnacious. Their 
ills and infirmities then multiply, and conse¬ 
quently their mortality is then greatest. But 
those are the days in which, according to popu¬ 
lar belief, the dog goes mad spontaneously. It 
matters not that rabies can be communicated 
only by a specific germ, and that, from the 
period of inoculation to the period of full de¬ 
velopment of the disease, many days or weeks 
must elapse, the popular belief in instantaneous 
development of madness in the dog days Cannot 
be shaken. 
The belief is sanctioned by traditions which 
have had honored place from time immemorial. 
They are founded upon a myth due to an asso¬ 
ciation of ideas between dogs and dog star, dog 
days and disease, all of which have been ex¬ 
ceedingly unfortunate for the dog in general, 
and in particular for the individual dog which 
may be suffering from any nervous ailment 
which in the least degree may simulate any 
mental disturbance. Let the dog act strangely 
and man is prone to discover incipient madness 
in such symptoms, and to raise the hue and cry 
of death. 
And yet the term dog days had its origin in 
ancient times with no reference to the dog 
whatever. They were the days of heat and 
humidity, associated with the heliacal rising and 
setting of the dog star, a pleasing fiction even 
in that connection. 
By a popular association of ideas, extended and 
specialized during the ages, dog days have come 
to be understood as having some special baneful 
effects on the dog, so much so that he is pre¬ 
disposed to go mad on the instant. It is true 
that, in hot weather, the dog pants more, lolls 
more, sweats most profusely; but, being much 
like man in his organic structure, there is every 
reason why he should display much the same 
physical phenomena as man under like con¬ 
ditions. He is subject to epilepsy, apoplexy, in¬ 
sanity, like man; but, unfortunately, in the dog 
days, every man, woman and child, many of 
whom are wholly ignorant of dog life and many 
other matters besides, diagnose every ailment of 
the dog as rabies, latent or active. 
It is not many days ago since one of the lead¬ 
ing daily papers of New York published a long, 
two-column article, on the dangers of feeding 
dogs meat in the dog days, that learned outflow 
of asininity being accredited to an eminent veter¬ 
inarian. When such astounding ignorance is 
displayed by those who profess to be public 
educators, the public may well be excused for 
having so much false knowledge. There is no 
more relation between the dog’s stomach and 
the dog days, than there is between his tail and 
winter days, and withal, his stomach is not cap¬ 
able of assimilating vegetable food properly to 
sustain his body. 
CHIEFS BEFORE THE KING. 
Chief Joe Capilano and other British Columbia 
Indian chiefs have just been received by King 
Edward at Buckingham Palace. The Indians 
came to plead for a restoration of their hunting 
rights and other native privileges which have 
been curtailed. There is much of pathos in 
their long journey from the far northwest across 
continent and sea to the distant sovereign to 
protest against the restrictions which have come 
with a crowding civilization. The address pre¬ 
sented to the King, protesting loyalty to the 
sovereign and expressing confidence that their 
plea will be heard, has excited wide sympathy. 
“The government acknowledges,” says the pe¬ 
tition, “that portions of our lands were taken 
from us and given to the white men and other 
portions were given to us, which is quite true; 
but they took the very best of our land and gave 
us rock and gravel.” It is the old, old story of a 
savage people occupying a country which the 
white man wants and in due time will have. 
One constant cause of friction between Indian 
and white is the big game and its hunting. The 
Indian of British Columbia may not hope to con¬ 
tinue to be the hunter he has been; not even 
the sovereign will can grant him that; the 
altered ways of life for him are inseparable from 
the altered condition of the time. He may not 
evade them. The age of the hunter in British 
Columbia as in all the rest of North America, 
save the very far north, has passed. 
Something of the conflict which exists between 
the Indians and the white people in British 
Columbia as to British Columbia hunting 
grounds is hinted in the current report of the 
Provincial Game Warden A. Bryan Williams. 
The game laws give the Indian special hunting 
privileges, but they are by no means satisfied 
with the latitude accorded them. They persist 
in hunting in districts off from their reservations 
and in an extremely wasteful way. They not 
only kill for their own food supply, but slaughter 
far in excess of all reasonable necessities, and 
thus destroy the game and devastate the hunting 
grounds which otherwise would afford good 
sport and would attract big-game hunters from 
abroad and thus bring in a considerable revenue. 
The income which might be secured from sports¬ 
men visiting the Province for big game would 
under normal conditions be very great, but be¬ 
cause of these depredations of the Indians in 
the districts devastated by them no inducements 
are held out to foreign sportsmen. Men who 
have the experience of expending hundreds or 
thousands of dollars in quest of British Col¬ 
umbia game trophies, only to find that the 
Indians have been through the country before 
them and have destroyed the game there, leave 
the Province in disgust and for good. That this 
experience is common enough among British 
and American visitors is indicated by corre¬ 
spondence published by Warden Williams. 
“When hunting sheep in a well known and until 
recently excellent sheep country,” writes a 
sportsman of Great Britain, “a place where a 
year or so previously sheep were to be found in 
abundance, I found practically none left. In¬ 
dians had been hunting all summer and indis¬ 
criminately slaughtering both sexes." In similar 
vein a sportsman of Pittsburg, Pa., writes: 
“I belong to a club which has a hundred mem¬ 
bers, most of whom go West every year, but, 
from the experience of a number of us, we are 
likely to give British Columbia a wide berth 
until you can assure us that, after we have paid 
our license fees and spent our money in outfit 
and guides, we will not be disappointed by find¬ 
ing Indians in possession of the hunting country 
and the game exterminated.” 
