Oct. ir, 1913. 
FOREST AND STREAM 
457 
A Great Bear Hunter." 
The four books of the Boone and Crockett 
Club already published are to be found on the 
library shelves of almost every big-game hunter 
in North America and England; and the fifth 
volume, just issued, is certain to take its place 
alongside its predecessors. 
“Hunting at Bligh Altitudes" possesses a 
peculiar interest because it gives tbe only full 
account ever written of the hunting adventures 
of Col. Wm. D. Pickett, who for about a gen¬ 
eration has been known as the greatest and 
most successful of American grizzly bear hunt¬ 
ers. Half the present volume is devoted to Col. 
Pickett’s "Memories of a Bear Hunter,” which 
cover the years from 1876 to 1883 inclusive. 
Following this intensely interesting account, 
come fifty pages of notes by Mr. Grinned which 
deal with people, places and events alluded to 
by Col. Pickett; many of which allusions with¬ 
out some explanation would be wholly blind to 
the reader of to-day who is unacquainted with 
the old West. 
Col. Pickett’s hunting adventures deal with 
a time of romance, years of game plenty which 
will never again be seen in America. In the 
years covered by this account of hunting he is 
believed to have killed between seventy-five and 
eighty bears; and came to know his game well. 
He tells of a season when twenty-three bears 
were killed, of which seventeen required only a 
single shot. "None of these bears gave any 
trouble." 
On the other hand, there were sometimes 
adventures that were exciting enough. One 
evening, just at dusk, he approached a grizzly 
feeding on an elk carcass which lay at the bot¬ 
tom of a deep gulch. 
“Stooping and stealthily approaching, I rose 
partly up when within twenty-five or thirty feet 
of the bear. He was there, but it had become 
so dark in that hole that I used my glasses to 
see him. He was lying on the carcass with his 
head from me, exposing his back and shoulders. 
His head was so placed that I feared to shoot 
at it. I determined then to shoot at his back 
just behind the shoulders, depending on getting 
a second shot before he could do much. The 
shot was fired, the bear gave no squall—an in¬ 
dication that he was ready to fight—and 
scrambled up the side gulch toward which he 
was headed. Before he had gone ten feet from 
the edge of the gulch I fired a second shot at 
his body, without stopping him. Just then the 
dog passed me like a whirlwind. It was im¬ 
portant to stop the bear before he reached a 
pine thicket toward which he was headed, and I 
fired a third shot, hoping to hit near the root 
of the tail and paralyze his hind quarters. Just 
as I was on the point of pulling the trigger, the 
dog got in the way, and I • raised the rifle 
slightly, just grazing the rump of the bear, 
which, with the dog, had disappeared into the 
pine thicket. Out of patience with myself, and 
grumbling over the bad luck that after so much 
work the bear should escape, I followed rapidly 
—luckily on my side of the gulch—and had 
reached a position still further up the gulch, 
when I heard a rustling in the pine thicket and 
♦“Hunting at High Altitudes.” The book of the 
Boone and Crockett Club. George Bird Grinnell, editor. 
Harper & Brothers. Illustrated. Cloth, pp. 511, price 
$2.50 net. 
out ran Nip, closely followed by the bear, evi¬ 
dently furious with rage. Now, an ill-bred, 
badly-mannered dog under these circumstances 
would naturally have run back to his master for 
protection, but Nip did nothing of the sort. 
With an intelligence quite human, as it seemed 
to me, he kept just far enough ahead of the 
bear to lead it on, the dog's head turned first 
on one side then on the other, always with one 
eye on the pursuer. He led the bear straight 
across the open ground, causing him to expose 
his side to me, and saying as plainly as could 
be. ‘Now, boss, give him a good shot.’ I took 
advantage of the opportunity, hitting him in the 
side. The ball should have knocked him down, 
but did not. On the contrary, lie turned from 
the dog and ran straight toward me. In re¬ 
loading, the shell stuck in the chamber and the 
breech-block could not be closed. The bear 
was near the brink of the gulch, evidently about 
to jump over. 
“The dog did not hesitate. As soon as the 
bear turned on me he was immediately at the 
bear’s heel and at the critical moment nabbed 
it and held on as long as he dared. The angry 
bear whirled, turned on the dog and chased him 
back fifty yards to the edge of the bottom. This 
gave me time to reload, and when, the bear 
stopped I fired again. Again it charged me on 
a full run, and this time the dog was not able 
to stop him. Just before he reached the gulch, 
I fired another shot and on reaching its edge 
he had become so weakened from loss of blood 
that lie could not make the jump, but fell down 
into the ravine and was soon beyond doing any 
harm. 
“During the last part of this excitement I 
noticed George Herendeen standing by at the 
foot of a tree, and after the bear had fallen 
into the gulch and become quiet, George came 
up to me and said, ‘Old fellow, a bear will get 
you yet.’ ” 
Mr. Grinnell’s notes on Col. Pickett’s hunt¬ 
ing deal with a variety of subjects, old frontier 
posts, early settlers in the West, Indians and 
Indian wars, the extinct Red River half-breeds, 
and many other subjects. 
In a short chapter entitled “In the Old 
Rockies," D. M. Barringer gives two vivid ac¬ 
counts of good luck and bad luck in the hunting 
of thirty years ago. He paints an effective 
picture of some of the incidents of mountain 
hunting, and his account will stir memories in 
more than one heart to-day. 
George L. Harrison, Jr., was separated from 
the Rocky Mountains by half the world when, 
with his friend Chew, he was hunting in the 
Thian Shan Mountains in Chinese Turkestan. 
This is the land of mighty mountain climbing 
game; for the ibex carry the largest horns to 
be found anywhere, while the sheep are the far- 
famed Oz’is poli. Here too are roebuck of un¬ 
usual size, and wapiti, or round-horned elk, very 
closely related to the elk of western America. 
Hunting among these heights is hard work. 
The altitude is great, and the region where the 
ibex and the wild sheep are found is one of 
snow-covered rocks and great glaciers. Here 
are found wolves, which, we are told, kill 
many old rams, which, because of the great 
weight of their horns sink more deeply into 
snow or bog than the females and younger 
sheep. .Though Mr. Harrison kept a sharp 
lookout, he never saw a skeleton of a ewe or 
a young ram, though those of old rams were 
common. In this general region tigers were 
not uncommon, though few or none are shot, 
poison being the means used for their extermi¬ 
nation. No hunter who contemplates a trip 
after ibex and Marco Polo sheep can afford to 
neglect Mr. Plarrison's article, which abounds 
in useful information. Another account of hunt¬ 
ing by Mr. Harrison deals with Rhodesia, where 
buffalo and buck of all kind, from the great 
eland down to the little duiker, fell before his 
rifle. 
Members of the Zoological Society will re¬ 
member Madison Grant’s article on the condi¬ 
tion of the wild life in Alaska, printed in 1907. 
This article has been brought down to date by 
Mr. Grant and finds a place in, the present 
volume. It is an interesting paper on a dis¬ 
tant region. 
Gen. Roger D. Williams, of Kentucky, gives 
an account of deer hunting in Cuba. Deer are 
not indigenous in Cuba, and no one knows 
where they came from, or by whom they were 
introduced. 
Dr. Charles Haskins Townsend’s account of 
his discovery of the elephant seals of Guadalupe 
Island is a very interesting paper, which first 
apeared in the Century Magazine. It is illus¬ 
trated by some photographs not previously 
printed. 
Chapters giving the history of the Game 
Preservation Committee of the Boone and 
Crockett Club, History of the Boone and 
Crockett Club, by the editor, and the Year 
Book of the Club, showing officers, committees 
and members, conclude the volume. 
One does not need to be a big-game hunter 
to find charm in this book. It should be in the 
library of every field naturalist as well as of 
every sportsman. It illustrates in most strik¬ 
ing fashion some of the faunal changes which 
have taken place in this country within the past 
thirty or forty years, contrasting the abundance 
of large animal life then, with its dearth to-day. 
The Rocky Mountain hunting of the seventies 
is as much a part of the past as are the Crusades 
and the Crusaders. 
Successful Quail Raising. 
Experiments in the propagation of game 
birds have been successfully conducted this sum¬ 
mer on the estate of William Rockefeller at 
Tarrytown, N. Y., under direction of Herbert 
K. Job, State ornithologist of Connecticut. A 
man secured by Mr. Job was employed and 
carried on the work under his direction. No 
attempt was made to raise a large number of 
any one species, the purpose being to work out 
a practicable system for private estates. About 
200 young bobwhite quail were reared to matur¬ 
ity, with trifling loss and no outbreak of any 
disease. The pheasant rearing was successful. A 
few broods of the Hungarian partridge were 
raised, and of the tinnamou, a curious South 
American game bird, also woodducks and other 
waterfowl, and a considerable flock of guinea 
fowl. Under Mr. Job’s system the young were 
hatched by bantams and the broods allowed free 
range by day, being shut in at night. They were 
scattered over the great estate, and the young 
broods of game birds with their foster mothers 
were an attractive feature all summer on the 
wide lawns. Trapping and other destruction of 
vermin was at the same time carried on. 
