Aug. 12, 1911.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
277 
SMITH GUNS 
ONE-TRIGGER 
T is no great achievement to get both 
birds with a Hammerless Smith Gun 
equipped with the Hunter One-Trigger attach¬ 
ment. Because it is so easy. Still the satisfaction 
is none the less, for it does require a good eye and 
a steady hand. 
THE GREAT ADVANTAGE of the Hunter One-Trigger 
is that you do not disturb your aim by changing from one 
trigger to the other. You simply pull the same trigger 
each time. There’s no relaxing of the muscles—no re¬ 
gripping—no re-adjusting yourself to the different length of 
stock represented by the distance between the two triggers 
—no disturbance of your aim. There’s no creeping or drag¬ 
ging, either—and no firing of both barrels atthe same time. 
Write your dealer at once—or us direct—for hand¬ 
somely lithographed Catalogue—it’s free. 
The greatest gun in the world today is the new 
20-Gauge Hammerless Smith Gun with the 
Hunter One-Trigger attachment. Weighs only 5% to 7 pounds. 
THE HUNTER ARMS CO., 90 Hubbard St., Fulton, N. Y. 
afford to keep canoes light enough or fast enough 
for the real canoe man’s wants. Such canoes 
can’t stand the wear of season after season, and 
a repainted canoe is too heavy for easy work 
in the woods. It is better and in the end scarcely 
more expensive to buy your own canoes. Use 
them gently on your trip, and when you come 
out you won’t have trouble in selling them for 
about what you paid for them minus the sum 
that you would have paid in rent. 
Woodsmen have their favorites in canoes iust 
as riders have special tastes in horses. Some 
think that they can get the best work out of a 
canvas covered canoe of the Old Town model. 
This canoe has high bow and stern and is 
broad of beam. In design it is not unlike the 
Indian’s birchbark. Men who use these canoes 
say that they stand up well under hard riyer 
usage because the canvas resists the hammering 
of jagged stones in shallow water. They say 
also that the high bow keens you drv in heavy 
weather on storm-swept lakes, and that on the 
whole the canoe is seaworthy. 
But to old canoemen in Canada there is noth¬ 
ing else which has the appeal of the Peterbor¬ 
ough. It is apt to be a slenderer canoe, hasn’t 
the canvas covering and has sharper, lower bow 
and stern. There is a trimness about it, a re¬ 
sponsiveness to the paddle, a certain gammess 
so to speak that Maine canoes do not have. The 
best ones are made in Peterborough, Ont., from 
which the model gets its name. 
In capable hands the Peterborough is as safe 
a canoe as there is. M an Y old canoemen would 
take a Peterborough out in a storm which they 
wou'd flinch at if they had to face it in a skiff. 
For the purposes of a canoe trip of the usual 
sort a sixteen-foot canoe is best, weighing no 
more than sixty or sixty-five 1 pounds. This is 
large enough for two men and their duffle and is 
heavy enough to withstand the wear and tear 
of a trip, provided it is handled with respect. 
If you are going to sell your canoe at the end 
of the trip, buy a painted basswood. This is 
the canoe of commerce and is as easily disposed 
of in the lake country as a pack horse in the 
mountains. Be careful of it, not only because 
you will want to get as good a return for it as 
you can, but because every scratch means added 
weight. 
Basswood is porous and sucks up water greed¬ 
ily. Even with the best of care a basswood 
canoe is likely to weigh five pounds more at the 
end of a trip than it did in the beginning. This 
matter of weight is of prime importance, for an 
additional ten or fifteen pounds means the dif¬ 
ference between reasonably stiff work on a port¬ 
age and exhaustion. Portages are hard enough 
work anyhow without the addition of unneces¬ 
sary weight. 
Next in importance to the canoe in the eyes 
of most woodsmen is the tent. There are still 
men who go into the woods declaring that they 
can get along without a tent. They say they 
would rather do it on account of the weight, 
but these are the men who forget that there 
are silk tents which weigh no more than a good 
sized rubber blanket. 
Two young men took a trip in Canada not 
long ago, using a small silk tent. They ran 
across a couple of prospectors in the Cobalt re¬ 
gion who were not so well equipped. In the 
middle of the prospectors’ canoe was a great 
mound of canvas which weighed to all appear¬ 
ances not an ounce under thirty pounds. It was 
clumsy and bulky, was hard to stow in the canoe 
and heavy to carry over the portages. 
The prospectors, looking at the stuff the young 
men had, asked where their tent was. One of 
them pointed to a roll not more than three inches 
thick which formed the center of their pack of 
blankets. 
‘‘That’s it,” he said. 
“That thing a tent?” observed one of the pros¬ 
pectors. “I thought that was a handkerchief.” 
As compared with the bale of canvas which 
the prospectors carried, it was a handkerchief. 
It weighed a trifle under six pounds. It was 
large enough when it was set up to allow the 
men to spread their sleeping bags side by side 
with room besides for their provisions and 
clothes bags. It was waterproof, which is more 
than can be said for most canvas tents. Camp¬ 
ers know that canvas, unless it is especially 
waterproofed, allows the rain to drip through 
wherever one inadvertently touches it. The re¬ 
sult is that one wakes in the morning to find a 
pool at one’s feet or one passes the night feel¬ 
ing the drip, drip of rain on the face. 
These silk tents are stronger than they appear. 
I he tent which the two young men carried has 
already stood half a dozen hard trips, on some 
of which it also did duty as a pack cloth. It 
has never blown down and it has never given 
the men inside a wetting. 
The scheme which campers utilize who do not 
believe a tent is necessary is simple and on some 
trips proves effective. A pair of rubber blankets 
laid side by side or a strip of waterproof canvas 
about six feet square is all that is necessary. 
The canoe itself, turned upside down and raised 
about a foot at each end, serves to keep the 
water off from overhead and the canvas, roped 
up on each side to the gunwales of the canoe 
keeps it out from below. The result is a sleep¬ 
ing space about three and a half feet wide, with 
no chance for soaking except at the ends. 
The practical objections to this scheme are not 
many under good conditions. If there are no 
mosquitoes and if you get rain only at night you 
will be sufficiently comfortable. But if the mos¬ 
quitoes are numerous they will come in through 
the openings at the ends of the canvas and there 
will not be any sleep for those under the canoe. 
Moreover, if you get a three days’ rain, as one 
sometirnes does in the woods, and you do not 
want to travel, you will find that the eighteen 
inches of headroom is not enough to keep the 
cramps out of your back. 
The net advantage of this scheme is its inex¬ 
pensiveness. As far as weight is concerned the 
canvas sheet comes to almost as many pounds 
as the silk tent. Most good camp supply houses 
sell tents of this sort for about $12. The canvas 
will not cost a quarter of that sum. 
A third possibility is the waterproof sleeping 
bag. Some campers insist that with a good 
sleeping bag they can get along readily enough 
without a tent. On rainy nights they invert the 
canoe over tlfeir heads and let the rain do its 
worst with the rest of the outfit, which is not 
much if the bags are really watertight. But the 
sleeping bag scheme is open to the same funda- 
.mental objections as the other idea. Mosquitoes 
and long continued rains have to be figured on. 
Many first rate campers insist that sleeping 
bags with waterproof covers are essential any¬ 
how, even if a tent is carried. They argue that 
in order to keep warm you have got to take an 
extra allowance of blankets, and that the canvas 
cover serves this purpose. It also insures keep¬ 
ing your blankets dry not only at night, but when 
you are traveling. 
'There are many chances on a canoe trip of 
giving your blankets a soaking—heavy head seas 
washing over the bows, a tumble in the rapids, 
rain or even a slip in loading the canoe beside 
a mossy rock—and it is a pleasant assurance to 
know that in their canvas cover your blankets 
are safe from all ordinary mishaps. 
In any event sew your blanket up into the 
form of a sleeping bag. This gives you the 
maximum protection with the least weight. Your 
feet are not coming out at the bottom when you 
want to keep warm and you are sure that you 
are not wasting inches of blanket in keeping 
yourself protected. Every ounce of b’anket is 
used for the purpose it was meant to serve. 
Campers do not agree when they come to a 
discussion of clothes, especially extra clothes. 
Some of them will tell you that the only way 
to go about preparing for a canoe trip is to put 
all the stuff you want in one pile and then go 
through it carefully, casting aside everything 
that is not absolutely necessary. The trouble 
with this advice is that it begs the question. 
What is necessary for some men is excess to 
others. 
One experienced man commends this as good 
advice for a month’s trip: Fix yourself up with 
one strong suit for steady wear. Then take 
along another light one to put on in case you 
fall in the lake. 
What he means, putting it in specific terms, is 
to wear a heavy pair of long woolen trousers 
(knickerbockers do not work on a canoe trip 
because they are too much trouble to get into 
and leave vulnerable spots open to mosquitoes) 
and put in the duffle bag a pair of light weight 
flannels. A waterproof hunting coat with a 
woolen lining is useful; also a sweater. 
Two flannel shirts are enough, and as little 
underwear as you regard as consistent with sani¬ 
tation. Some canoemen insist on wearing woolen 
underwear all day. Others use cotton, sometimes 
in short lengths. But if you are traveling in 
Canada in September it will pay to take along 
a suit of woolen underwear, even if in New York 
you cannot wear it in mid-winter. You will find 
that it will keep off the chills at night, and it 
may be that you will have to wear your heaviest 
trousers and a sweater besides. 
For foot wear nothing can serve the canoe- 
man as well as moosehide moccasins, or as they 
are called in the North, shoepacks. Get them a 
