Nov. 15, 1913- 
FOREST AND STREAM 
615 
ing grounds. Trout in the streams will take a 
spoon bait. The angler should have a variety 
of flies in his book. The professor is a very 
good fly, but they will also strike at royal- 
coachman and brown and black-hackles. The 
black-gnat is the best fly for the grayling, while 
it will take gray gnats, brown and black-hackles, 
coachman and royal-coachman. Various kinds 
of bait are used, but fishermen always take 
along a few cans of preserved salmon eggs, as 
Camping on 
1 AM sitting as I write this on the sandy beach 
of a little cove by the mouth of a tiny 
stream, which pushes out into the ocean on 
the shores of Newfoundland. We are camped 
here on Random Island, on the north shore of 
Trinity Bay. Half a mile across the sound I 
can see the green slopes of the main land roll¬ 
ing back to the blue hills of the interior, which 
are now, at sunset, silhouetted against the golden 
glow of the western sky. Back of me stretch 
for miles the forests and barrens of this island. 
In front of me, away back of the blue hills and 
the glorious sunset lie the forests and bogs of 
the back country, the winter range of the cari¬ 
bou. For two hundred and fifty miles, between 
here and the western coast, there is no house 
or dwelling place' of man. Even the courses of 
many of the streams and the positions of many 
of the lakes and mountains are unknown and 
unmapped. 
I have been watching one of my campmates 
taking advantage of an extra high tide to float 
some heavy logs of driftwood along the shore 
to near the wood pile, and waiting for the guide 
to finish getting supper ready. An interesting 
old character this guide is, too. He has been 
telling me of caribou hunts he has seen, a 
memento of one of which he will bear to his 
grave in the form of a great scar on his face, 
gotten in a hand-to-horn struggle with a mad 
buck which charged him when he had no gun, 
and which almost killed him before he managed 
to cut the animal’s throat with his hunting knife. 
These are ideal camping conditions, good com¬ 
pany and good weather, and it is an ideal camp¬ 
ing place that we have found, clear cold water 
in the brook, plenty of good wood for the fire, 
protection from the storm winds, and the ocean 
to bathe and fish in, all set in some of the most 
beautiful scenery that it has ever been my good 
fortune to look upon. And, as I look at it all, 
I keep thinking to myself, “If only this country 
were better known, how many more lovers of 
the out-of-doors would be coming up here each 
summer to take advantage of all it has to offer 
them!” It is because I think this, and because 
I have been for some years a subscriber to 
Forest and Stream, and believe that the best 
way to bring this land to the notice of the sports¬ 
men and campers of the States is to tell you 
about it, that I am taking the privilege of thus 
writing to you. 
I think that most pople have the idea that 
Newfoundland is next door to Greenland, a 
they are well known to be the most reliable. 
In Southeastern Alaska rare sport is had 
trolling for king salmon which grow to a huge 
size and are hard fighters. Other fish can be 
caught with bait in these waters, these include 
halibut, black bass, rock cod, and black cod. 
Alaska as a hunting ground is growing in 
popularity, but the sportsman contemplating a 
trip to Alaska should first inform himself on 
the game laws of the territory. For big-game 
By BENJAMIN F. HOWELL, 3d 
country of icebergs and fog, even in the summer 
time, a good place for caribou perhaps, but no 
place for a summer of camping. Well, I have 
seen icebergs here in the bays, even in July, and 
their glistening whiteness only added another 
touch of beauty to a scene already beautiful be¬ 
yond description, while at the same time the 
ocean was not too cold for a morning plunge, 
and the temperature of the air was ideal. Over 
the ocean “banks” and along the extreme eastern 
shore there is considerable fog, even in the sum¬ 
mer, but back here in the bays and fiords and 
inland on the lakes and rivers, the weather is 
as fine as it is on the shores or in the woods 
of Maine. By actual meterological observation 
there is much less fog and rain in Newfound¬ 
land than in England. And as for cold, last 
summer an old Newfoundland fisherman told 
me that he would “never bide home from the 
Labrador fishery another year” because it was 
too hot here. 
And yet this is the land of the caribou, and 
of the trout and the salmon and the ptarmigan 
and jacksnipe and countless flocks of shore and 
water birds, too. A flock of fifty or more geese 
spend the day in the sound between here and 
the mainland, going into the inland lakes and 
meadows to feed at night. The greater yellow- 
legs or twilligs, as the natives call them, wander 
along the shore with their musical call, and their 
little cousins, the spotted sandpipers, “teeter” 
and “peep” on the rocks. Yesterday I saw a 
hawk dive at one of these little fellows. The 
sandpiper saw his enemy coming, and dashing 
out over the water plunged beneath the surface 
just in time to escape the outstretched talons. 
The hawk swung away, disgusted, and the sand¬ 
piper emerged and went scooting away as fast 
as his wings would carry him. 
To turn from feathers to fur, there are two 
kinds of “hares” here. The variety which is 
now found over most of the island is said to 
have been introduced some twenty or thirty 
years ago from Nova Scotia. They are smaller 
than the great northern white hares, which used 
to be found here, but for some reason they have 
almost completely replaced their larger relatives. 
They seem to be subject to an epidemic disease 
which reduces their numbers whenever they grow 
too abundant, but whether this reoccurs with 
any regularity, as it does in Northwestern 
Canada or not I have not yet learned. Bears 
and foxes are not uncommon. Many fine silver 
black foxes arc trapped here. The Government 
hunting in the Kenai district, registered guides 
are required. The hunting license must be ob¬ 
tained from the Governor of Alaska at Juneau. 
A non-resident of Alaska must pay a license fee 
of fifty dollars if he is an American citizen, and 
one hundred dollars if he is an alien. 
When the lover of sports afield visits “The 
Land of the Midnight Sun” in the far Northwest, 
he will find that Alaska is in truth “The White 
Man’s Happy Hunting Ground.” 
is now forbidding the exportation of living silver 
foxes and encouraging the starting of fox farms. 
The wolves are nearly all gone, though there 
are still a few left in the interior. There are 
no red or Virginia deer. I am told that some 
moose have been liberated on the island and 
are reported to be increasing. Some of the Lap- 
land reindeer, which were brought into the coun¬ 
try not long ago, have escaped from their 
herders and are reported to be ranging with the 
caribou. 
There is even more fish than game here. 
Beside the salmon and trout and cod (and cod 
is king up here) there are the great horse 
mackerel, the tuna, plenty of them, and huge 
ones, too. The natives call them ’errin ’ogs, be¬ 
cause of the number of herring that they are 
supposed to eat. They are common in the bays 
and ought to furnish royal sport. Some men¬ 
tion was made of them in Forest and Stream 
a year or two ago, but I do not know that any¬ 
one has ever yet landed one here, though the 
Messrs. Reid are said to have an outfit for 
fishing for them. The fishermen, many of them, 
have motor boats from which the fishing could 
be done. And if the fish that I have seen are 
any fair samples of the general run of the race 
in these waters, the sport would be lively enough 
once they were hooked. They are as big as man- 
eating sharks. A friend of mine up here told 
me that one time, shortly after he first came to 
Newfoundland, he had gone for a swim in the 
ocean, when he saw one of these creatures break 
water only a short distance from him. He 
thought it was a shark, and according to his 
story he was still doing the Australian crawl 
stroke when he was stopped by colliding with 
a tree a quarter of a mile up on the shore. The 
fishermen say that these fish are harmless. Once 
in a while one gets caught in a cod or salmon 
net and breaks it, but this seldom happens, 
though the big fellows may often be seen swim¬ 
ming about near where the nets are set. 
I do not pretend to be an authority on New¬ 
foundland and its advantages to the camper and 
sportsman. I have never been in any but the 
southeastern part of the island, and this is only 
the second summer that I have camped here. I 
am not even camping for pleasure (though it is 
a great pleasure to be able to camp up here), 
and I have had no time to do any fishing or 
hunting for game, as I am kept busy at geologi¬ 
cal work, and my ‘ hunting” consists of hunting 
for fossils in the rocks. But from what I have 
Random Island, Newfoundland 
