298 
FOREST AND STREAM 
March 8, 1913 
Unk got up and, armed with a .22, began a 
thorough investigation, while Allie growled from 
his wall tent. 
‘‘It’s right here under the grub somewhere,” 
said Unk. “There are two of ’em. Wildcats, 
what?” I crawled out of my bag and joined the 
hunt. We finally fixed the exact location of the 
predatory beast as a big kettle filled with eggs, 
which, together with the rest of the provisions, 
was covered at night with a tarpaulin. I noticed 
that a number of the eggs lay on the ground 
under the tarpaulin, and began to investigate, 
through the tarpaulin, the interior of the kettle. 
To my surprise I felt the back of some animal 
about the size of a ’coon. 
“Here he is!” I exclaimed, while Unk and 
Allie bent over the grub pile in great excitement. 
“By Jove, I’ve got him by the tail!” 
“Hang on to him, Eddie, we’ll have some 
fun.” 
“You bet I will. I’ve got him through the 
tarpaulin so he can’t bite. Squirm, you varmint. 
I’ll teach you to steal eggs from a respectable 
camping party.” 
And then, all of a sudden, the bolt was 
loosed. It was as if a hundred ancient stink¬ 
pots had exploded under our noses. 
“Skunk!” I yelled. “It’s a skunk! Run for 
your lives!” And I dropped that tail as if it 
were a live wire and fled in wild panic round 
the corner of the nearest tent. I had a vague 
view of two big men bumping into each other 
in a frenzied rush to the same place of refuge. 
T’nere was a mix-up, a double crash mingled 
with hysterical laughter and something stronger, 
and two otherwise dignified members of the com¬ 
munity half crawled and half rolled into com¬ 
parative safety. Just at the moment when the 
skunk extricated itself from the kettle and ran 
out from under the tarpaulin, Hod’s face ap¬ 
peared through the dusk, and Lou’s beside it. 
‘TIullo! What's up? Porky?” 
“Skunk!” yelled Unk. 
“Wood pussy! Get from under!” roared 
Allie. 
“Mephitis mephitica!” I screamed. But none 
of these synonyms was necessary, for the air the 
next second was positively reeking with the suf¬ 
focating effluvium. The skunk, to make matters 
worse, started in the direction of the guides, 
and there was another wild stampede with 
“pussy” in hot pursuit, or it certainly looked 
that way. Unk swore that he saw a second 
skunk run out of the food pile, but I doubt 
whether he was capable of “visualizing” any¬ 
thing at that moment with proper distinctness. 
And how that camp did reek! And the 
grub! We dreaded to investigate it, that pile 
of stufif on which we should depend for the 
next ten days at least, Allie looked at me re¬ 
proachfully, 
‘’Eddie, I thought you said there was no 
animal in Nova Scotia that would attack man,” 
he said, holding his nose. Triangular recrimina¬ 
tions followed, with covered noses, and then the 
funny side of the adventure came upon us and 
we laughed long at ourselves and each other. 
As for the guides, we heard nothing from them 
till morning, for they had fled to their tent 
and wrapped themselves up in their blankets. 
When we awoke, it was not the perfume of 
wild roses that the gentle morning breeze bore 
to our nostrils. Nevertheless, it was not as bad 
as it might well have been, though we promptly 
renamed the place “Skunk Point.” From the 
fact that the animal which “exploded” was, at 
the time of irruption, confined in the kettle by 
the tarpaulin, the damage was practically local¬ 
ized in that small space, and we lost nothing 
but the kettle’ and its contents. As for the tar¬ 
paulin, a brand new one of Unk’s, we soaked 
it in boiling water, and then put it in the lake. 
We took it with us when we left the point, but 
it was ostracized to a spot far away from the 
tents. It was finally brought home, but still .has 
to stay outdoors. Unk hopes to be able to use 
it on the spring fishing trip in 1915. 
I don’t know whether we played very heroic 
roles in the “battle of Wildcat,” but I do claim 
to be the only living man who ever held a skunk 
for some seconds by the tail, when all his feet 
had a purchase, and got off unscathed. 
It’s odd how things do happen when .A.llie 
goes into the woods. Why, only a few days 
later—but that will do for this time. 
[the end.] 
Reminiscences of the Sandhills 
By AMOS BURHANS 
M y last shooting expedition into the sand¬ 
hills of Nebraska was not full of the 
same brand of charm that surrounded 
me when I first saw them. Let me draw the 
contrast: 
Business detained me from the fall shoot¬ 
ing until the middle of October, the first year 
I ever saw the sandhills. The season opened 
the first of September, and I could not get 
away, hence there was nothing to do until I 
might get off except to write the friend that I 
could not get away, pay for the conditioning of 
my dogs and order them kept right up in shape 
for any possible time that I might be able to 
get off. I was bound to go. Others who had 
shot from blinds along the Platte, made the 
sandhill pilgrimage annually, went into the best 
quail country along the Loup—other friends of 
mine who did these things as well as shoot in 
the sandhills as early as they could get away, 
came home and reported the prairie chicken 
shooting the best in years. 
On Oct. 17 I got away. A 300-mile trip by 
train and I was off for the night. In the morn¬ 
ing I looked out on a snow-covered landscape 
and thought the day’s shooting done for. I 
knew not a soul in the village, and gingerly 
dressed in the hotel room, on the third floor 
from which I could get the lay of the entire sur¬ 
rounding country. The town lay in the valley 
of the Loup, betokening that once upon a time 
the river had been some river and dwindled to 
an almost tiny silver thread, willow-bordered 
and hedged and fed br- thousands of little springs 
that, too, were deeply bordered and provided 
excellent cover for quail (hunting which I may 
write of another time). These little streams fed 
the river and ran through the good, rich, semi- 
alluvial soil, generally through meadows where 
wild hay was cut for the winter’s feeding. The 
meadows were not shorn to the edge of the 
tiny brooks. The brooks twisted too much for 
a patient man to mow their very banks, and 
these banks seemingly to protect quail and 
rabbits, sheltered game with weeds, sunflowers, 
willows, hedge and what not 
My guide and dog trainer was not to be 
found. Pie probably had thought I would not 
come, the weather as threatening as it had been 
for the past week. After breakfast I started 
for a cornfield in the edge of town, where, as I 
had dressed, I saw thousands of chickens feed¬ 
ing upon the shocked corn and basking in the 
sunshine of early morning. It was a certainty 
that I would never get up to any of them, but, 
nevertheless, I wanted the experience of seeing 
them in clouds. Remember, further on, that I 
saw these birds from my hotel window. 
I went down the railroad track from the 
little station. It was easier than plowing 
through two feet of snow on the level and 
bucking drifts. On great piles of wheat straw. 
stacks of alfalfa, fence posts and elsewhere they 
roosted to get the rays of warm sun. Probably 
I was able to get into a 500-yard range of them, 
but not much closer. They were wary. Yet 
they hated to fly off when I aproached. Trying 
to estimate them was a lot of fun. I figured 
about 7-000 of them. They had been blown over 
the hills and into the lower country by the 
hard wind and snow and helped themselves to 
the great cornfields that were scattered 
throughout the flat valley. 
This was one of the greatest mornings of 
my hunting experience. That afternoon I 
sauntered down into the brush along the Loup 
and killed a pair of chickens and a goose: They 
were seemingly late in going South for the 
winter. Returning to town, a half hour’s walk, 
I found my guide. Then the next day’s hunt¬ 
ing was planned. There was no need to go to 
the ranch forty miles off into the hills. Birds 
could be found anywhere, and now that the 
weather was warming up and the snow going 
oft' so fast that one could see it, we decided to 
try the uplands and long grass along the bluffs 
that guarded the valley through which the Loup 
had once careened, a veritable Nile. 
It is hard to describe the immense bluffs 
that abutted the valley. Cattle grazed over 
them, on their sides and in the valleys between 
them. There were spots along them where 
cattle could not get. The grass was from four 
