April 16, 1910.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
611 
out of business as a free lance in the Indian 
trade beyond the mountains. 
They did bring back, however, tales without 
number of California life in 1833 and 1834, for 
they went to the game of life a la Mexicana 
and stayed with it as long as their welcome and 
the free beef lasted, which was until the last 
beaver skin and the last ounce of the Bonneville 
grubstake was expended; then unquestionably 
they received the word to vamose. 
In my library there is a book yellowed and 
worn by the hand of time. In it is an account 
of the roping of a grizzly bear by California 
vaqueros of the old days, who caught and tied 
the bear down on a flint cowhide and dragged 
him with ropes made fast to their saddle horns 
to a fiesta at one of the great ranches of that 
day where they made him —nolens volens —fight 
a maddened bull. The book is one of the earliest 
leather bound editions of the great Washington 
Irving’s work, “Bonneville’s Adventures,” and 
the interesting tale is the one these rascally 
trappers told their partisan at his annual ren¬ 
dezvous in the valley of Bear River as written 
above. 
After the story of the vaquero, the bear and 
the bull, which is on the lines of Hancock M. 
Johnson’s “A Bear Fight at San Pascual”* 
(Pasadena). The account says: 
“The laso, now almost entirely confined to 
Spanish America, is said to be of great antiquity 
and to have come originally from the East. It 
was used, we are told, by a pastoral people of 
Persian descent of whom 8.000 accompanied the 
army of Xerxes.” 
The Moors, it would seem, introduced the use 
of the rawhide plaited rope or lariat with raw- 
*Forest and Stream, Jan. 12, 1807. 
hide hondo into Northern Africa, and later into 
Spain, who gave the inestimable blessing to her 
American colonies whom, with the cow horse 
it enabled to handle wild cattle in the open with 
the same ease and certainty that the farmer of 
to-day handles his shorthorns behind fences of 
boards and barbed wire. The use of the horse 
and the rope passed north to the mountain and 
plains Indian tribes and the race who dispos¬ 
sessed them, and to-day is used in a thousand 
useful and necessary ways wherever grass grows 
and water runs, for Col. William F. Cody and 
his Wild West aggregation simply international¬ 
ized the rope and took it back beyond the edge 
of the earth where the sun rises almost if not 
quite to the scene of its inception in the fertile 
brain of primitive man, and of its earliest tri¬ 
umphs over the whole of the animal kingdom. 
Albert J. Woodcock. 
Ruffed Grouse—Partridge. 
Concluded from page 572. 
I lie various methods by which the grouse 
avoid observation are little known and are sel¬ 
dom observed by those who are only occasionally 
in the woods and who, when there, are possessed 
with the idea that they must kill as many birds 
as possible in the time at their disposal. The 
ones more likely to see such things are the men 
who spend much time in the woods and take the 
time to sit down and observe, watching the ways 
of the wild creatures which, after a time be¬ 
lieving that the intruder has gone away, emerge 
from their hiding places and resume their usual 
pursuits. But if the observer makes a move¬ 
ment and the bird sees him, it will stop for a 
moment, look carefully and then turning, will 
seem to melt out of sight. It is most difficult 
to tell when it disappears. Under such circum¬ 
stances a bird will sometimes fly, but more often 
will run for two or three yards and disappear, 
and then springing from the ground at a greater 
distance will fly off low, not being seen after it 
takes to wing. 
Rarely one may see a frightened grouse on the 
ground and may get up close to it, but if he does 
this and wishes to observe the bird, let him 
avoid looking directly at it. If it catches the 
observer’s eye, it is almost sure to fly, and when 
it flies the very fact that you are so close to it 
may make the shot a difficult one. On one occas¬ 
ion many years ago, after shooting two or three 
times at a grouse, the dog pointed it at the foot 
of a great oak tree. The other dog backed and 
my two brothers and myself realizing where the 
bird must be, surrounded the foot of the tree. 
Presently we saw it crouched on the ground be¬ 
tween two roots, looked squarely at it and talked 
about it. That grouse must have had an un¬ 
happy time, for it feared to fly. For some little 
time we looked at it and talked, and then fear¬ 
ing that the pointing dog might try to seize the 
bird, which was almost under his nose, one of 
us stepped forward and grasped his collar. As 
this was done, the grouse took wing, twisted 
around the base of the tree, passing within two 
feet of one of my brothers, dodged away, and 
up and over a little rise of ground twenty yards 
from us, escaping untouched, notwithstanding 
the fact that three shots were fired at it. 
The grouse sometimes takes refuge in the snow 
in cold weather and is credited with diving into 
drifts at nightfall and passing the night there. 
A friend walking through the deep snow along 
a little swale through which passed a brook, saw 
sticking up out of the snow what he supposed 
was an odd looking stick. He declared to him¬ 
self that it looked just like a partridge's head, 
and when he had come within a few feet of the 
place a bird rose out of the snow like a whirl¬ 
wind and scaled away to a nearby swamp. 
No doubt these birds often inspect the gunner 
when he is little aware of their observation. 
“Dorp” tells of a case of that kind in the fol¬ 
lowing words: 
“I turned to resume my walk, and as I did 
so I cast my eyes upward and there on a plateau 
covered with moss and projecting nearly over 
me stood a ruffed grouse looking intently down 
upon me. He was twelve feet from me, as I 
afterward measured it. He was partly turned 
sideways with the neck stretched and head bent 
down and made a* beautiful picture with back¬ 
ground of evergreen. 
“He remained motionless as I did also‘for 
about a half minute, when he slowly turned and 
was quickly lost to sight. This was the closest 
I remember ever to have been to this wild bird 
in his native state when seen. I have been 
closer, but then I did not know it until he flew. 
“This bird had heard me wa king and his 
curiosity had prompted him to come to the edge 
and look down to discover the cause of the 
noise. Perceiving that my back was toward him 
he knew that I could not see him and so re¬ 
mained. Perhaps he had not seen enough of 
me to satisfy him, and when I turned around he 
knew I could not reach him. He had probably 
never been shot at and knew nothing of the 
power of the gun which I held in my hand or 
of man’s ability to harm at a distance.” 
In a country where it is much pursued by 
man or dog, the ruffed grouse, if unexpectedly 
approached closely, is likely to walk or run away 
rather than to fly. A good grouse dog follows 
the trail of the bird slowly so as to avoid forc¬ 
ing the bird to rise too soon. Those of us who 
have possessed good grouse dogs, which are al¬ 
ways scarce enough, have often seen them leave 
the trail, make a wide circle and come up on the 
other side of the bird to head it off and stop it. 
Unless something like this is done the bird miry 
readily enough be followed to the edge of the 
cover, where it will presumably take wing and 
disappear. If a dog is alone—especially if it 
be a dog of red or yellow color—suggesting a 
fox, the bird is likely merely to hop up on a 
limb well out of reach and remain there look¬ 
ing down at the enemy, but if a man follows 
the dog, the bird, if he gets into a tree, is likely 
to stand close to the tree trunk and remain abso¬ 
lutely motionless. 
Ruffed grouse are subject to more or less un¬ 
explained periods of scarcity. During one sea¬ 
son the woods will contain their usual number 
of the birds and the following year very few 
will be found. After that it may take some years 
-for the birds to recover themselves and again 
to become reasonably abundant. Whenever such 
a period of scarcity occurs, sportsmen very 
naturally endeavor to assign reasons for the 
reduced numbers of the birds. Among these 
suggested explanations are that they have been 
swept away by an epidemic disease, that they 
have been destroyed by insect enemies, that they 
have been destroyed by hawks, owds and foxes, 
that the breeding season has been unfavorable, 
that the winter's snow and cold have killed them, 
