940 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[June 17, 1911. 
as yet no agreement has been reached as to the 
compensation to be received by any nation in 
return for giving up the right to take seals at 
sea. The United States owns the Pribilof 
Islands, Russia the Commandorski group, and 
Japan, Robben Reef—the latter a small rookery 
from which it has more than once been sup¬ 
posed that the seals had all been exterminated. 
Twenty years or more ago the pelagic sealers, 
and the seal pirates who raided the rookeries, 
were chiefly subjects of the United States and 
of Great Britain, but since the Paris conference 
of some years ago, pelagic sealing by these peo¬ 
ple has almost ceased, while the Japanese sealing 
fleet has greatly increased, and on a number of 
occasions the crews of Japanese sealing vessels 
have raided the rookeries on the Pribilof Islands 
in the most high-handed manner. 
It is reported that the United States is willing 
to pay to Great Britain in consideration of her 
giving up pelagic sealing twenty per cent, of the 
profits of the seal rookeries, but the Japanese 
delegates demand that the other nations in¬ 
terested shall purchase the fifty vessels now in 
the Japanese sealing trade, paying for them $ 375 .- 
000, and further that Japan shall be paid one- 
third of the net proceeds received by the land 
sealing nations from their prosecution of the 
sealing industry. 
To this proposition Russia very positively de¬ 
clines to assent, and what the outcome will be 
still remains uncertain. It is clear that unless 
some arrangement be made by which pelagic 
sealing shall be wholly stopped, the seal herds 
will decrease until the point is reached where 
there will be no profit whatever in pelagic seal¬ 
ing and of course none in land sealing. On the 
other hand there is no immediate likelihood of 
the actual extinction of the northern fur seals, 
so long as the governments that own the lands 
to which the seals resort to have their young, 
protect those rookeries. 
New Publications. 
Hunting t.pe Sea Otter, by Alexander Allan. 
Cloth, i!.8 pages, illustrated, 7s. 6d. net. Lon¬ 
don, He race Cox. 
Many of the accounts of hunting the sea otter 
have been written by men who have engaged in 
the pursuit as a business, but Mr. Allan’s book 
gives the impressions gained by a sportsman in 
a hunting cruise among the Kurille Islands in 
the North Pacific Ocean. It is a pleasing narra¬ 
tive of adventure. 
The affection of the sea otter for her young, 
he says, is extraordinary. “It is very seldom 
that she will desert it, as she almost invariably 
clings to it with the truest maternal devotion to 
the last. Impeded with the object of her cease¬ 
less care, the long bold dives for freedom are 
no longer possible. Hampered with a charge 
whose plaintive cries strike deeper, deadlier than 
the hunter’s bullet, her sole, unselfish anxiety is 
centered in her offspring. Sometimes, during the 
extreme crisis of the chase, the little fluffy ball 
would be left to its own resources, but none who 
saw could doubt that this was but the choice of 
a lesser evil. Warned by the hushed plaint and 
catching breath, she knows that but a few more 
dives beneath the protecting element and the 
life of what she loved so well would be taken. 
And now she is free, at liberty to test her speed 
(Continued on page 958.) 
Minnesota Bass Fishing. 
Editor Forest and Stream: 
During the past few days some very fine 
strings of fish have been taken from Minnesota 
waters. Rains have roiled the waters of a great 
many small lakes and ponds that are fed and 
drained by creeks and rivers, and it seems that 
the fish have taken to striking anything that 
wiggled in the water. Trout are not taking the 
fly, so the casters tell me, as they were earlier 
in the season. The only explanation offered is 
that they are getting so much natural food. 
Frogs have been scarce all the early part of the 
bass season and have not grown appreciably 
plentiful of late. There are many instances of 
boys selling them at five to ten cents each and 
now they range about forty to fifty cents. The 
dry sloughs and puddle holes of early spring 
have had much to do with the shortage of the 
frog crop. Bass are taking frogs now in fine 
style. They make rushes for this bait that go 
to show it is a real bass staple. 
Charles Stapf, of Prescott, Wis., who is mak¬ 
ing that place famous with his bass spinner, and 
as a fishing resort on the upper Mississippi, 
took out a couple of fishermen from Iowa re¬ 
cently and used a piece of bass belly as bait, 
cutting it in the shape of a minnow and attach¬ 
ing it to the hook, the bait being attached to 
fly line and rod, and showed them how to 
catch small-mouth black bass along the govern¬ 
ment wing dams that have been built in the 
river. He landed three in fifteen minutes 
which showed his skill and his ability to bring 
them to net quickly. He is glad to give advice 
about places to fish for these bass on the upper 
river, and there is no better posted man in the 
country on good small-mouth bass waters. 
These bass were of about three pounds’ size 
and very gamy. Mr. Stapf has graduated from 
bait-casting, so he says, and now uses nothing 
but a fly-rod for his bass fishing, either for 
small- or big-mouths. He is a very clever 
caster, and knows the haunts of fish and their 
feeding times and places. 
Eugene Walter, the playwright and author of 
“Paid in Full,” is outfitting here to go into the 
Yellow River country, Wisconsin, and spend 
the summer with his family and friends, fishing 
virgin waters which are pretty hard to get at. 
Mr. Walter is a thorough fisherman and out¬ 
door man, and is now in the country locating 
his summer camp which, when placed advan¬ 
tageously, will give him a chance to return to 
St. Paul to further select the duffle that he 
needs for the summer’s sport. On his first trip 
up into the lake region about what is known as 
the Yellow River country, the light tackle he 
used was cut all to pieces by the immense 
muskies and pickerel that abound in the waters. 
He has equipped himself with heavier tackle and 
will attempt to take the big ones for sport and 
return to the waters the smaller ones he does 
not need for camp use. A number of the bigger 
lights of the dramatic world will probably visit 
his camp during the summer. From time to 
time I shall try to tell the readers of Forest 
and Stream just what luck they have in taking 
record fish. 
Boating on the upper Mississippi has opened 
up in earnest. We have had the rains to swell 
the smaller streams emptying into the Father of 
Little Wets, and now that creeks and smaller 
rivers are all going again, there is promise of 
them keeping on the flow. Motor and shanty 
boatmen are running off on cruises of some 
duration and the pearl buyers have been char¬ 
tering the boats not already hired. Some fine 
pearl catches have been reported. One buyer 
brought about three thousand dollars’ worth of 
them to St. Paul after a week’s trip among the 
clammers. I shall write more about the clam- 
mers in another article, and will send some in¬ 
teresting photographs of them at their work. 
It is a business of itself and one that has many 
followers, all looking for the time when they 
will open the big gleamer. 
Amos Burhans. 
Stopped When He Had Enough. 
Muskogee, Okla., June 8 .—Editor Forest and 
Stream: Along in March when I brought in a 
three-pounder together with several others of re¬ 
spectable size, and later, when Joe Haskell, son 
of ex-Governor Haskell, got out of the maiden 
ciass by landing one weighing six and a quarter 
pounds and followed it a week later with an¬ 
other tipping the beam at five flat, we were unani¬ 
mous in agreeing that its full quota of piscatorial 
honor had fallen on this section of the country, 
but it remained for Felix L. Gast, of this city, 
to demonstrate that the unalterable law as ap¬ 
plied to things without a limit is alterable and 
now includes a third in the form of bass fame. 
Mr. Gast, who is an active member and a 
trustee of the Wauhillau Club, located on the 
Barren Fork of the Illinois River, forty-five miles 
northeast of Muskogee, performed a feat en¬ 
viable in more ways than the mere concrete evi¬ 
dence of the sport he enjoyed. It had been his 
intention to fish a distance of about eight miles, 
ending the day’s efforts at the club, but starting 
casting a wooden minnow at daybreak, he had 
in less than an hour landed the following phe¬ 
nomenal string of big-mouth black bass: two of 
four pounds each, three of three pounds each 
and two of two pounds each, whereat he dis¬ 
played his tenaciousness to the highest ideals of 
sport and stopped. 
I want to lay stress on this point because Mr. 
Cast and I have talked of his exploit with mutual 
friends and from the majority of them come ex¬ 
pressions of surprise that he desisted at the most 
interesting time. Possibly our explanation of 
his very sportsmanlike conduct will instill an¬ 
other wdth the gospel of fairness in sport and 
another recruit be added to the lamentably small 
army of protectors of game. To assist in ever 
so small a v'ay in setting the highest standard 
in a given line of sport is a source of personal 
satisfaction, and ocular demonstration has al¬ 
ways been a successful method in promoting an 
idea. Paul H. Byrd. 
