FOREST AND STREAM. 
737 
AN OCTOGENARIAN SPORTSMAN. 
Photograph by Mrs. Z. A. Keenan. 
Dr. W. Shepard, of Shepard, Ohio, on a goose hunting trip on the Garcita Creek, Texas. The 
Doctor is in his eighty-first year, but still takes a trip to Texas every year to hunt wild geese. 
May ii, 1907.] 
I Past and Present Sport. 
(A Letter from the Old Man to a Friend.) 
Dear M. T. —We don’t have letters from each 
other so often as we used to have them, for the 
reason that most of the things we have in com- 
■ mon in these later years are memories instead 
of deeds; memories that are common to both 
of us; memories of the hundreds of days that we 
were afield together with guns and dogs; days 
that were never long enough; that were too 
1 stormy for sensible folks to be outdoors. Other 
' days that began with thick white frost on the 
ground, on every fence rail, and the shallow 
water had a skim of ice; streaks of fog lying 
close to the ground in the low places, the air 
full of the pungent odor from the smoke of 
burning logheaps in the clearings. Chilly those 
mornings, but the frost rapidly melted before 
the rising sun and by noon there was a genial 
warmth that made the setters pant. 
Those were the days when we were out before 
the sun came in sight, and from half a dozen 
different points we located quail by their morn¬ 
ing calls. Those were the days when we and 
the adogs ranged the weedy stubbles, the clear¬ 
ings, the cornfields and the thickets along the 
old fence rows from before the rising till after 
the going down of the sun, with never a stop, 
except to hastily eat a pocket lunch. Glorious 
days they were, but like many other things that 
were glorious, memory of them is all that is 
left. The quail are gone, the dogs died of old 
age years ago, the weed fields, the clearings, the 
thickets, and the old rail fences are gone. The 
land is shaved as with a lawn mower, and “No 
Hunting” signs are plentiful. 
Well, we. have had our days and must live 
them over in memory, and it is some consola¬ 
tion to think that they were better days than 
the days that are now being lived by our grand¬ 
children. Just once in a while we get a little 
taste of the old sport. Some friend kindly 
steers 11s on to a bunch of quail, a pond where 
there are some ducks, or a branch where some- 
1 body says he saw snipe. Then the old gun is 
brought out, we put on the old shooting coat 
and open the back door to whistle for the dog; 
then remember with a twinge of sorrow that the 
blessed old setter has been dead for more than 
ten years and we feel that nature ought to have 
1 arranged for dogs to live, too, as long as men. 
Perhaps the birds can be found without a 
dog, and you tramp about in hopes of flushing 
them, but it is a slow, lonesome job. You pres¬ 
ently find “sign,” a roost in a weed patch, a 
stray feather, or where they have been wallow¬ 
ing by the side of a rotten log. Possibly you 
flush them. Up they go with that thrilling, 
! startling roar that puts you all on edge. Bang! 
bang! right into “the brown of ’em.” and after 
you quit wondering how it happened, you re- 
, member that the way to do ft is to pick a bird 
on the extreme edge, and not see anything but 
that bird. You try to mark them down, but 
somehow they get out of sight so much quicker 
than they used to. You follow them and. after 
| a lot of tramping, flush one. Meanwhile you 
, have been giving yourself a lot of scolding about 
: not having your wits about you and when this 
bird gets up you remember the way you used 
to do it, and as it is a fair chance, make a 
; clean kill. 
Now the old enthusiasm comes back; you 
start to get the dead one and flush another. A 
little overconfident this time, you merely wing 
the bird, and see it running on the ground. For- 
1 getting that you have no dog, you chase it in- 
1 stead of shooting it, and before you come up 
with it it is out of sight and you never find it. 
1 hen you go after the first one, but your chase 
after the cripple has mixed you up so you don’t 
1 know just where it fell, and you fail to get it. 
; 1 hen you tell yourself what you think of a man 
who will go for quail without a dog. Possibly 
1 y°u tramp up two or three more and bag a 
! couple of them. Further tramping fails to raise 
another one, and you walk to the top of the hill 
and look oyer the fields. Down there in that 
field you killed twenty-six before noon. That 
was the time the old dog was retrieving one 
: an d pointed another one. He pointed for a 
1 moment with the dead bird in his mouth, then 
slowly qpened his mouth and let the dead one 
drop. Off to the right you remember there was 
a clearing when you were a little boy, and one 
day you saw a man hunting rabbits with a dog. 
You had a sore throat and were not allowed to 
go outdoors, but you slipped out and followed 
that man and his dog for three hours and the 
dog got two rabbits, and the man gave them 
to you. You thought that was the finest, best 
man ever, and to the day of that man’s death 
you always had a very friendly feeling for him. 
Whatever way you cast an eye there is hardly 
an acre in sight but what some incident is re¬ 
membered. At last with a deep sigh of regret 
that the good days are gone you slowly walk 
toward home. A slight noise in the weeds re¬ 
calls you from the past, and before you know 
anything about it seemingly, you have bowled 
over a big fat October rabbit. 
Now, my dear M. T., perhaps this is enough 
of the past. Neither of 11s has any trouble to 
remember many of those days, so I will just go 
a little into the present. March of this year 
was warm as May, and there was rain enough 
to wet the grounds where there are sometimes 
snipe to be found in the spring "of the year. I 
kept inquiring of the boys as to whether any 
snipe had been seen, but no one had seen any. 
The first of April the weather turned cold with 
a northwest wind that blew steadily for twelve 
days, dark and cloudy, with many snow squalls. 
It has broken all records for the first half of 
April. It knocked “Gran Pap and Uncle John” 
clear out. Neither one of them call remember 
anything ’way back in the forties that equalled 
it. Moonlight nights began about this time, 
and although it seemed too cold for snipe, the 
boys soon began to say they had seen a few. 
It was not long till I went out to Charley 
Arnotts’ pasture, as Charley said he saw some 
in there. It was a very dark cloudy afternoon 
and the wind blowing thirty miles an hour. I 
had just climbed over Charley’s barn-lot fence 
when more than a dozen snipe got up, all the 
way from thirty to sixty yards away. I was 
lucky enough to get one. 
They broke into wisps of two or three to¬ 
gether and flew in all directions. Several of 
them came down here and there in a dry 
meadow, where the grass was very short. It 
was no trouble to get them up; some got up 
a hundred yards away. I followed along down 
the wet ground and flushed quite a number, all 
getting up wild, but as the wind was at my back, 
and they invariably rose against the wind. I 
just kept shooting and once in a while got one. 
I kept it up for about two hours and bagged 
eleven. By that time they were all driven out, 
and the shoot was over for that day. I have 
been out there a half-dozen times since, and the 
bag each time ranged from two to eleven. 
_ Taking it by and large, as they say down on 
Cape Cod, it has been a lot of jolly good sport. 
The warm weather in March brought thousands 
of robins and many yellowhammers, and the 
severe weather that came afterward made it im¬ 
possible for them to get insect food. They 
did not leave here, but took to the habits of 
the snipe, and are living on angleworms. 
Wherever snipe are found, there are robins by 
the hundreds and yellowhammers by scores, all 
busy pulling the angleworms out of the soft 
ground. They are so numerous as to be a 
nuisance about the snipe shooting. The snipe 
shooting is not over yet, and perhaps there may 
be something more to chronicle about it. 
O. H. Hampton. 
Canada Gets the Pablo Bison. 
Edmonton, Alberta, April 28 .—Editor Forest 
and Stream: The Dominion Government has 
purchased the largest herd of buffalo in the 
world, known as the Pablo herd on the Flat- 
head Reservation, Montana. Mr. Douglas, super¬ 
intendent of the National Park, Banff, will super¬ 
intend. the shipment of the dry stock and bulls 
the third week in May and the cows and calves 
will be shipped in August. All arrangements 
are completed. The shipment will be made from 
Revallie Station by way of Missoula, Helena, 
Great Falls, Lethbridge, Calgary, Edmonton, 
Lament, on the Canadian and Northern Railway, 
and from thence by trail two miles to the Elk 
Island Park, some fifteen miles east of Fort 
Saskatchewan. The Elk Island Park contains 
sixteen sections of land fenced in by woven wire 
fence. 
These buffalo originated from a pair secured 
by Messrs. Pablo and Allard some tw’enty-five 
years ago, about the time the last of the” wild 
buffalo disappeared. By careful breeding and 
handling they have raised the number to some 400. 
the whole of which have been secured by the 
Dominion Government, Mr. Douglas having 
charge of the deal. 
W. H. Cooper. 
A Wild Celery Query. 
Apalachicola, Fla., April 26. —Editor Forest 
and Stream: I would like to know if any o' 
your many. readers have had any good results 
in propagating the wild celery ( Vallisneria) from 
its seed. I believe the more common practice is 
to plant the roots and yet I am urged by some 
to buy the seed. One gentleman who has tried 
the seeds writes me that he has not been able to 
get any satisfactory results from sowing them. 
Can any of your readers give me any advice, 
based upon experience, in propagating the wild 
celery from its seed? R. V. Pierce. 
