FOREST AND STREAM 
337 
I 
Deep in the Okefinokee Swamp 
The Stirring Adventure of Two Young Men, Armed Only with Bov,s and Arrows, into 
One of j the Wildest Regions of the Old South 
By Will H. Thompson (Continued from May Forest and Stream). 
4 
FEW lucky days came to each 
of us. The quails were very 
plentiful on the island, but the 
short cover was so thick that it 
was seldom that a shot could be 
obtained at them. 
One afternoon, near dusk, 
we were returning from a tramp 
along the doubtful ground, where the cypress 
of the wet land met the pine of the 
barrens, when we heard the sharp chatter of 
frightened quails, and saw a flock of a dozen or 
more rise from the palmetto cover, and, flying 
almost straight up, alight in the low branches of 
a slash pine. The tree was less than thirty 
yards away and we were prepared for a shot 
when, to our surprise, a wildcat leaped ten feet 
up the tree and, when the frightened birds flew 
away, clung with his back to us, turning his head 
from side to side, looking for a possible bird. 
Brother and I each drew from our quivers a 
steel head arrow, quickly fixed the nock oh the 
string, and, drawing to the head, dwelt for one 
brief second on the aim, and loosed together. 
The two. shafts went like converging rays of 
light, to one goal. Each hit the beast. My ar¬ 
row cut through his left flank and buried its 
steel head in the tree. Maurice’s arrow entered 
the very center of the animal’s head at the back. 
I heard the peculiar “chick” as it struck. And 
now we had a circus that was hideously tragic. 
With a yell, the cat sprang from the tree to the 
ground, drawing itself off my arrow and leaving 
it, twisted and broken, still in the tree. Once 
upon the ground the animal began a series of 
frantic bounds into the air, all the time scream¬ 
ing as only the cats can scream. Whirling over 
and over with distended claws, it tore up the 
shrubs and scattered brush and sand into the air. 
I ran up and tried to shoot it, but its move¬ 
ments were so galvanic that I missed it. Maurice 
tried, with no better result. Just as we were 
ready to shoot again, it leaped high into the air 
and fell on its side, stone dead. With all our 
power, we tried in vain to extract the arrow. I 
carried the cat to camp and, on opening its skull, 
we found that the steel arrow-head had pene¬ 
trated the brain to the frontal bone and had 
been there bent and clinched. What amazing 
vitality and what fearful weapons has nature 
given to the assassins of the earth and air! 
The little quails are harmless. They make love 
and mate, and in gentle constancy to each other, 
they hover and rear their flock of little ones. 
Was there a benign purpose in nature that the 
mother bird should toil to raise her little ones 
in order to make food for the beast whose bale¬ 
ful eyes watched by the little dust heap where 
her children come to play, or to be torn by the 
cruel talons and brutal beaks of the winged tigers 
of the air? 
Turkeys were abundant on the island. We 
had seen many, and had heard many more, be¬ 
fore we were able to kill one. This feat I ac¬ 
complished by grace of the craft of Jordan, and 
his peck of corn, rather than by reason of any 
great skill of my own. The black man had a 
scheme by which he hoped to fill the pot with 
a juicy huckleberry-fed turkey. He constructed 
a huge trap of poles, so bound together with 
muscadine vines as to make a rectangular box 
without a bottom, about six feet wide by eight 
feet long and three feet deep. This he set 
by a runway where much sign of turkeys 
appeared, and, with one end of the trap raised 
about two and one-half feet and supported upon 
a cunning trigger combination, he baited it with 
some of the shelled corn. A few grains were 
strung upon a thread and then were wrapped 
around the inner extremity of the long trigger, 
and other grains were scattered thickly under 
the trap, and others led away more scatteringly 
to quite a distance. Evidently the turkeys vis¬ 
ited the trap early the next morning, for when 
Jordan reached it about eight o’clock, the corn 
outside the trap was all gone but not a grain in¬ 
side had been touched. The bait was replen¬ 
ished. but the result was the same. 
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The Old “Dugout”—Now Only a Memory. 
