622 
FOREST AND STREAM 
Nov. 16, 1912 
boughs and made a sled of them, laying the fish 
upon them and dragged them over the snow to 
the shore, up the banks and along to the place 
where we had left our horse. 
We then hitched up, put all our stuff aboard, 
and harked back to our headquarters. When we 
arrived there we found another good supper in 
waiting, to which we did ample justice. And 
whereas the wise man has said, “That it is im¬ 
possible to crave food with any ulterior design, 
and it is impossible to eat food with any ample 
calculation,” I am sure that I partook of that 
meal with craving for it, and a hopeful calcula¬ 
tion that there might be enough left for the next 
morning’s service. 
And here ends the truthful recital of the 
incidents attending my long desired excursion 
to Great Watchet Lakes. 
THE TOP RAIL. 
Springfield, Vt., Oct. 23. — Dear Grizzly 
King: Recently a young friend of mine, a 
lawyer, had occasion to take a team and drive 
into the wilds of the town of L. He arrived 
at the small apology of a hotel late at night, 
and after seeing his horse carefully attended to, 
he entered the office where six of the local 
celebrities, including the proprietor, sat about 
the great stove warming their toes and smok¬ 
ing freshly lighted cigars. This caught my 
friend T.’s attention and he drifted over to the 
cigar counter, and noticed that it was abso¬ 
lutely empty. He pretended not to notice, 
however, and asked the young girl who stood 
behind the counter for some cigars. At the 
word the proprietor, a man with grizzled hair 
and long goatee, thick eyebrows, a hawkish 
nose and a raucous .voice, dropped his evening 
paper, and bringing his heavy hand down with 
a slap on his thigh, exclaimed, “Hell fire! 
Cigars! I’ve had them six cigars a-layin’ in 
that case more’n a year and I told the boys to¬ 
night that we’d smoke ’em up and get rid of the 
danged things, and just as we got ’em goin’ 
you comes ’round and asks for cigars”; and 
without another word he buried himself in his 
paper. 
My friend has a most acute sense of humor 
and he appreciated all this to the last notch 
and thought he would follow up the vein a 
little, so he casually asked the landlord where 
the lavatory was. 
“Lavatory! Well I guess that must be 
up to Bill Sykes’ store. The post office an’ 
town clerk’s office an’ everything else is up 
there, and I guess that must be, too.” 
After supper my friend thought that he 
would retire early and suggested as much to 
the landlord, who said he had better wait until 
the room could warm up and he would go and 
build a fire right away; so T. waited until the 
landlady, after numerous flying trips, told him 
she “guessed ’twould be all right now,” and 
the landlord showed him up the stairs and into 
an old-fashioned room some twenty-five feer 
square, in one corner of which was the bed, 
with its typical huge feather-bed and homely 
but comfortable quilts, and in the most distant 
corner a miniature sheet-iron stove, capable of 
holding about one stick of ordinary stove wood, 
and calculated to heat up that room in the 
winter season at the end of the first week. 
Mr. T., in order to keep the landlord in¬ 
terested, asked him if he would kindly bring 
him a pitcher of ice water. “Hell fire!” says 
he, “ice water!” and he went off down the hall 
and T. could hear him saying, at every step: 
“Hell fire! ice water. Hell fire! ice water!” 
Soon he came back with a big pitcher and an 
apologetic air, and said, “Guess you’ll find that 
cold enough. We hain’t got any ice water,” 
and then his face lighted as one inspired, and 
he rushed to the window, threw up the sash, 
reached out and pulled in an icicle as long as 
his arm, broke it over his knee, soused it into 
the pitcher, and handed it to T. “There,” says 
he, “guess that’ll be cold enough for you,” and 
went away mumbling “ice water” and his favor¬ 
ite cuss word under his breath. 
T. sat up all night trying to keep that stove 
warm, and in the morning the fastidious young 
man, who was accustomed to breakfast on an 
orange and a little crisp toast and coffee, sat 
down to a menu of bean soup, pork steak, fried 
sausage, mince and apple pie; but as he is 
young and healthy, he did justice to the repast, 
and ordering his team hitched up, bundled him¬ 
self in the sleigh and pulled out for home, the 
last words of his host ringing faintly in his 
ears: “Say, mister, Bill Sykes says this town 
don’t boast no lavatory, but old Doc Peters has 
got a jim-dandy phonegraph.” W. W. B. 
With the completion of the Panama Canal, 
Japanese steamships will probably, for the first 
time, ply on the Atlantic seaboard, particularly 
in connection with the extensive raw cotton 
freight traffic. 
“Names of Animals.” 
Seattle, Wash., Oct. 26.- —Editor Forest and 
Stream: In the issue of Oct. 12, under the head¬ 
ing, “Names of Animals,” quoting from the New 
York Sun, you say, “The red Indians speak of 
the wishton-wish, when they mean that pretty 
little marmot of the plains, which we refer to 
as the prairie dog.” Now, I take exception to 
this statement. I do not think that the Indians 
called this animals by any such name. Accord¬ 
ing to Fenimore Cooper this was their name for 
the whippoorwill. The Indians are inclined to 
call an animal or bird by a name that would 
represent its call, as much as they could imitate 
it, and “wishton-wish” would represent “whip¬ 
poorwill” a great deal more than it would the 
barking note made by the Cynomys ludovicianus, 
from which it gets its name of “prairie dog.” 
I have seen several articles in Forest and 
Stream about the wild pigeon. I well remem¬ 
ber, when a small boy, the great flocks of wild 
pigeons that would go over our house in the 
fall and winter. I think it was about 1873 or ’74 
that they were very abundant. The next year 
they were scattering, and then they never showed 
up again. I remember hearing my mother tell 
of the great times they had when they came in 
such great numbers. Last October I made a 
trip to the coast from Roseburg, Oregon. From 
Roseburg to Myrtle Point, a distance of sixty- 
three miles, we traveled in a stage. In a canon 
along the Coquelle River we came across a small 
flock of very dark blue pigeons, which looked 
like the ones I had seen as a boy. I asked the 
driver what they were and he said, “Wild 
pigeons,” but said he did not think they were 
the wild pigeons that he had seen as a boy, when 
living East. We saw these several times, but not 
very close by. I could not see any marking at all 
on the wings or tail—they seemed to be a dark 
blue all over. I could not identify them at all. I 
would like some reader who is acquainted with 
the Oregon birds to name them if they can. 
W. W. Westgate. 
A day’s BAG ON LAKE OF THE WOODS, BAUDETTE, MINN. 
Capt. E. Riley, Tony Hoover, “Cub” Perkins and J. Perkins. 
