FOREST AND STREAM 
59 
Into a patch steps the hunter, peering 
about to catch a glimpse of a black form 
against a blacker loam. 
WHIR-R-R, buzz, whir! 
A dozen full-fledged quail spring up and 
away. Finger flies to safety release, and 
then, just in time, flashes the sign “closed 
season.” Well, if some pot-hunting, license- 
dodging, law-defying, individual does not 
“get ’em settin’,” there flew seed for the fu¬ 
ture. 
Now, up from the earth rises Lady June. 
Poor old girl, she had been on those birds 
all the time, wondering why in time Miss 
Twenty-bore and I did not appear and open 
up. Lady has many accomplishments, but 
reading the game laws and their constant 
changes are not within her scope. 
The dog is wildly excited: it has been 
some time since she scented that odor which 
is the acme of pleasure to the pointer or 
setter. It is by moral and physical exertion 
that June is conducted from the scene to 
the bandanna flag, and after a time the 
wounded rabbit is pocketed. 
Disappears Lady again, this time river- 
ward. 
The sunny side of a freshet-lodged log 
appeals to me. I stop to smoke, sitting in 
the lee of a bunch of fodder. 
In front, a willow and weed patch. Hip- 
pityhop! and out comes a big rabbit. He 
sits down not ten feet away. The wind 
is in my favor. I smile as Bunny wobbles 
his nose, and then with one long hind leg 
scratches his ear. Constantly he watches 
the thicket. His paws are covered with 
black mud. 
A FLOCK of belated robins rises, and 
settles in the linden trees. Something 
brown, something swaggering in its 
gait, walks down a tabloid gully rich in al¬ 
luvial deposit and—Oh, joy, a woodcock 
settles himself, long bill laid down, plump 
breast. He is a native, for he is as fat as 
butter, and thoroughly knows his cover. 
See, he raises his bill, then sinks it to the 
nostrils in the earth. Those big eyes, set 
far back for the purpose of watchfulness 
while feeding, are plainly visible. Then he 
tilts back and slowly, oh, so slowly, he 
drags out the worm his ears have told him 
was below. Eureka! I have seen: I have 
observed: I have caught Philohcla at lun¬ 
cheon ! 
Stealing along on the hot foot scent: 
each paw placed as if treading on the shells 
of the eggs of the ruby-throat, jaws champ¬ 
ing and eyes gleaming like carbuncles, 
comes Miss June. Follows a point, so 
beautiful, so rigid, so graceful, that one’s 
thoughts fly homeward where the camera 
is—just where it should not be! 
Something warns the bird, and with a' 
whistle he is up and away. Miss Twenty- 
bore indifferently throws the shot column 
a trifle too low, and then as Philohela 
swings and slants earthward, puts the other 
barrel just where the bird is—not. 
Anyway, the sight of that backward pull, 
and that disappearing worm takes all the 
edge off the chagrin at two just “plain rot¬ 
ten” misses. The rabbit? Quen sabe? 
June’s blood is up. Mine ditto. Into that 
tangle we go. A cock flushes. With one 
leg over a half-decayed log, with the other 
slowly sinking in the ooze,.with a certain 
important part of an already precarious 
pair of trousers entangled in a bunch of 
barbed wire washed down from some farm 
field during the big flood of 1913, with a 
brier sawing one wrist and a willow whip¬ 
ping the other, one is not exactly in a trap¬ 
shooting attitude. Miss Twenty-bore cracks 
—I divorce my raiment from the wire and 
Miss June brings me the bird. 
Somehow, dead, with the warm blood 
slow drip-dripping, Philohela is not so beau¬ 
tiful a sight to me as was he, when he 
“rared back” and got that worm. 
Another rise: another bird. The rest of 
the cover is blank. 
Boring through a regular forest of horse- 
weed, with its sandpaper stalks, one comes 
to a wheat field that yields nothing except 
the sight of a single killdeer plover, and a 
pink arrow point. Against the sky-line 
looms a mound. Perhaps under all that 
earth, carried thither maybe in skins, and 
on the backs of the dusky warriors of long 
ago, sleeps the man who fashioned or shot, 
that roseate bit of flint. 
Elk then fought elk for the favors of 
their love: mayhap buffalo sought the min¬ 
eral springs.- 
T HE river is low: the bridge is far 
away; so, hopping from stone to stone 
and with only one foot wet, I reach 
the other shore. Right from under the root 
of a stream-side sycamore pops a bunny. 
Steady! plenty of time—a straightaway. 
Miss Twenty-bore drops him lifeless at 
twenty-five yards. 
After All, Bunny Cottontail Furnishes Most of Enjoyment the Amateur Gets in Winter. 
