558 
FOREST AND STREAM 
lish later on, around the shores of tne northern 
Millacs, and hope to be there when the great 
northern flight trails in off of the ice-pans of 
the north, and to get some of the best of par¬ 
tridge hunting. After all, there is nothing the 
equal of questing for his Majesty, Sir Ruffed 
Grouse, he of the neck-cuff of purple black 
feathers; and the thundering wings, and that 
wonderful, spine-straightening quit-quit as he 
rides. Give me then those smokeless Peters, 
with a charge of Number Six shot, and we will 
talk business. The woods have been fine just 
now for the partridge. The meager rains have 
been just enough to wet the rustling leaves, and 
one is able to proceed through even the densest 
woods with little or no noise. Hunting close 
to civilization reverts to a matter of skill, and, 
a particular ingeniousness that must have the 
stamp of woodsmanships attached to it, if suc¬ 
cess is to be wooed with any notable degree. 
Your men around civilization walk the wood 
like elephants and have success accordingly. But 
your cautius man need not travel far away from 
home to find his game. Two or three partridge; 
two or three gray squirrels, and you have all 
your family cares for, at one meal or two or 
three for that matter, considering the immense 
concentrated value of this kind of meat- And 
speaking of this sort of success, around civiliza¬ 
tion, calls to mind an incident, hut it is worthy 
of another paper in itself, wherein to show that 
one may travel to some place, hundreds of miles 
away, and come home empty-handed; where one 
might have better luck right at home. I never 
saw so many mud-hens (or rice-hens, or coots 
as they are classically designed by the scientific 
sharps) as I have seen this year. On the swamps 
where I have hunted this year, there has been 
such a teeming abundance of them that whole 
lakes have been black. Upon one sheet of water 
I could have sworn there were at least three 
thousand and the ducks hide among them. They 
remain unharmed, mind you. Now every hunter 
is not a sportsmanlike figure, holding thoroughly 
to set rules and regulations, recognizing the 
greater attendencies of honest domain, and yet 
even the wildest of these seem to instinctively 
spare the mud-hen. Why? Of course the mud- 
hen is poor as table fare. I will not tell of some 
of my own experience, and people kill them 
still for the mere sport of seeing them fall or 
topple over, and yet I find them now, conclu¬ 
sively Spared. This points to a universal spirit 
of preservation. The mud-hen is not destructive; 
and is good fixed up only as it is parboiled. 
Though I can swear on a stack of bibles ten 
feet high that I will never again eat mud-hen. 
I remember how proud I was in my domineering 
youth when I sat me down in proud and regal 
state to eat one of my own specially prepared, 
broiled hell-diver steaks; 'but it tasted to mud- 
hen a hundred per cent, the winner as a gastro- 
nomical introductory. Therefore, thank you, 
when the mud-hens teem I will single out my 
teal—and try for him if he presents. I find 
that throughout this northern country there is 
not so much snipe-hunting, and woodcock-hunt¬ 
ing as a person would think. Such sport has 
not yet taken hold of the shooting element. It 
yet belongs to the eastern states, and the At¬ 
lantic seaboard. And as for shooting the rail- 
birds here, the dominant soras, well, that is a 
thing that is unheard of. Friend, you shoot a 
sora here, or even a snipe, and show it off and 
you will he laughed at, and people will nudge 
themselves and pass the thought around that 
you are a songbird slaughterer, belonging to the 
days of boyhood. We get as far as ducks, quail 
and partridge here, and rabbits, of course, and 
there the conventional line is drawn. But snipe, 
woodcock, sandpipers, curlews, plover: that is 
in the songbird class. The rails breed in Min¬ 
nesota and the Dakotas by the virtual billions. 
Hardly a swamp but that teems with them, but 
who do you think, paying from two to three 
cents a shell, would waste them on these feath¬ 
ered specks. Therefore, for a wonderfully long 
time to come we will have rail and snipe and 
woodcock. The latter is very scarce. I do not 
think he has been minimized by the shell route. 
The trouble is they keep so wonderfully secluded 
that a person, of the ordinary observation, can¬ 
not locate them. Hunting the woodcock is a 
feat and it takes a past master of the scheme 
of throwing a pattern to bring them to earth. 
But the hunt for them; the hours of quiet, un- 
I got on much better for the rest of the win¬ 
ter, although still very weak and utterly unfit 
for anything requiring exertion or likely to sub¬ 
ject me to exposure. I had a fancy to try for 
the clearings as I got better, but old Peter de¬ 
clared it so decidedly imprudent, and refused 
so emphatically to go with me or furnish ponies 
until the sugar season was over that I concluded 
to wait. 
The sugar season came at last, and a part of 
the band moved down to an extensive tract 
of sugar maples within six or seven miles of 
my shanty and commenced operations. They 
had a merry time of it; the season was an un¬ 
usually favorable one, and big kettles, little ket¬ 
tles, tin pots, pails and pans, were in great de¬ 
mand for collecting sap, boiling down, and su¬ 
garing off. 
One pleasant afternoon a pony was sent to 
me with an invitation to ride over to their camp 
for a visit—an invitation which I gladly accept¬ 
ed, and the visit proved an interesting one. They 
were very busy, and had ten or a dozen kettles, 
large and small, seething and bubbling over hard 
wood fires. Their mode of reducing the sap 
to sugar did not differ in the least from that 
practiced by the white settlers, save in the utter 
disregard of cleanliness exhibited by them. 
The young Indians were continually scouting the 
woods with their little half-starved curs, and 
any unlucky coon, hare, squirrel, or even a musk¬ 
rat, which fell into their hands, was sure to be 
skinned and thrown into the boiling sap for 
cooking, without further dressing or cleaning. 
This rather cooled my appetite for warm sugar, 
and tended also to prejudice me slightly against 
Indian cookery—a prejudice which much after 
observation has only confirmed. They are, al¬ 
most without an exception, most disgustingly 
filthy in all their personal habits. 
I hung about the bright cheerful fires until 
late at night, going from fire to fire, chatting 
with such of them as spoke English and refus- 
troubled expectation; the deliciousness of that 
feeling when you bag several; the very uncer¬ 
tainty of doing this-—all these factors make it 
one of unbounded appeal. And as for hunting 
the rail-bird; I leave that to you of the eastern, 
or southern marshes. But here it yet remains 
to be introduced. More time-worn rules and 
regulations set the invincible standard of hunt¬ 
ing morality, rigidly adhered to by the men of 
the thundering steel. Quail, in Minnesota, will 
soon be a thing of the past, I have no doubt. 
With the quail edging closer and closer to 
civilization, as the covers are wiped out, there is 
an. element that mow them down, perhaps, in 
season and out. It is too bad, too bad, too bad; 
I hate to drop a quail now-a-days, for they have 
too many enemies anyhow. The farmer boy 
with his single gun is an actual menace. I think 
if a few more condemnations were directed 
this way, instead of upon the usually law-abid¬ 
ing yellow-coated men, it would not be out-o'f- 
place- Perhaps what we need here is a five-year 
closed season ; I do not know. 
ing liberal offers of sugar; but at last Peter, 
who acted as cicerone, said it was time to sleep 
and led the way to old Blackbird’s tent, where 
we went to spend the night. The tent was a 
large one with a dull, simmering fire in the 
center, a big smoke-hole at top, and a loose, 
ragged blanket by way of a door. The fire 
gave out much smoke and very little heat, the 
ragged blanket ventilated the structure most ef¬ 
ficiently, and what with young Indians, dogs, 
young and old, smoke and filth, the whole affair 
was well calculated to knock the romance out 
of Indian life effectually. My own little den 
of a shanty was bad enough considered in the 
light of a domestic institution, but it was warmth 
and comfort compared to this. 
For an hour or two I tried to delude myself 
into sleep but the tent grew smokier and colder 
as night waned, until I was fain to take my 
blanket and seek the nearest fire, where, seated 
on a piece of dry bark, I nodded and dozed the 
night away. The Indians treated me kindly. 
Such as they had, and the best they had, was 
offered freely; at parting they pressed me to 
accept of divers small fawn-skin sacks filled with 
dried berries, corn, beans and nuts, which, to 
an invalid who had passed through a long spell 
of sickness with no vegetable food other than 
“hard tack,” were most grateful. 
Just as I was on the start for a return, a 
pretty little squaw, whom I had spoken to the 
day before without elicitating any answer save 
the unmeaning Indian stare, came up and pre¬ 
sented me a small, tastily worked doe-skin pouch 
filled with cranberries, saying in very good Eng¬ 
lish : “Here, you take these and stew them with 
sugar; they are good in fever—'birch is best 
for ager.” And she dodged into a tent, laughing 
loudly, as did all the squaws, who seemed to 
think whipping out the ague a capital joke. Per¬ 
haps it is. 
A few days after my visit to the sugar camp 
a warm south wind stopped the flow of sap, 
and the Indians to the number of twenty return- 
A Winter in Michigan 
Still-Hunting 
By Nessmuk. 
