Oct. s, 1912 
FOREST AND STREAM 
425 
range, although as the birds had generally been 
shot at before, most of them rose out of reach. 
Part of the day I occupied a seat in the bow 
with my two guns and Leonard sat in the stern 
on the swivel chair that was used for fishing 
from. Then later on we changed places and I 
shot from the chair with my long-barreled choke 
gun. The sport was excellent, but the low little 
craft, traveling seven and a half miles per hour, 
threw up a great deal of spray whenever there 
was any sea on, which drenched the man in the 
bow in spite of all he could do to protect him¬ 
self by means of a rain coat. The one in the 
bow of course had the cream of the shooting, be¬ 
cause the one in the stern did not dare to fire 
toward the others for fear of deafening them. 
But we soon learned that it paid for the bow 
sportsman to let pass on the water as many 
birds as possible and take the others ahead in 
order to give his companion in the stern a good 
share of the shooting. In this way Leonard with 
his automatic often got in two or three shots 
after I had fired. Most of the shooting was done 
close to the water, but once in a while some bird 
that had risen far ahead of the launch would 
climb and swing in a little too close to us for 
his own good, although truth to tell, we missed 
a great many shots of that kind. 
When one considers the continual jiggle-jiggle 
of the boat from the machinery, the constant 
rolling and pitching due to the sea, the high 
velocity of the craft, the varying speeds of the 
ducks, and the different directions of their flight, 
it is readily understandable that misses were in 
order. Again, the bluebills are great divers, and 
unless killed outright they go down as soon as 
they strike the water, often traveling far under 
it before reappearing on the surface. We failed 
to retrieve a great many birds that we knocked 
down, but after a while I became quite expert 
in picking up cripples. The way I did it was by 
standing up with my chokebore gun and snapping 
at the projecting head of the duck as it emerged 
from the water, firing just as quickly as I make 
a practice of doing on a rising jacksnipe. We 
found that if we waited to take good aim, the 
duck would be beneath the water by the time 
the shot reached its vicinity. After some ex¬ 
perience I became so expert on killing the crip¬ 
ples in this way that a much smaller percentage 
of the wounded birds escaped. Some of them, 
though, never let us get within range, and others 
made their way to water too shallow for our 
launch. 
Often in chasing a bunch we ran into a mud 
bank and had to lose much valuable time in 
backing out. 
During the middle of the day we tried trolling 
for a while, but the weather was unpropitious, 
and we succeeded in taking only one small sea 
trout. 
Toward evening the wind subsided, and we 
were able to shoot for a time without getting 
splashed from head to foot. We returned to 
town about sunset with a fine bag of ducks which 
we distributed to everybody at the wharf who 
desired them and divided the remainder between 
two or three restaurants. 
For our meals at Fort Myers we browsed 
around, trying the various places and finally 
settling upon a little fish-and-oyster house built 
on piles over the water alongside a wharf. The 
food there was absolutely fresh, and the cook- 
(Continued on page 441.) 
Chapter II. 
CLOSE study of the many sheeted map we 
bought from the Mississippi River Com¬ 
mission told us that as we worked south¬ 
ward along the river, its confining bluffs on either 
side grew wider and wider apart. Just below 
Prescott we first noted this. On the left, de¬ 
scending, towered the great bluffs for a few miles 
below the town. On the right, beyond the little 
bayous and sloughs, stretched acres upon acres, 
thousands of them, more or less tilled and sown 
to crops. Tangles and undergrowth, fields gone 
to waste and plots of once tilled land abandoned 
because of high water or a wet season made the 
finest quail cover I ever saw. The bluffs were 
from three to ten miles apart, and with the ex¬ 
ception of the comparatively tiny stream thread¬ 
ing its way crookedly southward, nothing be¬ 
tween but what beckoned to the game little bird 
of brown and ashy gray. 
And his whistle was everywhere. 
Generally speaking the dweller along the 
banks of the Mississippi does not shoot quail 
until the tracks in the snow allow him to make 
pot-hunting profitable. The early season shoot¬ 
ing is mostly done by sportsmen who hunt to 
dog. I am not saying out-of-season shooting 
does not take place. It does, though is very 
small. And I am not sure that pot-hunting is 
as profitable as trapping. The festive muskrat 
seems to be everywhere in the bottoms and his 
pelt is worth good money. 
Making the cruiser fast to a lone tree on 
the Minnesota side, we gained permission of a 
clammer-farmer-stockman to see what we could 
find in his oat stubble, hay meadows and corn 
fields. He was a generous soul, bewhiskered of 
face and white of heart. He kept a ’coon dog. 
Once in the corn field about his shanty we saw 
the dogs roading a bevy of birds. Finally taking 
lodgment in a piece of uncut hay, they laid to 
dogs in fine shape. Approaching, we made ready 
to shoot, but when putting the dogs into the 
bunch they began getting up so close to us that 
we could see they were hardly of a size to kill, 
save the old hen of the brood, which we refused 
to slaughter. One of the dogs was a puppy, and 
he thought when the birds began raising before 
him that he had broken all the rules he had been 
yard taught, for he shivered as if he had been 
thrown into ice water on a blustery day. 
Working over further into the tall weeds, 
waist high, we found a covey of seven big birds, 
all of spring hatch and claimed five of them. 
The rest of the morning was devoted to getting 
five more from a scattered covey that dropped, 
spread-eagle fashion, among the tall alders and 
weeds, willows and brambles that seemed at first 
impenetrable. 
The perfect cover along the river bottoms 
will provide good shooting along them for many 
years to come. The birds cannot be butchered, 
as they have been butchered on the prairie coun¬ 
try of Kansas and Nebraska. Nothing can af¬ 
fect the crop except nasty winters and overflows 
during the nesting time. The spring of 1912 saw 
no overflow on these upper river bottoms. What 
high water there was came with the approach of 
spring, and birds that might have nested in the 
low places were forced to adopt other locations 
before mating. 
The following day we went over to the west¬ 
ern bluffs, taking a wagon trail through the jun¬ 
gles. The shooting was not as good as it had 
been the day before, owing to the scarcity of 
water during the hot weather of early summer. 
Quail would rather stay about flowing water or 
the shores of a lake than anywhere else if the 
cover is sufficient for them. During the day we 
heard the booming of a number of gunning 
DUCKS APLENTY. 
