April 5 . 1907.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
5 2 9 
THE STILLWATER CAMP. 
-- -r 
I Burke is one of the ablest woodsmen in 
Herkimer county. He is one of the few men 
|vho can trap an otter when he starts out to 
lo it. His first line of traps was set when he 
|vas twelve years old—all home-made traps and 
f leadfalls—and when he was seventeen years 
bid he lived alone on Jock’s Lake trapping 
narten and mink. This was thirty years ago 
vhen the cry of wolves echoed nightly among 
he mountains, and when panthers left their 
racks among the rocky ledges. Young as he 
,vas, Burke knew that he had nothing to fear 
rom any Adirondack animal. 
“I never feel so safe as when I’m back here 
n the woods,” he said in answer to a question. 
‘What could hurt a man when there isn’t any 
big timber standing around his camp to fall 
3n it, and when he’s careful of his ax and rifle? 
A man can’t get lonesome. Why, if I get blue 
any day all I’ve got to do is take my rifle and 
go anywhere and I’ll find marten or fisher or 
ox tracks—I might even catch an otter crossing 
from stream to stream!” 
The trail led, perforce, where the animals 
night be most frequently expected. In getting 
the line, Burke had used the knowledge which 
forty-five years in the woods had made in¬ 
stinctive with him. For the most part, our 
course was along the high places—on ridges, 
knolls and mountain tops. Unsuspected clumps 
and areas of green timber, or virgin forest, 
known perhaps to Burke alone, contained many 
of the traps. But sometimes one was placed 
arbitrarily, as it appeared, on some hillside at 
a distance from what might have seemed good 
country. 
1 “I believe minks come through this way gen¬ 
erally.” Burke would explain, or “I notice 
there’s a fisher likes this sag pretty well.” Some 
track, some instinct, had indicated that the 
place was “good,” so Burke had placed the trap. 
The forest was very chill and silent. No 
tender voice was raised to relieve the “im¬ 
passive, stolid brutality” of the woods. We 
Tramped for days through the deep snow, over 
I miles of ridges and swamps, and did not see a 
living thing; not a buoyant cry of a bluejay; 
j not a welcome lisp of a chickadee; not a jeering 
challenge of a red squirrel interrupted the quiet. 
I If we heard a sound, it was the sharp rending of 
'•frost-split trees, or the soft, depressing lump- 
i ing of snow from overladen evergreen branches 
i —sounds suggestive of a forest in distress. But 
: the deep snow told its tale of creatures hard- 
pressed, of wild animals, hunger-driven, and 
combating for life against cold and famine. The 
tracks of the forest dwellers but emphasized the 
1 silence. One may fancy that he almost sees the 
fisher, the mink, the rabbit or squirrel, but he 
could not. These creatures, with voice enough 
on occasion, remain silent in the days of woods 
famine. Nowhere is the meaning of the ex¬ 
pression “sing low” so plain, so clearly under¬ 
stood, as in the wilderness from December to 
April. That most vociferous little rodent, the 
red squirrel, quivers silent in prepetual dread 
close to his burrow or home tree. When it 
does bark, how different is the faint, ventrilo- 
; quial burr from the wild and ludicrous chatter 
one knows so well among pasture butternuts! 
. It is sing low or die with the red squirrels, the 
| birds and the rabbits. 
On all sides we saw the trails of the wild 
hunters, where they roved the ridges and valleys 
seeking prey. Foxes had been everywhere, on 
mountain tops and in old lake swamps; the first 
tracks we saw on our way to the beginning of 
the line were of the sly, red forest rovers at the 
edge of the farm clearings, and from there 
to the very heart woods of the Adirondacks, 
their cautious courses were usually in sight, and 
they were not the least interesting of the forest 
creatures. 
Some one had put out a lot of “pills” along 
the old road leading to Black Creek reservoir. 
A “pill” is a cube of lard an inch long on a 
side, carefully hollowed out and filled with 
crystal strychnine. Driving along the old road, 
the poisoner had thrown chunks of meat—porcu¬ 
pines, cow heads, hog lights, whatnot—and on 
top the meat in the snow were tossed two or 
three of the deadly pills. Lured by the meat, the 
foxes came to feast, and in coming they showed 
their far-famed caution. We saw where one had 
dug down in the snow till he came to a pill, 
and then left the bait. In another place a fox 
had dug down to the meat and gnawed it. 
Where his track led along the sleigh ruts they 
showed plainly, and Burke exclaimed: 
“That feller’s got a pill. See how he spreads 
his toes!” 
Nearly two hundred yards down the road we 
found where the fox had pawed away some loose 
snow and carefully deposited a pill in the track. 
“Now look at that!” Burke exclaimed. “That 
fox carried that pill till he’d thawed it up in 
his mouth, and could taste the hand that made 
it. Then he put it down where Jerry would 
find it! I bet Jerry don’t get that fox! Not 
unless it eats a poisoned fox carcass!” 
Burke said that foxes would not take bait 
thrown out by a man on snowshoes for a long¬ 
time after it was put out. Time and again he 
pointed to where foxes had come to his trail, 
ten inches under snow, and had refused to 
cross it, or else had raced across at full speed 
with long jumps over the faint depressions the 
snowshoes had made in the snow; but a fox 
will follow the track where a deer has been 
dragged in the fall, or, as has been seen, the 
woods sleigh roads. 
Burke’s acquaintance extended to individual 
creatures of the forest. “I’ve seen his tracks 
before—he’s an old dog fox,” the trapper re¬ 
marked of one track. On Jock’s Lake Moun¬ 
tain he showed where a fox had walked all 
around a marten trap, taking short, mincing 
steps in the snow, and finally coming to the rear 
of the trap pen by channeling deep under the 
snow in order to pass under any trap that might 
be set near the savory-smelling but suspicious 
cubby house. 
Burke knew the fishers best of all. With them, 
more than with any other forest animals he was 
obliged to contend. More than one of them 
had impressed its personality on him, and he 
knew their tracks by sight. 
Toward the end of our hardest day’s tramp, 
when every step was painful and when the mile 
to the club camp before ns seemed the longest 
of the sixteen we had tramped that day, Burke 
suddenly stopped and exclaimed with animation: 
"Now ain’t that the biggest fisher track you 
ever saw? Look at what an awful paw lie’s 
got! Did you ever see the size of that before? 
He’s tired, too, wallering in this snow—lie’s 
walking. He’s the one got into my marten trap 
up Chuckledee Brook, but all I got of him was 
his toe-nail. I’ve a notion to foller him up and 
see ’f he’s gone down to the traps on the 
outlet.” 
Burke forgot his fatigue in laying plans for 
the capture of the “biggest fisher in the Ad¬ 
irondack's—sixty pounds, no less!” Fishers, 
more than any other animals, were known to 
Burke. They aroused his enthusiasm, especially 
when he found where one had devoured a $7 
marten in his trap near Salmon Lake. Of the 
score or more tracks of different fishers which 
we saw, Burke recognized more than half as 
old acquaintances. The “big un” had a regular 
beat along a little sag, or valley, which it fol¬ 
lowed, always going the same ways. Though 
