HERRICK MATCH. 
CHAMPIONSHIP REGT 
PRESIDENT’S MATCH. 
WIMBLEDON CUP. 
HALE TROPHY. 
INDIVIDUAL LONG 
LIFE 
TEAM MATCH 
CHAMPIONSHIP COMPANY MATCH. 
RANGE TYRO LEECH CUP MATCH. 
MEMBERSHIP MATCH. 
UNITED STATES CARTRIDGE COMPANY 
LOWELL. MASS 
New York City 
i 
[ Nov. 7, 1908. 
- 1 - 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
Made with (US) AMMUNITION 
At Camp Perry 
Matches. 
GATHERING CHESTNUTS. 
The red squirrel is a good deal like me; he 
never can wait for the chestnuts to open. As 
long as early September 1 tised to see him go¬ 
ing up and down the trunks of trees neighbor¬ 
ing the chestnuts, sputtering and exploding his 
way along in a jerky unrhythm. He’d go up 
the trunk as a lightweight, motor-skipping run¬ 
about goes up a steep hill, trembling all over 
as he fizzed along with barking explosions. He 
had his eye on the closed burs, densely set with 
green spines, and he was angry because he was 
liable to get his tongue pierced in getting them 
open. But it didn’t matter. The milk-white 
pulp in the brown shells was too tempting. All 
this last month he has been going to the very 
tips of the limbs of the highest trees, clinging 
there as only a red squirrel can, and gnawing 
the burs loose. When a sufficient number of 
these were strewn on the ground beneath, he 
would motor down there, and with the piston 
still chugging occasionally, just to prove to 
himself that he could start his car at a second’s 
notice, cut expeditiously through the defiant 
prickles and smack his wounded lips over the 
kernels within. Meanwhile, in common with 
most of the boys in town, I too have been hav¬ 
ing my troubles with the chestnut burs. A boy 
understands that the red squirrel gets the burs 
after the fashion of the real sport, and so far 
as he can he is willing to do the same. But the 
smaller limbs of the chestnut are brittle, and 
under the best of circumstances it is a danger¬ 
ous thing to go far enough out on them to 
reach the tips. Lightweight, daring boys some¬ 
times do this, and often* fall in the attempt, as 
accident records show. Sometimes the squirrel 
falls, too, though this is of comparatively rare 
occurrence. The wild creatures of the wood 
are as liable to accident as you and I, but they 
are not so prone to it. That severe pruning 
which wild life gives all who are robust enough 
to live it lops off all the clumsy branches of the 
squirrel family tree. Few but the cool-headed 
and skilful live to reproduce many of their 
kind. The boy who falls from the upper limbs 
of the chestnut may save his neck by catching 
a lower limb as he falls—I have known boys 
to do it. Or he may even land with no serious 
injury if he is fortunate enough and the distance 
is not too great. The squirrel would be almost 
sure to land safely either in the lower limb or 
on the ground. This is more sure in the case 
of the red squirrel than in that of the gray, for 
the gray is two or three times the weight of the 
red. Yet I have seen a gray squirrel come 
down forty feet through the air and land un¬ 
injured. 
My own method of loosing the unripe burs 
from their tenacious hold on the limb tips 
lacks the finesse of that of the squirrel. I do 
my work with a club. Nevertheless, it takes 
wisdom and precision. To stand twenty feet or 
so below a bunch of chestnut burs and hurl 
your club at them with such accuracy that it 
hits the limb just behind them at the right spot 
to snap them off their perch is an art that you 
must learn in boyhood or never. You may hit 
the burs themselves or you may hit the limb 
further back, and nothing happens. With the 
burs on the ground your task is to open them, 
which you must do by pounding with one 
stone upon another. Flit in the right place and 
with the right force, the green prickly envelope 
yields and the soft, brown nuts roll out un¬ 
crushed. To me they are sweetest when this 
brown is just beginning to tinge them, before 
the shells are very hard and the kerne) is too 
resilient and crunchy. 
On these October mornings the chestnuts are 
ripe } a wonderful rich brown, still clinging in 
cloise companionship in the center of the burs, 
which have opened and revealed the precious 
kernels within. To harvest them now by the 
quart your task is more easy than it was to get 
a few when they were three weeks younger. 
. The squirrels know this.. There is no need to 
climb to the dangerous limb tips and cling 
there precariously while gnawing them through. 
The ground is strewn with bounty and the reds 
and the grays both are busy among the rustling 
brown leaves garnering what the winds, and 
boys, and I have shaken from the open burs 
and failed to gather. Now and then they eat 
one, but for the most part they are busy storing 
them up for future use. In hollow trees, under 
stumps, they pile them in little hoards. But 
besides that' they dig little holes in the ground 
here and there, and put a nut at the bottom of 
them, and pat the brown leaves down on top. 
I have always inferred that these were for 
special luncheons, stored ready to hand when 
the owner did not care to go to the main larder. 
I know that they do go to these in the winter 
on occasions, for I have often seen the hole 
through the crust snow where the squirrel reso¬ 
lutely dug his way in and left behind him the 
chipped shells of the nut which he found there. 
But I do not believe that one nut out of a hun¬ 
dred that are thus buried is ever resurrected by 
the squirrels; it is nature’s method of getting 
her chestnut trees properly planted, and I half 
believe that the squirrels realize this; that they 
do not mean to dig these nuts up again, and 
only do so when hard pressed by hunger. 
My path to the chestnut wood to-day lay 
through a shallow sea of purple wood-grass. 
It is a wild grass, scorned of the farmer and 
left ungarnered of his scythe, standing now in 
clumps in all waste places of the pasture, as 
amber wine of autumn tint that intoxicates you 
as you pass through. It is a stirrup cup for 
your expedition. Old as the hills, amber-purple 
and clear, yet with a fine bubbling of hoary 
leaf tips, it warms the heart as wine of the 
grape does, and already you begin to be drunk 
with the beauty of the day. Afterward you pass 
through aisles of birch wood where the one 
green leaves are a translucent yellow, fining the 
gold of the sunlight down to a soft radiance, a 
richness of pale effulgence that I have seen 
matched only in one gem. Some years ago 
there came from South African mines a wonder¬ 
ful lump of crystalized carbon, a great diamond 
