974 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[June 18, 1910. 
yards off before the heel plate touched my shoul¬ 
der. Luckily I held on the bird, and the center 
of the load hit it so that it fell quite dead. At 
the report two more rose near me and this time 
I brought my gun to bear a little more quickly 
and killed the second one. Two or three more 
rose at this report, and flew off down the lake, 
but they did not fly the whole length of the 
knoll, and I marked them down. 
It was evident that if this lasted I was going 
to have good shooting, and so it proved. I went 
on more slowly and carefully, and tried to pick 
my shots. As I had no dog, only the birds 
immediately in my way got up, except that some¬ 
times, when a shot was fired, several rose ahead 
or to the right and left, and most of these 
pitched off down the hill, and scaling off on the 
wind reached cover in the thick aspens of the 
lower ground where I knew it would be useless 
to follow them. | 
Before I had reached the lower end of the 
knoll I had more birds than I could carry, and 
I was not sorry to see my companion coming 
after me on horseback to relieve me of the load. 
The shooting that he had heard had notified 
him of the sport that I was having, and he 
rightly concluded that I would need help. I 
was interested to notice as he came toward me 
that he put up a number of grouse, though his 
route was not far from the one I had followed. 
When we had tied our birds on his horse it 
was found that I had already ten, which I esti¬ 
mated to average not far from three pounds a 
piece in weight. Just at the end of the knoll, 
and as we were about to turn back to go to 
camp, a grouse jumped up before me at the foot 
of a clump of aspens and d ved into them, pre¬ 
cisely as a ruffed grouse would pitch into a piece 
of underbrush. Just as I should have snapped 
at a ruffed grouse, so I snapped at this bird, and 
a moment later a loud splash in the water and 
a muffled drumming told that the shot had 
reached him just as he was about to cross the 
river. My companion went down, and riding 
out into the water, picked up the eleventh bird. 
A little later on the way home another grouse 
sprang from some low aspens at some distance 
in front of me and pitched into a growth of 
pines, and this one I snapped at! again, but not 
with the success of the former shot, for the bird 
passed through the pines and flew a long way 
to a little island where he seemed to go dowu. 
If I had had a dog and a good shooting pony 
I could undoubtedly have killed forty or fifty 
birds in this one place, but forty or fifty would 
have been inexcusable slaughter, since there were 
but two of us in the camp and we could not 
have used anything like that number of birds. 
As it was, those that I got that day lasted us 
for quite a long time, and most delicious food 
they were. The white juicy flesh, sweet and 
well flavored from the diet of berries on which 
the bird had been fed, was most delicate. Prop¬ 
erly cooked no bird is worthy of higher com¬ 
mendation than the dusky grouse. This is espe¬ 
cially true when the birds on the lower p’ateau 
are feeding on the tiny red huckleberry that 
grows in such profusion in the pine woods. 
While the females are down in the lower 
ground attending to nest building, hatching and 
the rearing of their young, the old males and 
the barren females resort to the higher land, 
often being found on the. mountain sides far 
above timber line. From such places they are 
often startled by the goat or sheep hunter, and 
pitching down from these great heights take 
long flights, at last bringing up down among the 
timber and flying so far that no one knows just 
exactly where they go to. 
Nowhere, so far as my limited experience 
goes, is the dusky grouse pursued in so syste¬ 
matic and sportsmanlike a manner as on Van¬ 
couver Island near the beautiful city of Victoria. 
My shooting of them there dates back many 
years, and it may be that in recent years the 
sportsmen of other parts of the Pacific coast 
have taken to shooting this splendid bird over 
dogs as in old times they did near Victoria. 
What good shooting there was at Victoria 
twenty-five years ago and how varied the bags 
used to be! There were the pheasants rising 
like an explosion of fireworks, sometimes from 
under your very feet and seeming—after you 
had ineffectively fired both barrels in the air in 
3'our fright—to wave at you in derision long 
brown tails that you almost felt you could grasp 
by reaching out the hand. There were blue 
grouse, big and straight flying, getting up with 
a roar and almost at once plunging into the 
dense thicket. There were ruffed grouse, simple 
birds that you sometimes saw walking about on 
the ground not far from your feet, but ready 
enough after they had been pointed by the dog 
and killed out from their hiding place to practice 
all the arts that their cousins used three thou¬ 
sand miles away. Then finally there were the 
California quail, big flocks of them, more often 
heard running through the underbrush than seen, 
yet sometimes rising in thick flocks and darting 
off like little blue bullets through the timber. 
It was here that in company with two or three 
Victoria sportsmen I first saw dogs used on the 
blue grouse; not always with success, for two 
wild young puppies, blundering excitedly through 
the underbrush and the heavy green forest 
flushed the birds, some of which took refuge 
in the branches of the tall cedars or Douglas 
firs quite out of reach of the shotgun. 
There was one old white setter, however, which 
regarded the younger dogs not at all, but trotted 
methodically through the forest in businesslike 
fashion. To him and to his owner I attached 
myself, and during the day had the opportunity 
to see him point half a dozen birds in most 
workmanlike style. The grouse lay well and 
did not run ahead of the dog as an educated 
ruffed grouse would have done. At the same 
time when flushed, the birds displayed wonderful 
quickness in putting some object between them¬ 
selves and the gun, though in this case as there 
were two guns, the operation was not always 
successful. No great amount of wisdom was 
required to circumvent these birds. They had 
not been subjected to the constant pursuit suf¬ 
fered by the constantly pursued ruffed grouse 
of our Eastern covers and did not resort to his 
puzzling devices. They afforded great sport, but 
the shooting was very destructive to the birds. 
On the other hand the thick cover which pre¬ 
vailed over much of the forest did not permit 
following up the birds, and if not secured on 
the first rise they were not seen again. 
It would be interesting to know whether in 
modern days the ruffed grouse or the dusky 
grouse of the North Pacific coast had been suffi¬ 
ciently pursued to acquire a wisdom which men 
of the eastern part of the continent usually ex¬ 
pect the ruffed grouse to possess. Easterner. 
A Lillooet Sheep Hunt. 
Continued from page 936. 
Grant was very anxious that I get my second 
ram as soon as possible, as he was afraid that 
if a heavy snow should come, the pass through 
which we came would be blocked and we would 
be forced to make a long and very difficult de¬ 
tour in order to get back. His predictions of 
bad weather were justified the next morning, 
when we looked out on a blinding snow storm. 
It was impossible to hunt in it, as nothing could 
be seen at any distance, so we smoked and told 
stories. Grant told us a great many stories of 
the remarkably bad shooting done after moun¬ 
tain sheep. For example, how one man had 
climbed to the top of a big rock and looked 
down on the back of a huge ram forty feet be¬ 
low him and then shot four feet to one side with 
a .405 and had followed this up by emptying the 
magazine at the ram while he placidly walked 
away. At first I 'had been inclined to think 
some of these stories might be exaggerations, 
but after trying sheep shooting I fully credited 
them, for I can imagine that if a man is inclined 
to buck fever or lacks experience, he has a 
fine chance to develop it after mountain sheep. 
It is no light thing to stalk a sheep for three 
hours until you are in the last stages of exhaus¬ 
tion, and then be told to hold your breath, look 
over the ridge and shoot straight, as it will 
probably be your last chance. I think if any¬ 
thing justifies bad shooting it is conditions of 
this sort. Maybe somebody some time got a shot 
at a ram when he was not upset with the climb¬ 
ing. This, however, did not fall to the lot of 
Cutler or myself, and both of us are of the long, 
rangy type and can usually do more than our 
share of foot work without feeling it. 
This day in camp gave us a good rest and the 
next day Pat and I started out for a long day. 
It was still snowing and Pat thought we would 
be likely to find sheep on the low, grassy hill¬ 
sides beyond Shallops. We tramped all morn¬ 
ing and about noon struck the tracks of a bunch 
of sheep going back toward Shallops. We fol¬ 
lowed their trail for about three hours along the 
steep hillsides and I never endured greater 
misery. The bad walking and the roughness of 
the first three days’ climbing had cut and torn 
the hob nails out of my shoes until they were 
as slippery as glass, and when I started along 
these steep hillsides covered with soft snow I 
found it almost impossible to stand up. It had 
also turned bitterly cold, so that I had to wear 
my Mackinaw coat over my buckskin shirt. We 
walked for five miles and I fell about every fifty 
feet, and the continual slipping and recovery 
were very exhausting. 
At last, about 4 o’clock, we got back to Shal¬ 
lops and on its side saw five sheep, including at 
least three good rams. It was getting toward 
dusk and there was a chance to stalk them by 
going straight across the open, as it was still 
snowing and foggy. In order to do this we 
had to cross a small snowslide which ran down 
two or three hundred yards to the valley. I 
told Pat that crossing the top of it looked very 
dangerous to me, but he said he thought it would 
be all right. I finally said my shoes were so 
slippery that he had better take my rifle and I 
would take the sharp-pointed stick he was carry¬ 
ing. 
Pat crossed the top of the slide all right, but 
