288 
FOREST AND STREAM 
SMOKE 
|»W| 
IT’S GREAT 
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and deer and bear in Michigan, to geese and 
ducks and chicken, quail and jacksnipe in the 
marshes, on the prairie and along the streams 
of Nebraska. Thus the love of nature is the 
principal charm I find in hunting. The pleas¬ 
ure of exercising the considerable skill with which 
I am possessed in finding game and shooting it is 
truly secondary to the love I have for all ani¬ 
mate and inanimate nature. I love the woods and 
the fields and the waters with equal fervor. I 
love the trees and the flowers, the sunshine, the 
hills, the lakes and streams, the air and all the 
concommitants which go herewith. I think as 
much of the robin, with his ruddy breast and 
black hood as I do of the Canada goose, with 
his ebony head, white collar and sonorous auk- 
unk! I am as interested in the flicker, as he un¬ 
dulates across the fields in flashes of gold, as I 
am in the pinnated grouse that thunders from 
under your very feet, from out the yellowing 
prairie grass; there is as much music for me in 
the whistling wings of the dove as he rises from 
the new-made stubble as there is in the raucous 
cry of the mallard, or the cackling of the pintail 
or widgeon; the red-headed woodpecker, pitch¬ 
ing from cottonwood to fence stake, is as curious 
to my eyes as the whizzing, bee-line flight of the 
quail; and the young meadow lark, with a breast 
of gold and jet, nearly as bright as that of his 
chuckling old sire; the bee bird, whose curious 
little curving excursions from telegraph wire, 
or barbed wire fence, are always fascinating, as 
you watch him from the buggy; the swifts and 
swallows, darting hither and yon; the noisy che- 
winks, ghostly rain crow, thrush, indigo bird and 
wild canary—they all hold for me an equal 
charm with the gamey jacksnipe, tinkling upland, 
curlew or yellow-leg. And thus it is with all the 
■birds, and all the animals, too, and I know of no 
state more liberally abounding with this beautiful 
wild life than our own fair Nebraska. 
But on that memorable July day Ray and myself 
suddenly lost all interest in the commoner ad¬ 
juncts of outdoor sights and curiosities, when 
suddenly, as we were nearing Reeves’ charming 
home, Welch raised his hand and exclaimed: 
“Listen!” 
The next moment we caught a sort of rippling 
whisper, like the silvery notes from a phantom 
lute, come falling from the clouds, and as we 
lifted up our eyes, caught a glimpse of a little film 
of gray trailing over the hazy summer sky, and 
then again and again caught those pearls of 
sweetest harmony as they dropped from the deli¬ 
cate throat, as the graceful shape pitched on for 
nearly a half mile and then dove down into a field 
of withering 'head-high corn. 
We were not long in getting out of the wagon 
and, hitching the horses in the soothing shade 
of a convenient box-alder, we climbed through 
the barbed wire fence, into an old pasture ad¬ 
joining the cornfield, into which the plover had 
dropped. Ray said h£ would play dog and start 
the birds, so skirting the clump of caterpillared 
bramble bushes he crawLed through another fence 
into the corn, while I strolled slowly along in 
the pasture, ready and alert for the flushing of a 
bird. I was admiring the pale white and blue of 
a few straggling blossoms of the wild morning 
glory, which twined in and among the gold of the 
cinquefoil along the oid stunted hedge posts that 
had once partitioned the two fields, when sud¬ 
denly I was startled by a sudden triplet of sweet 
notes—-the startled upland’s whistle—and, turning 
to the left, was barely in time to see a fragment 
of gray flitting over the tasseled tops of the corn 
not forty feet away. The next instant Welch’s— 
he had climbed into the corn—gun broke the 
summer quiet, and when the thinnest vapor, which 
is all those matchless Peters’ shell made, had 
swept away, I could see nothing but the waving 
corn, while Ray stooped down, hiding himself a 
moment amid the waving leaves, then standing 
up he held high, where I could see, a young 
plover by the tip of one of his long, pointed 
wings. 
“First blood!” he cried, then slipping the dead 
bird into the pocket of his canvas shooting coat, 
he moved on. 
A few moments laler and it was my turn. 
From the dusty tufts of ragweed at the lower 
end of the pasture, some eight or ten plover 
flushed at one time, and, as if rebounding from 
heaven, that sweet call echoed and re-echoed from 
all points of the field. I stopped short in my 
tracks.as I saw a wary old bird swinging round 
toward me, and calling to Welch to stand still, I 
prepared myself for a kill. 
“Turwheetle! Turwheetle!” the bird cried, as 
it swept down toward me, then shied off as it 
detected my motionless figure, but it did not get 
far before I stopped it, for at the crack of one 
of those far-reaching ideal shells it went gyrat¬ 
ing into the corn not a dozen steps from where 
Ray was standing. At that very instant an old 
mottled hen jumped from the straggling tufts of 
goldenrod not twenty feet away, and in my 
eagerness I fired before getting her well cov¬ 
ered, and above the edge of that thinish spiral of 
smoke she went sailing quickly off and up toward 
the sky. And then I heard Ray’s gun again. 
Scarcely had the report of my piece died away 
when a bird arose out of one of the corn rows, 
and 1 saw Welch raise his gun and then heard 
its spiteful crack. But he had made a clean 
miss, and off went the plover, out over the upper 
end of the pasture, where it was joined by sev¬ 
eral other lines of tinkling gray, and in another 
moment the whole neighborhood seemd resonant 
with a full chorus of that mystic melody. 
Have you ever shot upland plover in the ripen¬ 
ing corn and on the grazing iands hemming it in 
roundabout? Is there any greater sport, and is 
there any excitement that will keep the blood in 
speedier circulation? 
Ray had come out of the corn and joined me, 
-nd while he stood there lamenting his last miss 
I saw a bird clean cut against the sky, within 
fair range, and Ray saw it, too, and in our eager¬ 
ness we both shot together. 
The stricken thing held its poise in the air a 
second, then there was one single, sharp note, and, 
in a whirl of gray and white, it came tumbling 
down, over and over, like a redhead out of a high¬ 
flying flock, to the short-cropped grass. Two 
others, which we had not seen, but which were 
trailing close in its wake, sped away in fright 
at the crack of our Parkers, their startled notes 
falling even louder and sweeter as they fringed 
the fleecy, low-lying clouds. They quickly van¬ 
ished and all was strangely quiet. We bent our 
heads to listen, but not a whistle, save the mock¬ 
ery which came from a flock of jangling black- 
THE CAMPER’S OWN BOOK 
This is that BIG little book of the open—America’s new outdoor annual. It comes to 
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Authors of country-wide repute have, with their enthusiasm and familiar knowledge, 
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PRICES PER VOLUME 
In the appropriate green T-cloth $1.00. In the paper (as shown in cut), 50c. postpaid. 
FOREST AND STREAM 22 Thames Street, NEW YORK CITY 
