FOREST AND STREAM 
31 
visit, but as their habits are altogether filthy, I 
determined to end that, if possible. So I “play¬ 
ed ’possum.” The door, which like Robinson 
Crusoe’s, was made of thick planks or slabs, 
hewn and squared by hand with an axe, from 
the solid trunks of trees, swung on leather 
straps for hinges, and was kept closed with a 
short piece of rope. Ensconced behind a crack, 
I killed a couple of the magpies, and again like 
Crusoe, with the birds that were destroying his 
grain crop, exposed their bodies, and never was 
bothered with another magpie again. 
They are very wise birds, these magpies, and 
are not at all easy to kill. When one of their 
number is killed, and the rest of the tribe, for 
like gypsies, they usually band together in the 
fall, discover the remains, though it be a day 01 
two after the fatality, they hold a sort of wake 
over the deceased, gathering about him, and set¬ 
ting up a loud squawking and cawing, which 
lasts for a minute or more. Thereafter in that 
neighborhood, for a while, it is all but impos¬ 
sible to get a shot at one except from ambush, 
and then with difficulty for at the slightest sound 
or movement they are off. 
Other visitors were the ravens, but they never 
really intruded. Scenting the meat afar off, 
they would pause in their flight, and take a 
perch upon the top of some dead pine nearby, 
emitting that peculiar note which they never 
utter except when the mouth is watering at the 
sight of something to eat—a curious sound it 
is—a sort o'f compromise between the gurgling 
of water from a jug, and a hoarse chuckle. They 
are said to attain the age of one hundred years, 
and certainly they embody the wisdom of long 
and varied experience, for it is almost impos¬ 
sible to get near enough to watch their behavior, 
to say nothing of a shot. They have learned to 
know that in the fall, a man on foot or horse¬ 
back, carrying a gun, in the game country, is 
quite likely to have casual relation to a killing 
and a subsequent feast. So that they seldom 
see a hunter but they circle him, soaring above 
his head, until they have satisfied themselves as 
to how the matter stands. 
Man’s presence and activities do not always 
spread fright and woe among dumb wild brutes. 
Until they “holed-up” in September, gophers 
were plentiful about the cabin, and nowhere else 
in that region. The reason was, of course, that 
the coyotes killed them off almost to the last one 
elsewhere, and the coyote is too suspicious to 
venture close to man’s habitation except by 
night, and then the gopher is safe in his bur¬ 
row. I never saw such presumptuous little 
wretches. They came and went in the cabin at 
will, either through holes which they burrowed 
beneath the logs, or through the door which was 
always open, for the admission of light and air, 
for the cabin had no windows. And how pas¬ 
sionately fond they were of flour. There were 
scores of them and so fearless that when my 
sudden entry surprised some fat old depredator 
with his head and half his body sunk in the hole 
he had tunneled in the flour sack, he would not 
bother to run, but backing out, would eye me, 
though not two feet away from him, stolidly 
and with manifest disapproval, as if he meant 
to challenge my right to interfere. But my pa¬ 
tience was not proof against this, and one day 
the sight of perhaps a dozen gophers, scuttling 
around the cabin, with their whiskers full of 
flour, moved me to wrath, and the little short- 
barreled Stevens .25, a mighty handy gun. 
They never forgave me, and whereas the chip¬ 
munks continued to dance over the dirt floor un¬ 
til the very last, the gophers after my summary 
execution of sundry of their number, pour en- 
courager les autres, as Las Casas said of the 
Indians whom the Spaniards tried to convert by 
burning at the stake, they gave me a pretty wide 
berth, and would run whenever they saw me. 
Though the gopher is supposed to be a pretty 
A Difficult Bit of Nature Photography. 
