494 
[April i, 1911. 
the time, but that as nearly as he can discover 
only two birds flew away. It is altogether prob¬ 
able, however, that Mr. Tilleys preserve was 
the source of all these flamingoes, and if the 
third bird described by Mr. Cashman was ac¬ 
tually a flamingo, three must have escaped from 
the Tilley preserve. It would be interesting if 
the third could be traced, but on the other hand 
it is a matter of congratulation that two have 
been accounted for. 
The Forest and Stream may be obtained from 
any newsdealer on order. Ask your dealer 10 
supply you regularly. 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
Black Raccoon. 
Buffalo. N. Y., March 22.—Editor Forest and 
Stream: A farmer, Ralph West by name, who 
lives near Angola, N. Y., about twenty-two miles 
from this city, and who runs a line of traps in 
the winter season, writes me that he caught a 
black ’coon—not a negro—but a black raccoon in 
one of the traps, that the color of the animal s 
fur was the color of black fur on a skunk, and 
that the party to whom he ships his fur allowed 
him $6 for the pelt. 
I saw a raccoon at Blossburg, Pa., some years 
ago that had fur the color of a very light red 
fox, but never heard of a black one before. Are 
they common? E. P- 
[Raccoons are often quite dark, even black, on 
the back, and the blacker the more valuable. 
This specimen seems a case of melanism. Such 
a one we have never seen.— Editor.] 
Faunal Conference. 
At the conference to take place in Washington 
in April as to the preservation of the North 
Pacific fauna, Russia will be represented by P. 
Botkine, Minister at Tangier, who took part m 
the previous conference on this subject. 
A Night in a Storm. 
T. N. N. was born in Missouri, and when 
fifteen years old, and large for his years, he 
enlisted as a volunteer in the Union army, under 
the first call, and served through the war, in 
a cavalry regiment, being mustered out in 1866. 
His troop was stationed chiefly in Louisiana 
and Arkansas, a hostile country, and as he was 
almost constantly on scout duty, was several 
times wounded and had many hairbreadth es¬ 
capes. 
After the war he went West and re-enlisting, 
served under Crook and Sheridan, fighting In¬ 
dians. In 1898, he tried to enlist again as one 
of Torrey’s troop, but was turned down because 
of his age. 
He was one of the first settlers in North¬ 
western Colorado, where he subsisted for many 
years, chiefly as a market hunter, killing deer 
and elk and taking them to Leadville and other 
mining camps by the wagon-load. He has ac¬ 
tually hunted elk every year but one for nearly 
forty years, for when they became scarce in 
Colorado he emigrated to Wyoming, where they 
were and still are plentiful. 
I have hunted many a day with him, and al¬ 
though he is sixty-six, he is a bruiser for that 
kind of work, albeit he is not overfond of any 
other. When it comes to trailing game or a 
strayed horse I have never seen his equal, nor 
one who could stay on his feet longer. 
Like many another man of his age he is 
full of little notions. One has to do with the 
camp bedding. “I can never sleep when I’m 
cold,” says he, and his blankets are a large 
pack-load. 
One day late in November we left camp to 
bring in some elk meat I had killed the day 
before about fifteen miles away. It lay in deep 
snow near the top of a ridge whose elevation 
was about 9,000 feet above sea level, and whose 
sides were covered with burnt and fallen tim¬ 
ber, and so precipitous that there was but one 
place where we could get up with horses. 
We had good animals and we loaded them 
heavily; there were seven pack-loads when all 
was on. Then it was just getting dark, and a 
bitter cold night set in, and with it a tre¬ 
mendous snow-storm. Still we started, but the 
trail was lost in a moment, and our horses 
would not face the blast, and almost at once 
three of the most heavily laden drifted away 
from us in the dark. So there was nothing for 
us to do but "lay out,” as the natives call 
it. 
We had left camp without any preparation 
for this sort of thing. We had had nothing to 
eat since morning, and nothing to drink either. 
And no overcoats. In the pelting wind and 
blinding snow we were down to our last match 
before we got a fire started in a big pile of 
down timber, and in the lee of that we cowered 
all night. 
I shall never forget that night. About mid¬ 
night the snow ceased, and the sky cleared. 
But that simply added to our discomfort, mak¬ 
ing the cold more bitter, and on the top of that 
bare ridge, the wind drove it clear through us. 
Wyoming cold is almost arctic, and but for the 
big blaze of the pinon logs, we undoubtedly 
would have perished. 
Sleep was beyond me; once only I drifted 
into unconsciousness for a moment, but waked 
up chilled to the bone, and did not try it again. 
Not so the old man. He skirmished around 
in the snow and found a few little pinon seed¬ 
lings, that had sprouted after the forest fire. 
He gathered some of these, spread them on 
the snow in front of the burning logs and lay 
down. They afforded about as much of a bed 
as a sheet of paper would have done, and he 
who could never sleep when he was cold, was 
lost to the world almost as soon as his head 
touched the snow, and he lay there nearly all 
night, shivering and shaking violently from 
head to foot with the cold, and snoring fit to 
wake the dead! 
Though we were out thirty-six hours without 
food or drink—for we had nothing to melt the 
snow in—he was never a pin the worse, and 
walked, leading his old horse through the snow, 
up hill and down dale, nearly all the way to 
camp, fifteen miles of very hard going. Such 
is the stuff of which pioneers are made. 
W. B. S. 
When the Hound Bayed. 
The ’coon hound bayed at supper time. The 
cook was heard baying in the kitchen a few 
minutes later. It was the kitchen of a little 
hotel on the shore of Charlotte Harbor, Florida. 
There were fifteen men in the dining room when 
the first note of the hound’s music were heard, 
and the two darkey waiters were just getting 
ready to serve them. A minute later there were 
no diners and no waiters in the long room. It 
seemed that some of the sitters must have es¬ 
caped through the windows and dropped eight 
feet to the sand. The cook bellowed. The 
•‘cohn” bread and "poke” sausage, the boiled 
Spanish mackerel and the roast duck were ready 
to follow the green turtle soup, but there was 
nobody there to serve or eat the viands, and the 
rage of the dusky chef was due to two causes. 
In the first place his mighty efforts were not 
appreciated, and secondly he did not dare de¬ 
sert the kitchen and join in the ’coon hunt. 
Out in the scrub palmettoes back of the fringe 
of mangroves the deep-throated hound’s voice 
was mingled with the fierce yapping of the tyke 
and the shouts of the hunters who were stumb¬ 
ling and tumbling amid the cable-like roots of 
the stunted palms. Torches flared out and 
lighted up the tangle. The dogs were well for¬ 
ward among the slim, tall pines, and finally a 
stand was made and a dozen men gathered 
around a fire-scarred pine in a crotch of which 
two glaring eyes reflected the torchlight. 
“There she is!” said Cato, one of the waiters. 
“Shall I go up and git her?” 
“Go to it, Cato,” said Uncle Bill. “I’ll bet 
fo’ dollars to a wild orange that it s oney a 
onery ’possum.” 
“Spat” went a Flobert cartridge fired by the 
youngest member, and a fiery ball tumbled from 
the crotch and was instantly tackled by the tyke. 
Cato grabbed the ’coon hound just as it closed 
its teeth on the whiffet, which it evidently mis¬ 
took for the ’coon. Bethel, the other waiter, 
pounded the ’coon over the head with his light 
wood torch, and the hunt was over, except that 
the party picked up two gopher turtles on the 
way back to the hotel. 
