488 
FOREST AND STREAM 
Oct. i g, 1912 
Chapter IV. 
W E had not much more than left St. Louis 
when we began to find the great sand¬ 
bars on the inside of every bend in the 
river. 
At night they were peopled with the lesser 
children—geese, ducks by the thousands, and 
brant. It was now no trouble at all to pick up 
plenty of birds from the front door of the boat, 
many being killed with a small caliber rifle by 
firing into the black mass on the water, so thick 
did they sit. The writer has seen ducks and 
geese in the breeding grounds of Canada and 
the Dakotas, but never saw such a sight as filled 
the eyes below Chester, Ill., that October morn¬ 
ing. 
While I have said that we were a month 
too late in starting down the river, there have 
been falls galore that would have given better 
weather for our trip. But the game season could 
not have been excelled. It was propitious for 
plenty of meat to supply the galley larder. At 
the last named section of the Big Creek, ducks 
blackened the water. One could hardly imagine 
where the breeding grounds of so many thou¬ 
sands could be located. 
The mate was cleaning a pair of ducks on 
the poop deck and the skipper was foolishly 
watching such game sights as he had never seen 
before, when with a dull stop all the under irons 
dragging in the sand caused us to become aware 
that the cruiser was on the sand, and that we 
were not in the channel at all. Fact is, we had 
paid no attention to the charts for some miles, 
and had not even noted the location of the dia¬ 
monds or day marks that told the channel from 
the bars. An island dead ahead of us and we 
to the left of it rather than the right held our 
progress up for some minutes, while all hands 
and the valiant engine backed and puffed and 
snorted until we were clear of .the bar. It is no 
light task to handle a 35-foot or 40-foot boat 
where the water is swift, and the reverse is but 
one turn of the wheel to three of the engine. 
Don’t try it. 
We backed off and made for the channel 
again and swung round the island and came up 
behind it, dropping anchor nearly where we had 
gone aground. This was below the bar, and in 
the chute where the water that tried to hold us 
on the sand concentrated and washed a nice chan¬ 
nel. Such is the fickle river. She cuts and pieces 
and runs amuck where and when she likes, and 
the hand of man droops in obedience to her. 
Getting into the flat bottom lands further 
along, yet above Cairo, gave us a chance to see 
the great wedge-shaped flocks of geese winging 
from one corn field to another or from bar to 
bar, cutting the miles by river by steering from 
aloft and traveling as the crow flies. We now 
took our time, anchoring each night in some 
weird looking chute or behind an island, or at 
the head of some sand-bar where we might get 
ashore and follow the bar’s circle into the weeds 
and burs wherein the honkers seemed to prefer 
a night roost. 
They were wary. Many times we would get 
within a hundred yards of an unexpected flock, 
and away they would go, flapping their long 
flights to bear them upward and away from the 
scatter gun. Our first shooting at geese had 
taught us the futility of trying to penetrate their 
tightly massed feathers with anything smaller 
than buckshot, and we had but few shells of 
this sort, hence hoarded them like a miser would 
his coppers. To bang away at the birds and 
waste shot was not known to us, but we failed 
of goose meat. 
Again we came at night to a dandy landing 
among a Government fleet of barges and work¬ 
ing boats and steamers. On a bar out in the 
river, water running on both sides of it, calmly 
sat a plenteous flock of the black-necks, having 
dropped upon it as night approached. Among 
200 men on the shore was one strategist who sug¬ 
gested loading a boat with brush, having it hauled 
up the river and set adrift at a point where it 
would start for the bar whereon sat the preen¬ 
ing geese. Great idea. Float down on them and 
murder the whole flock. It seemed easy. 
And no sooner had the idea been germinated 
than the work was set about to accomplish its 
fulfillment. Brush was loaded up and two gun¬ 
ners, one the scribe, were hidden beneath it. A 
motor launch pulled us up the river and dropped 
us about where the current would bear us down 
past the bar on one side or the other of it. We 
began the descent, guns loaded with buckshot 
No. 8 chilled, and hope high in two breasts, with 
198 mortals on the shore awaiting developments. 
The launch went on down stream, to wait 
for us and pick us up. The geese sat serenely 
on their island and flopped here and there as 
they pranked among themselves. Four hundred 
yards off we were. Three hundred; two hun¬ 
dred. The old wise gander who led the guard 
stretched his neck and scanned the dreadnaught 
floating his way. The wind was behind us, and 
it looked as if they smelled the danger. One 
hundred yards. Thirty more and we would be 
within long range. But they did not wait. 
Mr. Wise Gander raised into the wind and 
started to swing over us with his gabbling flock 
behind. When they were in a nice twenty-yard 
range, we raised from the bottom of the scow 
and began triggering. I fired four times. Bill 
fired six. Three honkers dropped into the river 
and descended with the current. Dark and the 
obstructing brush probably prevented our getting 
at least a half dozen. But they fly swift; they 
are hard to kill and are never killed until dead 
in hand. From the shore a chorus greeted. The 
chugging of the two-cvlinder two-cycle skiff came 
near, and we were picked up along with the 
geese and taken ashore. The officers’ mess 
aboard a steamer the following day was graced 
with goose and visitors treated to the hospitality 
of old-time rivermen. 
Ducks were everywhere. The first thing in 
the morning and the last thing at night we 
would see great strings of them, heads under 
their wings in inclement weather, floating south¬ 
ward. Below Cairo we found greater numbers 
of them. Also we found more cruisers and hunt¬ 
ers and hunting parties. Turkeys were now 
found in the bags of the bottoms hunters whom 
we came across. In the Tennessee bottoms rifle 
shots were heard and cruisers from up the Ohio 
were tide to the shores, where their parties had 
made camp temporarily. 
On the Arkansas' shore I found deer tracks. 
A piece of venison hanging near a negro’s shanty 
in the bottoms and a crippled wild gobbler in 
the pen of a bottom billy hinted that pre-season 
shooting had been going ahead for some weeks. 
At one landing we were accosted as soon as 
the mud-hook caught and demanded to reveal 
ourselves. It must be ascertained that we were 
not wardens. Seldom, if ever, had a cruiser 
stopped in that out-of-the-way place. We found 
the reason to be dozens of hoop nets stretched 
in the swift-running water of the chute we chose 
for an anchorage. Literally these folks were 
devastating the river of fish—catfish, buffalo, carp 
and hundreds of bass and other fish that were 
coming up-river. A bass is a green trout down 
there. He is only respected for the slightly 
higher price he brings in the market. And we 
have our suspicions that many other temporary 
settlements of fishermen along the river are 
doing the same work. 
At Memphis we saw carloads of fish and 
game, barrels on barrels on it, in the produce 
market. Ducks were decaying by the barrel. 
They had been packed without vent holes in the 
containers and overheated, were not iced, and 
represented no profit to anyone save the express 
company that had carried them. 
In Louisiana we began to miss the ducks 
and geese, as the sand-bars were covered with 
water, and the birds had cut across country to 
the coast where the river had begun to flow gen¬ 
erally eastward rather than south. ‘ But in the 
cotton fields and corn of Mississippi and Louis¬ 
iana we began hearing the festive whistle of the 
quail and seeing them offered for sale. On a 
(Continued on page 506.) 
