434 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[Sept. 9, 1911. 
Y OU know mallards—wisest and wariest of all 
ducks- Solomons of the air. You can’t knock 
down mallards with a paddle nor can you get them 
with a gun that plasters its shots all over the face 
of creation. 
A mallard shot is generally a long shot, and long 
shots require a hard-shooting, close-shooting gun. 
That’s why the long-headed man who goes to a 
mallard country takes a Lefe/er. When he swings 
it on a towering pair of mallards he does not ques¬ 
tion the result. He know it— 
TWO CLEAN KILLS 
The reason a Lefever kills clean and sure and 
far is Lefever Taper Boring. 
But if you buy a Lefever for the taper boring 
alone, you will get more than your money’s worth. 
For instance, you will never be handicapped with 
looseness at the hinge joint. The exclusive Lefever 
screw compensates for a year’s wear by a trifling 
turn that you make yourself with a screwdriver. 
LEFEVER 
SHOT GUNS 
Sixteen other exclusive Lefever features and Lefe¬ 
ver simplicity and strength make the $28 gun the 
peer of any §50 gun on the market. Upwards to 
Si,000. Send for free catalog and get Lefever wise. 
Lefever Arms Co., 23 Maltbie St., Syracuse,N.Y. 
Where young trees are plentiful, squirrels do 
much damage, as we have proved to our cost, 
stripping them of the young buds and shoots, 
which does not tend to improve their growth, 
and often results in their failure to mature. 
They are a decided menace to young birds, 
for they can easily climb out upon the thinnest 
branches and reach a nest which even the active 
house cat cannot contemplate. In woods where 
the trees are well grown a few squirrels will 
not do very much harm, yet it is surprising the 
number of young birds one or two of them will 
destroy, and for this reason, if for no other, 
their ranks require thinning almost to the point 
of extinction. They breed freely and are great 
wanderers, thus a wood clear of them one month 
may contain two or three the following month, 
and in most districts the supply is usually 
plentiful. 
The most sporting way of thinning their 
ranks is to use a repeating .22 rifle, shooting them 
as they jump from tree to tree, or crouch, sway¬ 
ing on the topmost branches. As boys we used 
to shoot them with catapults, using a single 
S.S.G. shot with fairly strong elastic. Unless 
hit in the head or shoulder they could withstand 
a tremaridous amount of hammering, but as we 
practiced regularly with our weapons, but few 
of the red rascals escaped us. 
They are surprisingly active in their move¬ 
ments, and will dash headforemost down a tree 
at your feet, when determined to run for fresh 
cover. Their curiosity is great, and if you stand 
still beside a tree should a squirrel have taken 
refuge in its lower branches it is ten to one that 
it will come gradually down the trunk, chatter¬ 
ing and quickly moving its feet, to suddenly 
dart up again with a wild cluttering, only to 
again come down and take a fresh survey of 
you. 
In summer the fur is extremely red, which 
changes in winter to almost the gray-brown of 
the deer’s pelage, while the tail thickens out to 
a splendid “brush.” 
They can carry away a surprising number of 
nuts or chestnuts in their mouths, the cheek 
pouches seeming to have endless capacity in this 
respect. 
As an edible quantity squirrels are by no 
means to be despised, as we know from experi¬ 
ence, although in England it is considered 
rather an Indian-like custom to eat them. When 
in Canada we have cooked and eaten grey, black 
and red squirrels, not to mention the pretty 
striped chipmunk, or ground squirrel. The 
woods fairly swarmed with red squirrels, like 
our British species, though somewhat smaller. 
Both black and grey squirrels are larger than 
the English reds, and are considered quite a 
delicacy. Grey squirrel shooting is a popular 
sport in many States of America. 
In America the squirrels hibernate during 
much of the winter, coming out only on bright, 
sunny days. They hide supplies of nuts in holes 
in the ground, within easy distance of their 
winter quarters, and it is surprising how they 
find the entrances to these storehouses when 
snow lies a foot deep above them. We have 
often wondered whether an acute sense of smell 
or a remarkable memory for locations enables 
them to so unerringly go straight to the spot, 
working down through the snow. Like the 
hedgehog, the squirrel is by no means averse to 
taking and eating the young of game birds, 
and most keepers are fully aware of this, the 
rows of vermin on the keeper’s “gibbet” gen¬ 
erally showing a few of their carcasses in vary¬ 
ing stages of decomposition. 
Despite their evil ways, the squirrels help to 
make the country side what it is, and in these 
days of strict game preservation, when our wild 
things of the vermin tribe meet constant death 
by gun and trap, we cannot but rejoice when a 
few escape to please our eye and encourage us 
to hope that all our really wild life is not quite 
yet extinct. 
CALIFORNIA’S UNIQUE FOREST. 
California, among many other natural 
wonders, contains a stone forest. This is lo¬ 
cated in Sonoma county, only a few miles from 
the little resort of Calistoga Springs. This 
“forest" consists of a great many petrified trees 
—all of wfliich are prostrate. 
In respect to the great number of petrified 
trees, and their immense size, the California 
“stone forest” surpasses that of Arizona. 
Strange to say, but very little is known about 
these wonderful Sonoma county petrifactions— 
so far as the general public is concerned. Many 
of these trees are of enormous size. The fam¬ 
ous Queen of the Forest is a pre-historic red¬ 
wood, about 80 feet long, and nearly 12 feet in 
diameter. It has been broken in several places, 
and these breaks are as clean as if cut off with 
a saw. A tree has grown up through one of the 
breaks and has attained quite a large size. An¬ 
other giant tree known as the Monarch lies 
nearby, which is almost 90 feet long and is 
without a break. This tree is a fir, and averages 
10 feet in diameter. Not far away is another 
giant son of the forest—a redwood that is about 
60 feet long and is without a break. This tree is 
broken into many hundreds of pieces, yet it re¬ 
tains its shape almost perfectly. Scattered about 
for the area of several acres, are many other 
pieces of petrifaction. So perfect has been the 
transmutation into stone that the grain of the 
wood still remains very clear, and the variety 
of the tree may be easily determined.—-American 
Forestry. 
The Forest and Stream may be obtained from any 
newsdealer on order. Ask your dealer to supply you 
regularly. 
WITH THE SHOTGUN IN KASHMIR. 
It would be possible to write volumes in de¬ 
scribing the various kinds of sport to be ob¬ 
tained on the mountains of Kashmir. \ve 
should start with the Chakore and tell of the 
difficult nature of the ground frequented by this 
most excellent species of partridge and 01 the 
big bags made in the days when sportsmen were 
few and birds plentiful; we should pass on to 
the Ram Chakore, a bird as big as a turkey and 
as good to eat as the finest partridge, which is 
found high up on the mountains, usually in 
scrubby bushes skirting the pine forests; and we 
should not forget the gorgeous Minaul pheas¬ 
ant, easily king of the feathered denizens of 
the dark pine woods of Kashmir. 
Though the finest and most exhilarating sport 
is doubtless to be obtained on the mountains 
and in the sweet-scented deodar forests, the 
lakes, jheels, and rivers of the plain afford capi¬ 
tal diversion to any keen sportsman who is 
willing and able to work for his bag, for it is 
hard to name any kind of wildfowl wliich is not 
to be found in the valley at some time of the 
year. 
Whether you take the tonga and drive along 
the road between Baramula and Srinagar or 
elect to do the journey by the more lengthy 
but far pleasanter route on the bosom of the 
winding Jheelum River, you will, at intervals, 
pass jheels which at certain seasons are crowded 
with wildfowl. The valley itself is for the most 
part very flat, varied by karewas, or table lands, 
and the spurs of the surrounding mountains 
rise very abruptly from the plain, which is itself 
about 5,200 feet above sea-level. It takes, 
roughly, a couple of days for a doonga, or 
house boat, to accomplish the journey 10 the 
Eastern Venice, and sometimes delay is caused 
by a storm on the Woolar Lake, which the 
Manjis rightly look upon with fear and trem¬ 
bling at any time when the winds show a dis¬ 
position to descend from the lofty mountain 
fastnesses surrounding the gloomy waters. 
In winter time this extensive lake—the largest 
expanse of water in Kashmir—is often alive with 
wildfowl, mallard, widgeon, pintail, golden-eye, 
teal, to say nothing of tile various kinds of geese 
and swans. My own efforts to obtain sport on 
the Woolar have never been crowned with suc¬ 
cess, but probably a skilfully-maneuvered duck 
punt, carrying a big duck-gun, with a pound or 
so of buckshot, would do better than my very 
amateurish efforts with my ordinary shoulder 
gun. 
It is not, to my mind, worth while to waste 
time in chasing birds over the broad expanse 
of the Woolar when all along the banks of the 
river are to be found such excellent jheels as 
those at Manisbal, Shadipore, Kanaspura, and 
Ningle. It is well to take plenty of time on the 
journey and "tie up” at the river bank whenever 
a likely jheel is reached. You will not have tied 
up long before the local shikari will pounce 
upon you and loudly sing the praises of his 
particular jheel. His account of the number of 
birds, etc., may be highly colored, but if you 
do what he tells you he is pretty sure to show 
you some sport. As a rule, the shikara used 
on these occasions is a very small flat-bottomed 
boat or punt, pointed at both ends, about 12 
feet long, and very narrow, so that it can be 
easily propelled or pushed in between the thick 
banks of high rushes. This little boat is only 
just big enough to support two, and very often 
the shikari, who is practically unencumbered 
with clothes, is wading in the mud and water, 
and pushing you along in front of him as you 
sit comfortably on a thick litter of dry rushes 
ready to fire at duck or snipe which may be dis¬ 
turbed by your progress. It is always better 
to have two guns for this kind of work. One of 
you takes up a position well screened by grass 
and rushes, while the other is pushed and 
paddled about all over the jheel to disturb the 
duck. This “hanking” or driving work is pos¬ 
sibly the most interesting of the two, because 
one gets the rising shots as well as the high 
shots overhead. 
The larger and better jheels are to be found 
more on the line of the Baramula-Srinagar 
