Jan. io, 1914. 
FOREST AND STREAM 
47 
jackass rabbits. I have a sort of fancy that they 
sit up behind and laugh at me, though it may 
be that they just sit up to be sure which way I 
am firing before they run. At any rate Manuel 
killed that deer and carried it home. We antici- 
W HAT hunter or fisherman with an experi¬ 
ence of ten years in the wild places of 
the earth could not outline at least one 
score of mistakes which foreknowledge would 
have spared him? Perhaps there is no service 
in which traveling equipment and camp outfit 
are given such severe treatment or tested in a 
fairer way than on a railway survey through an 
unexplored wilderness; and it is the points of 
after-knowledge which I gained from such work 
that I present here as the fore-knowledge of those 
in the first stages of camp and trail experiment¬ 
ing. 
Our survey lasted five years and was spread 
over five hundred miles of timbered jungle, mam¬ 
moth rocks and muskeg, thickly mottled with 
lakes and rivers over that vast wilderness that 
lies to the north of Lake Superior on Canadian 
soil. Travel for any great distance on foot is 
well nigh impossible and pack animals would have 
been worse than useless. This narrowed us down 
to the use of canoes along the lakes and streams 
during the summer, and indeed these same av- 
nues served equally well during the winter sea¬ 
son when supplies were toted on toboggans. At 
first we tried the birch canoe of the Indian. It 
is a wonderful structure but extremely delicate 
and impracticable except in the hands of natives 
or experienced whites. Next we tried the bass¬ 
wood or cedar canoe, designed closely upon the 
Indian models. The advantages were many, par¬ 
ticularly as regards strength and speed, but the 
weight was a serious handicap on portages, and 
finally we discarded them in favor of the canvas 
canoe. These we subjected to the heaviest pos¬ 
sible service and have found them closest to the 
ideal for our kind of work. They are almost 
identical in model with the Indian canoes, but 
the metal fastenings and other perfected inci¬ 
dentals of a white man’s factory give them 
superiority over anything the Indian has been 
able to produce. 
The matter of tents gave us not a little 
trouble before we came upon the correct idea. 
Many different styles were tried, one of our first 
objects being lightness. Finally we evolved a tent 
having a roof of 8 ounce duck with back, front 
and walls of light drill. In the country through 
which we traveled, shelter was never lacking, so 
we had the tent walls made .from five to six 
feet high, thus greatly increasing the roominess 
and providing against one of the most awkward 
features of camp residences. 
In selecting winter bedding, we took a leaf 
out of the red man’s book, and adopted the rab¬ 
bit skin blanket, but later discarded it in favor 
of the eiderdown quilt, made into a sleeping bag. 
This, to my mind, is the most perfect article for 
fighting the extreme cold in outdoor living; and 
I have known men to climb into one of these 
and fall asleep on a snowback with the tempera¬ 
ture at 30 below zero, and awake without the 
least tremor of cold. 
In the winter season the toboggan takes the 
place of the canoe. We attempted to use the 
type of broad-running sleighs similar to the Es¬ 
quimaux’ kometik, but found that they require 
plenty of elbow room and a firm, hard bed to 
travel over—advantages which are half the time 
pated a welcome addition to our fare of dried 
beef, but the meat was disappointing—dry, dark 
colored and without flavor. 
Francis C. Nichols. 
Corbo, Sonora, Mexico, Oct. 25, 1913. 
lacking. They also work poorly on portages, 
and in other respects surrender first place to the 
toboggan as a universally adaptable instrument 
in winter travel. Dogs were employed for long¬ 
distance work. 
Perhaps the most important item in the out¬ 
fit for a winter journey through unbroken coun¬ 
try is the snowshoe, and the trouble we found in 
procuring the right article was noteworthy. The 
Indian knows the secret of snowshoe making, 
but seems to employ it only for himself and 
family. The articles he sells are not worth look¬ 
ing over and the goods offered by the average 
white man’s factory are still worse. 
We have not yet found a satisfactory solution 
for the stove problem. In large parties where 
a generous and varied diet is necessary, the open 
fire will not serve, and cooks rebel at its lim¬ 
itations. Camp cook-stoves still lack compact¬ 
ness and lightness. We have tried out a score 
of makes and have not yet discovered the article 
we need. R. B. 
Bears and Steel Traps 
1 HAVE no axe to grind and will probably 
never again set a trap for a bear, but I 
would like to be allowed to say a few words 
on the subject to get the matter in its fullest 
light. 
When I came to the lower Fraser Valley, 
B. C. in 1887, bears—common black and “cinna¬ 
mon” bears—were very abundant and extremely 
destructive to hogs, so much so that they put 
many hog ranches out of business. A neighbor 
of ours lost $400 worth of hogs in one season and 
quit. 
Two or three men then started to trap the 
animals and in a few years reduced their num¬ 
bers so that ranchers along the foothills were 
once more able to raise hogs. 
The hogs were usually seized and carried 
off alive into the dense brush squealing frantic¬ 
ally, and when partially disabled were pinned 
down by the powerful paws and devoured alive 
■—the bear commencing at the soft part of the 
abdomen and flank. I have seen several hogs—- 
one a large sow—thus torn open and still alive 
when the bear was driven away. 
After this my sympathies for the poor 
trapped bear were considerably lessened, and 
after seeing many bears in steel traps the conclu¬ 
sion was forced upon me that their sufferings 
were very different from those of a human being 
in a similar predicament. Rage and fear rather 
than pain seems to drive them to the frantic 
exertions that often end in their tearing loose, 
and I have never seen them bite themselves in 
any part of their anatomy except the foot in 
the trap, and that only rarely. 
To show that their sufferings are far less 
than might be imagined let me cite a case. 
My partner trapped a bear on his ranch late 
in September, which got away, leaving one fore¬ 
paw in the trap; it must have gone into hiberna¬ 
tion not later than one month afterward, yet 
he caught this same bear in the same trap the 
following April and it was rolling fat. 
Anyone would think that the suffering en¬ 
tailed on wrenching off a paw at the wrist joint 
would reduce the animal so much that it would 
have difficulty in surviving the winter’s hiberna¬ 
tion. 
Bears are not supposed to molest deer, but 
I know what would happen if one of them 
came across a newly dropped fawn, and I know 
of one case, at least, where a bear killed a full- 
sized and vigorous mule deer. 
Deadfalls are clumsy and ineffective at best 
and the steel trap will always be the principal 
means of taking predatory and fur-bearing ani¬ 
mals. 
Except beaver, all of the latter are blood¬ 
thirsty and destructive—I would not even except 
the muskrat—and their extinction, even, if possi¬ 
ble, would be a gain to the bird lover and sports¬ 
man, if not the farmer. 
A California enthusiast on “protection” is 
now bitterly bewailing the decrease in the smaller 
carnivora of that state, and proposes drastic 
legislation to protect them. Now, in two win¬ 
ters spent in California the thing that struck me 
most forcibly was the abundance of foxes, coy¬ 
otes, ’coons and wildcats, right close to the larg¬ 
est cities even. The amount of game and nests 
of game birds they must destroy must be enor¬ 
mous, and the dense cover of the chaparral cov¬ 
ered mountains will always insure them from 
complete extermination no matter how sedulously 
they are trapped. 
The plea for the protection of predaceous 
animals and birds arises from the mistaken idea 
that before the advent of man the solitudes of 
the forests were teeming with life of all kinds. 
Nothing could be farther from the fact. I have 
been in wildernesses where fur-bearing animals 
were plentiful before the advent of the trapper, 
and the lack of life was the most noticeable 
feature. Game birds and animals were practical¬ 
ly absent and the silence of the primeval forest 
was appalling. 
The only place where I have seen grouse 
(Franklin’s and ruffed) really abundant was a 
“trapped out” locality, where hardly a fur-bearing 
animal remained. 
But I am wandering from the subject of 
bears and steel traps, and in conclusion would like 
to say that, while I deplore the barbarity of the 
steel trap, it still should be regarded as a neces¬ 
sary evil, as it is in many cases the only way a 
rancher can protect his stock, or the lumberman 
his supplies for the winter campaign. 
If a guide can add to his hard-earned wages 
by trapping a marauding bear, neither he nor the 
“sport” who shoots it should be held up to scorn. 
It would be different if the black bear were 
an animal that could be hunted in thick timber 
with a fair modicum of success, but bear hunting 
in the brush—still hunting, I mean—is about the 
most hopeless form of hunting a man can at¬ 
tempt. Of course, with dogs sport may be had, 
but dogs that will run bear in preference to deer 
are scarce indeed, and a guide would naturally 
wish to keep dogs out of a good moose or deer 
country. 
Allan Brooks. 
Okanagan Landing, B. C. 
The gathering and selling of acorns is a 
new industry, in Arkansas, to supply eastern 
nursery firms with material for forest planting. 
The forest products laboratory at Madison, 
Wisconsin, has made 4,000 tests on the strength 
of American woods. 
Advertising makes goods sell faster, thereby 
enabling the merchant to transact a larger busi¬ 
ness on a smaller investment. 
Equipment and Camp Outfit for Heavy Service 
