Forest and Stream 
$3 a Year, 10 Cts. a Copy, 
Six Months, $1.5<h 
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, APRIL 27, 1912. 
VOL. LXXVIII.—No. 17. 
127 Franklin St., New York 
PELIC.-^NS IN FLORIDA WATERS. 
Photograph by George A. Irwin. 
“Ring Around a Rosy” with 
ETTER get out one of them guns. I don’t 
' Ib like the actions of that off mule,” said 
Lick-i-ty-cut Pete. ‘‘He keeps a-cockin’ 
forward his ears an’ throwin’ up his head like 
a houn’ dawg tryin’ to ketch a scent. See that! 
■See how he squats an' quivers every time the 
win’ restles the bresh?” 
I ‘‘Oh, that ain't no sign of nothin’ but low¬ 
browed mule,” said Paystreak Johnson. ‘‘He’s 
-only lookin’ fer some chanst to do somethin’ 
j ornery.” 
“Nothin’ of the kind; that there mule’s got 
sense. He smells somethin’ that he’s afeard is 
bear. If there’s anything that’ll skeer a mule 
j worse’ll a bear, it’s two bears. Not the little 
I black or brown hog-rootin’ kind, but sure-enough 
j bear like grizzly or cinnamon. Them’s the boys 
that’ll make a mule throw up his paint bresh 
tail fer a fare-ye-well an’ send him over the 
t nex’ range like he was makin’ up time.” 
j We were high in the California Sierra Nevadas, 
’Johnson, Pete and his fifteen-year-old stepson, 
feud Larkin, and myself. Johnson and I had been 
rocking some of the bars on the Feather, be¬ 
tween Injun Joe’s and Spanish Fork, with such 
' success that the weight of gold dust and nuggets 
I in our buckskin pouch prompted us to winter in 
a little park of second growth yellow and sugar 
pine, well sheltered by high peaks and about a 
mile back from the river. We knew that a 
j snowfall of fifteen feet on the level was not un- 
' usual in that locality and built our cabin of pine 
1 logs accordingly. We had figured on ham. bacon 
and dried beef for our winter’s supply of meat, 
but Paystreak had created a longing in our minds 
By E. E. BOWLES 
or stomachs by suggesting that some smoked or 
jerked venison and bear meat would be good to 
vary the monotony, so he wrote to Pete, who 
had often boasted to us of the good hunting in 
his neighborhood. 
Pete had made a clean-up of a pocket on the 
Middle Fork of the American several years be¬ 
fore—enough to permit the purchase of a hay 
ranch up Mohawk way — married the Widow 
Larkin, who kept the boarding house at Yankee 
Jim’s, famous for her yeast biscuit and frijoles, 
and had settled down. Tall, lean, loose-jointed, 
easy-gaited, good-natured Pete — when one let 
him have his head—but try curb bit or spur and 
he was hard rubber over steel springs. For in¬ 
stance, one night a gang of disappointed rustlers 
tried to raid our—but that has nothing to dp 
with this. 
We often speculated on how the widow would 
house-break Pete after his having roamed desert 
and mountains, wild and free, for so many years, 
but our first visit showed that she had succeeded. 
She first tamed him with her “woman’s cookin’ ” 
and then held him to the work of the ranch by 
sheer force of her personality—but you don’t 
know the widow and can’t understand. Occas¬ 
ionally, however, Pete would feel the call of the 
wild and write us to ask him to take us hunting 
or for his assistance on the cla’m. The widow 
knew that to refuse his granting our request 
would create an impression in his mind that we 
might think he was tied to her apron strings. 
When he wanted to wander off alone for weeks 
at a time, that w'as a different situation and easier 
to control. At first she would go with him and 
a Grizzly 
he soon tired of that. A woman is not much 
assistance in trailing a wounded buck or bear 
over chaparral-covered mountains, and women do 
not enjoy standing up to their hips in muddy 
ice cold water all day shoveling pay gravel into 
a sluice box. 
In a year or two the widow’s son was old 
enough to take trips with Pete, and on the quiet 
he would suggest to the boy that it was time for 
trout to rise, that deer would be in prime con¬ 
dition about such a time or that he believed a 
certain mountain had never been prospected for 
gold properly. The boy did the rest. I hey al¬ 
ways left home with such misgivings and fears 
on the part of the mother, however, that such 
trips were not frequent. 
“She just idolizes that there boy,” said Pete, 
“but, as fer as that goes, his own daddy couldn’t 
have thought more of him than I do. But he’s 
got to take a man’s place in the world an’ he’s 
got to have a man’s trainin’; things a woman 
can’t teach. She c’n train his morals an’ we c’n 
send him to school for the learnin’ me an’ his 
mother lacks, but there’s some things that all 
the books in the world can’t teach, jest as we 
know a feller has to live ’em. He’s goin’ to 
learn to stan’ on both feet an’ look every man 
square between the eyes, know when to give in 
an’ when to turn his thumb knuckle in an’ hit 
straight an’ hard. He’s got to ride, throw a 
rope, shoot, swim an’ do every thing that comes 
into a man’s life in the open. How the wild 
things live an’ grow an’ how they pertect them¬ 
selves. I’m teachin’ him them things an’ he’s 
a-learnin’ fast. My idy is that if the right S'H 
