808 
FOREST AND STREAM 
rar" The Fool and the Gun 
^ TT THEN a majority of the landowners of 
\\ the state have cause to feel that the 
mere presence of game on their land is 
a menace to the safety of their stock and them¬ 
selves, there is not likely to be any great rush to 
increase this game.” 
Thus writes a valued farmer correspondent of 
Forest and Stream in an article published else¬ 
where. He quotes at length from the recent pub¬ 
lication in an agricultural paper of standing, 
complaining bitterly against the carelessness of 
some hunters, and citing injury to animals and 
the narrow escape of human beings as well, 
from flying bullets fired from high-power rifles. 
As in every other question, there are two sides 
to this one, but we are afraid that the farmer’s side 
has not been given the attention it deserves. The 
man who will carry and use a high-power game 
rifle in a.thickly-settled community is a fool, and 
a dangerous one at that. Means should be taken 
to prevent him from menacing life and property, 
but unfortunately this is difficult to do, unless at 
the sacrifice of the convenience and legitimate 
recreation of the far larger majority of sports¬ 
men who keep within the bounds of the law and 
within the restraints of common sense. The 
question involves more than that, for as our 
correspondent points out, it has to deal with the 
preservation and future supply of game, and in 
this particular the farmer is a leading factor. 
Incidents such as those which have been referred 
to are not tending to make relations between the 
farmer and the sportsman more cordial, but are 
leading to a point where open hostility is fre¬ 
quently in evidence. 
The fool and his gun, needless to say, are re¬ 
sponsible for this unhappy discord. It should 
be possible for the farmer under modern laws 
and conditions to regard the raising of small 
game on his acres as a source of profit quite as 
certain of yield as his other products. We do 
not mean altogether that the farmer will go into 
the game breeding business in order to become a 
game seller, but an acreage that possesses a fair 
quantity of small wild game is an attraction that 
legitimate sportsmen will bid well for during 
shooting seasons. This may be regarded as a plea 
for the sportsman with money as against the 
sportsman without money, but if things go along 
as they have been going in the more thickly set¬ 
tled states, we will soon face a condition where 
the farmer will prefer to see all the game de¬ 
stroyed rather than expo~e his interests to jeop¬ 
ardy, and as a natural sequence, a cure from the 
farmer’s standpoint will be complete only when 
there is no game left. 
Perhaps the conservation commissions and 
sportsmen’s associations of various states can 
work out some solution of a situation that just 
now appears to be approaching a critical point. 
The quicker such efforts are made the better it 
will be. Our sympathy is with the man with the 
gun and especially the sportsman of moderate or 
small means. He is not by any means powerless, 
for his influence in legislation is great. But our 
sympathy, while extended to the class named, is 
not withheld from the farmer, who has been 
long suffering under provocation. It is too bad 
that a closed season cannot be slapped on the 
fool with the gun. Some day an enlightened pub¬ 
lic opinion will take his license away from him, or 
refuse him one altogether. That is a reform the 
accomplishment of which everybody will welcome. 
The Albino Deer in Nature 
HE usual reports of the killing of “albino” 
deer are circulating in the daily press, 
with the literary embellishments that al¬ 
ways accompany such stories. Thus we read of 
giant “phantom” deer, the “ghost buck of Jones’ 
Mountains,” etc., etc. As a matter of fact the 
stories have ail the thrills that attach to the usual 
ghost narrative, and no doubt timid people, un¬ 
acquainted with the woods, go to bed after read¬ 
ing these tales of a winter’s night, the wind 
howling outside meanwhile, with a well devel¬ 
oped accompaniment of creeps and shivers that 
the stories are designed to produce. 
Now an albino deer is a rather rare freak in 
Nature. So is a white blackbird, or any other 
off-color specimen of wild life. But albino deer 
exist, as do white blackbirds, and white black¬ 
berries for that matter, and there is reason to 
believe that by selective methods of breeding the 
white color could be increased, for a white deer 
is only an ordinary deer, just as a black fox is 
an ordinary fox, although the black fox has been 
made to breed true to color. 
In its long career Forest and Stream has pub¬ 
lished many accounts of the killing of albino 
deer and the taking of albino specimens of other 
animals. But we have never to our knowledge 
published an account of an albino deer that sur¬ 
passed in size or prowess the ordinary run of 
his own species. As a matter of record, the al¬ 
bino deer is, if anything, usually under-sized. 
It would require too much space to go into a 
dissertation of the whys and wherefores of the 
albino freak in Nature, but the illustrations which 
are published on another page showing a few 
specimens taken from pictures previously appear¬ 
ing in Forest and Stream, may give a better idea 
of what the albino deer is in real life. Note that 
the pictures show animals of common size only, 
and even under-sized. 
It will add to the interest of this discussion if 
some of the readers of Forest and Stream who 
have come in contact with “albinoism” will send 
something for publication in future numbers'. If 
possible, the article should be accompanied with 
illustrations. 
Hudson’s Bay by Rail 
UDS'ON’S BAY has long been the northern 
goal of the hardy sportsman tourist. It 
has been, in fact, the ultima thule, the 
Northwest Passage, of the outdoor man possess¬ 
ing time and means to reach the real wild places 
of the American continent. The recent construc¬ 
tion of the Canadian transcontinental line has 
taken a little of the danger and difficulty out of 
the Hudson Bay trip, for the sportsman voyageuer 
can step from the train at a good starting point 
over the Height of Land and follow the down- 
rushing tumultuous rivers to the Bay itself, with 
the assurance of finding a comfortable Hudson 
Bay post at the end of his journey. Time was 
when visitors to these posts were so infrequent as 
to create astonishment, but latterly the tide of 
travel has largely increased and it has been said 
jokingly that Hudson’s Bay sooner or later would 
appear on the list of summer resorts. 
And this possibility is nearer realization than 
imagined. The Hudson’s Bay Railway via Win¬ 
nipeg to begin at La Pas, some hundreds of miles 
to the north, is now within 200 miles of comple¬ 
tion, and during the past summer 800 workmen 
were employed at Port Nelson, the terminus, in 
constructing breakwaters, harbor facilities, etc. 
It is expected confidently that part of the 1917 
Canadian wheat crop will go to Europe via Hud¬ 
son’s Bay but no one puts the actual date later 
than 1918. This astonishing feat of railway con¬ 
struction will, it is predicted, involve economic 
consequences of vast import, but it opens to the 
sportsman tourist a field confined heretofore to 
only the hardiest and the wealthiest of outdoor 
men. 
Still the change is no less striking than that 
which has taken place in Africa, where one now 
rides in modern sleeping-cars through the great 
and supposedly inaccessible game fields about 
which so much has been written. But let not 
the reader excite himself wtih the idea that even 
though he may be able to go to Hudson’s Bay in a 
Pullman car, he will see it all. The new terminal 
is at least 800 miles northwest of Moose Factory, 
the southern point of the Bay, and several hun¬ 
dred miles from the northern shore. The Bay 
itself is probably 600 miles wide at the point 
where the railway will touch its shores. 
A vast and practically unknown country com¬ 
prising many thousands of miles of virgin and 
for the most part, barren regions, lies between the 
Bay and the nearest point of contact on the west. 
This will prove to be the last big game field of 
the American continent, for over it rove the bands 
of barren land caribou, the musk-ox, and other 
sub-Arctic fauna. Nothing but rich mineral dis¬ 
coveries will ever induce railway construction 
through this region, which with its multitude of 
lakes and myriad wild fowl must stand as it is 
now, a veritable terra incognito. 
The Dog 
HO can look on the picture of a good dog 
without a thrill? What memories of 
pleasant excursions afield, of purple 
dawns on upland pastures, the pungent scent of 
fallen leaves, the golden glow of autumn sunsets 
and soft, cool winds, a picture by that master of 
all animal painters, Osthaus, brings to mind. From 
the dim and shadowy past, when man himself had 
risen little above the brute creation, the dog was 
his chosen friend and companion. That is the 
best compliment that man ever received, or ever 
will receive. A man that a dog likes is a man 
that human beings can like, and as a corollary the 
man that likes a dog is a man worth knowing. 
Every dog cannot be a champion. Neither can 
every man be President, but he can be just as 
good a man, and so a dog without championship 
honors, be he faithful and honest, is as good a 
friend and as well worth having as the bench or 
the field winner. If you are fortunate to hold the 
affection of a friend like this, you are indeed to 
be envied for you have passed a test based on an 
honest deduction. 
