* 
FOREST AND STREAM 
more woods acres in a day than they could 
possibly hunt over in a week walking. 
One night coming down out of the country 
with my big headlight shooting a fog of illumina¬ 
tion for fifty rods ahead. I discovered a family 
of skunks, eight young ones. It was such a 
pretty sight, that I ran down town, and got a 
couple of the boys to come back up with me and 
look at them—ten miles round trip. 
Again : 
“How far is it?” 
“Just over the hill.” 
“That all? All right—Come on!” 
The hill is two thousand feet high and over 
it is ten miles, and ten back. 
“I got lost up there.” 
“That so—Go far?” 
“No, not very. Twenty miles—I came out by 
that old cheese factory on the Van Hornellse- 
ville road. Then I knew where I was. 
The See America First spirit has moved thou¬ 
sands of motorcycle boys to take trips that they 
never dreamed of taking before. Thus two 
281 
twenty miles before putting down his traps. 
Motorcycles and automobiles are equalizing 
the hunting of the country. They are making 
the trout as shy, the deer as wild twenty-five 
miles back as they are in the city reservoirs, 
and in the edge of the timber. 
The lust of going somewhere generally stifles 
and grows stunted in the breast of most men. 
It is first school, then work, and then the paucity 
of vacation days. When one thinks how many 
tens of thousand of people dare not break away 
from their work for more than a week or two 
weeks annually, the thralldom in which humanity 
exists is dimly seen. Some men know how to 
make a break for the timber. Sometimes it 
takes an attack of lung trouble to give them 
nerve to make the break, however. 
The motorcycle has freed tens of thousands 
of people. A little city has a hundred of the 
machines, a small county has six hundred, and 
the country has hundreds of thousands of these 
little machines. Men who could not get away 
from town without taking the train get away 
Ttiov Get into the Woods and Mountains 
cycle in beaten paths, one wears out about eight 
hundred miles of scenery. Can there be any¬ 
thing more preposterous? Why, the State pays 
thousands of dollars to preserve a quarter of 
mile of scenery in Watkins Glen, and there are 
whole books written about a mile of Trenton 
Falls, let alone a few hundred feet of Niagara. 
The difficulty developed was familiarity. I 
live in the heart of about ioo miles of scenery 
which has long been regarded as among the 
great attractions of the country. When the Erie 
Canal was dug through, the tourists used to 
stand on the decks of the boats and wipe their 
eyes because of the tears of exhilaration at such 
sights as filled them. 
Not only did I follow the canal, but I follow¬ 
ed the parallel roads, and then, having used up 
fiftv miles of scenery, I would go up on the 
valley ridges, first one side and then the other. 
It was when I began to leave the good roads, 
which are marked on automobile maps, that I 
began to find the better service of the motor¬ 
cycle. 
I think I must have traversed about 3,000 
miles of roads in making 8,000 miles. I rode 
away across country eighty miles or so, taking 
the roads as they came. I went into the woods 
fishing. I went hunting. I went, many times, 
picnicking. 
Off the macadam the going varies from hard 
clay, which is as good as stone or brick, to soft 
sand and slick mud, than which I know of no 
worse going for motorcycling. Hills seem not 
to matter much for the motorcycle, when ore 
has learned the arts of slipping the clutch, get¬ 
ting headway, manipulating the two speeds. The 
latest models, the three speed, will go up any¬ 
thing where the driving tire can get purchase. 
I have said that my wheel had a 27 gear on 
originally. I reduced this, with excellent re 
suits, to 33 gear. This gives a slightly larger 
oil and gas consumption, but it gives a great 
deal more pulling power—speed is reduced so 
that I suppose I can hardly make more than 
60 miles an hour, but at ten miles an hour, I go 
up anything I try to climb, and I have canied 
375 pounds of humanity up and down and across 
country where the grass grows in the roads be¬ 
cause horses cannot haul wagons over them. 
The great charm of the motorcycle is the 
diversity that it gives one. Starting from a 
city, one arrives in a morning’s run, at as good 
trout fly fishing as one can find nowadays in 
the Adirondacks. If one starts early, he can 
get to deer hunting by nine or ten o’clock. As 
for squirrel and bird shooting, if one knows the 
country, the motorcycle is simply astonishing. 
With a friend of mine, I went out after gray 
squirrels. The idea of hunting in the open 
country, in woodlots, in an off year for squirrels, 
seemed rather like exercise, more than like real 
hunting. We rode out eight miles, dragged a 
woodlot, went on a few miles, dragged another 
lot; then we rode two miles to the top of a 
ridge where we could get a bird’s eye view of 
the country. From this height we picked some 
woods about five miles away, and went through 
them. 
Here was a kind of hunting of which I had 
no previous knowledge. It is common enough, 
of course. Lots of men go out in a buggy, or 
in these days, in an automobile, and hunt over 
youths whom I met last summer were going to 
Denver. Every day, all summer long, tourists 
on motorcycles drive down the Mohawk Valley. 
They come in from Chicago, Cleveland, St. 
Louis, Omaha. Cincinnati, Louisville, and other 
towns. They began to go through westward 
bound last fall on their way to the Panama 
Canal Exposition. A good many hundred motor- 
cyclers will go through this summer. In Canada, 
the motorcycle boys are enlisting in the armies 
as message bearers. 
The outdoor business men are using the motor¬ 
cycles a great deal in going and coming. One 
man of my acquaintance has been riding all this 
winter, with a sled-runner outrigger carrying a 
side car. He drives a hundred miles without 
difficulty. I know that trappers were covering 
their lines with motorcycles, and the number is 
increasing for the reason that if there are any 
kind of roads, particularly sandy, in wet autumns, 
hundreds of miles of lines can be covered in the 
semi-open country. Where a man on foot could 
not cover a circle reaching more than ten miles 
from home, a man on a motorcycle can go 
on a Saturday afternoon, ride on a motorcycle 
a hundred miles to supper, and then the follow¬ 
ing day, drive 150 or 200 miles further. Two 
hundred miles in a day is a long pull for a soft 
rider, but a hundred miles is as easily ridden 
as ten or fifteen miles in a buggy. And what 
is more, it is as easy to take one’s wife or 
sweetheart out twenty miles to a picnic creek- 
side as it is to walk down town to a hotel dinner. 
I know that the motorcycle is making outdoor 
men of indoor men. It is taking young men 
away from town resorts of questionable pro¬ 
priety onto the wilderness road. Boys who 
would ordinarily never have seen the green 
timber, now run out into the Big Woods as a 
matter of course, and they are learning to 
shoot, to fish, to camp out as they would never 
have learned to do without the single tracker 
and its exceedingly seductive capacity for mak¬ 
ing miles at a low expense. Thus they get into 
the woods at the rate of two cents a mile, or 
thereabouts. They come and go at their own 
hours. Neither night nor day deters them. 
The big thing about motorcycles is the fact 
