FOREST AND STREAM. 
[Feb. i, 1908. 
1 76 
in invective. In a few minutes a greasy, hairy 
individual, smelling rather loudly of the sheep 
corral, stood in our midst and demanded the 
gore of the man who stole his fuel. The guilty 
individual seemed reluctant to come forward 
and be slaughtered. At length one of us re¬ 
monstrated in a brotherly way with this irate 
shepherd on the error of his language, but the 
words fell upon unhearing ears. Nothing would 
<lo but we should reimburse him for that sage 
"brush, and we finally induced him to spare us 
•on payment of five dollars. That was a very 
•expensive fire. 
It rained in the night. We had neglected to 
put up the tents. Perhaps some of you have 
"been sound asleep, cooing softly through your 
nose and dreaming mayhap of myriads of ducks 
and geese falling beneath your fatal aim, then 
have a shower of rain fall on you. The awaken¬ 
ing is rude. I pulled the tarpaulin over my 
head and dozed again. My bed-fellow gave 
utterance to a mellow oath and yanked it over 
his ears. It had accumulated about a gallon 
of water in a slight depression between our 
shoulders and when he pulled, the water gently 
insinuated itself down the back of my nightie. 
Stoicism has never been with me a virtue; I 
yelled. I lost track of my own misery in the 
enjoyment of watching the misery of my com¬ 
panion. Such is the depravity of the human 
mind. 
The night was four hours longer than other 
nights are. This was decided by the astronomer 
of the crowd, though it must be admitted that 
his only means of arriving at the fact was his 
own feeling of discomfort. Over in the direc¬ 
tion of the little lake geese were making the 
night vocal with their noises. With the first 
streak of gray dawn we seized our guns and 
crept over the little hill that hid the thousands 
of geese from our sight. It was arranged that I 
should lead off with the firing, as I had the 
biggest gun and should bag the most geese. 
Like Indians we crept up and peered over. A 
sheep corral lay below us, and in it were some 
two thousand sheep all bleating at once. The 
visions of geese vanished in thin air; not a 
goose was there. On the lake, however, sat two 
mallards, unconscious of the presence of an 
enemy. Using the huddled sheep as a blind, I 
crept over and turned a Toad of BB shot into 
the air. They yielded up the ghost and lay 
flapping their legs in the foggy air. How to 
get them without a boat was a problem. 
The sheep herder came out at the sound of 
the gun. We asked him if the bottom of the 
lake was solid. He replied that it was as solid 
as the Bank of England. With that I returned 
to the camp, and rode one of the horses into the 
slimy alkali water. It was all right for the 
first dozen feet, then it got soft. When about 
three yards from the ducks the bottom gave out 
and the horse began floundering around in the 
soft mud. The glee of that sheep man when 
he saw me tumble off into the ice-cold water 
was actually unholy to look at. He chortled 
until one of us offered to fill him full of goose 
shot if he did not desist, an act I should have 
accomplished myself had he been there when 
I got out of the water, but he wasn’t. I had 
the sweet satisfaction of seeing that miserable 
cayuse swim the lake to the opposite side and 
wander off into the sand hills. It took two days 
to round him up and bring him back to civili¬ 
zation. The ducks sailed away, their legs still 
in the air, and the last we saw of them they 
were bobbing along in the distance, driven by 
the wind. 
We hired a pinto demon from the herder to 
take the place of the one that decamped, and 
after a solemn breakfast, we once more set out 
for our destination. There was a dim wagon 
trail leading across the sage plain- and this the 
herder told us was our highway. We were 
bound for Moses Lake, which was supposed to 
lie somewhere in the neighborhood of sixteen 
miles from where we started. We passed in¬ 
numerable little lakes but none of them looked 
like they might belong to Moses; in fact, it was 
questionable whether Moses would have taken 
one of them as a gift. I forgot to mention 
the fact that it was raining. Whenever you 
reach a point in this narrative where there is 
nothing much being said, just put in a rain 
storm and that will fill out the vacant space. 
Along about night we reached Moses Lake. It 
looked as if it might hold geese. There were 
none there then, but it seems these geese only 
come when you have a pit in the sand and are 
sitting in it; at least that is what our informant 
said. 
Some black willows grew in a discouraged 
sort of manner along a little stream and beside 
these we camped. The tents up we bade de¬ 
fiance to the rain. It was not altogether un¬ 
pleasant. There was something rather grand 
about the scenery. Before us lay the lake 
stretching away for miles into the gray of the 
distance, its waters crinkled by the wind. At 
our back lay the gray sage hills and level mesas. 
Not a house or a farm in sight, just the in¬ 
terminable stretch of land and sky. Not a 
sound broke the stillness save now and then the 
call of a burrowing owl or the howl of a prowl¬ 
ing coyote. The only life seen was the flocks 
of coots that lay upon the lake half a mile from 
shore and drifted, feeding with the wind until 
they approached too near, then with one accord 
would rise and fly back to the open water again. 
Not a goose nor a game duck appeared to cheer 
us with his presence. 
The next day we dug the pits according to 
formula. When they were complete we tumbled 
in and waited for the slaughter to begin. 
Along about three in the afternoon a solitary 
old gander came in sight, honking lonesomely 
to himself winging slowly down wind. He 
passed over the first pit about three hundred 
yards to port, then he swerved and passed the 
next one just too far away for the shot to reach 
him. Then he bore down on my pit. All at 
once he detected something amiss with the ap¬ 
pearance of things and with a frightened squawk 
wheeled in the air and flapped out of sight. All 
the rest of the day we sat there and peered into 
the mist and moisture. Not another goose hove 
in sight during the whole time. 
When we arrived at camp we found that the 
coots had drifted into shore. One of us turned 
both barrels of his old yager into the flock and 
mowed down enough for a mess. Now, perhaps 
the gentle reader has never regaled his inner 
man with a diet of coot. If not. he has an 
experience in store for himself. Try it some 
day when the larder is low, and game comes 
not plenty to your gun. If you are in the 
proper locality, you can always kill a coot, or 
several of them for that matter. We tried to 
pick the feathers off ours. Don’t do it; life is 
too short. Skin him. A coot is about as easy 
to skin as a jack rabbit, and when he is skinned, 
he presents a much neater appearance than if 
you have tried to yank the feathers out by hand. 
There are several interesting things that we 
learned about this delectable bird which will be 
mailed to any one interested upon the receipt of 
sufficient postage stamps to satisfy the crav¬ 
ing of Uncle Samuel. One is that no coot is 
a success boiled; he should be fried. He is so 
constituted that the longer he is boiled the 
tougher and stringier he becomes, but a breast 
of coot fried is mighty filling when there is 
nothing else to fill with. 
Day second was like unto day first, save that 
we saw not even a lonesome old gander. Also 
it rained. 
The third day we were beginning to get 
enough of goose shooting when a native came 
along hunting stock. He rode up to the pits 
and peered down at us crouching there. Then 
his gaze wandered off across the lake and he 
broke into a silent laugh that shook him all 
over. In a manner as sarcastic as possible we 
asked him why his mirth. Then he enlightened 
us. There was not and never had been any 
geese in that part of the country. The geese 
spent the night on the river and came in the 
day to feed upon the stubble fields where the 
wheat had grown. These stubble fields were 
ten miles away. Our informant, he of the chart 
by which we steered our course to this spot, 
would have felt very indignant could he have 
heard the candid opinions expressed by us upon 
the receipt of the above information. 
The lost horse had been recovered. I re¬ 
covered him by proxy. On the second day a 
noble red man came along astride of a bob¬ 
tailed yellow pony. He seemed hungry and I 
staked him to a pot of boiled beans that had 
grown somewhat antique. After regaling him¬ 
self with these, he informed me that back there 
a-ways he had seen a horse, and from his 
description I knew at once that my whilom 
steed was still in the neighborhood. For a 
consideration he agreed to recover the brute. 
You would not suspect from reading a Cooper 
novel that the red man was capable of double 
dealing, but that savage evidently had never 
drawn his morals from the same fount with 
Cooper’s Indians, for within ten minutes after 
striking a bargain with me for the return of the 
horse, be came leading the animal from behind 
a sand hill where he had tethered him while he 
came in and struck a contract with us. 
We shook such of the mud from our feet as 
we could, and following the advice of our 
native friend, departed in the direction of the 
land where dwelt the geese. We arrived late 
in the day just as the birds were returning to 
their sleeping places on the river. There is no 
language that can adequately express the scene. 
The air was black with swarms of them, all 
hurrying toward the deep canon, at the bottom 
of which flowed the lordly Columbia. They 
were flying too high to shoot, but the man on 
whose ranch we were informed us that in the 
morning they would come within range. 
There was little sleep in camp. Nearly all 
night the bands of noisy geese passed overhead. 
With the first gray light of dawn our rancher 
friend came out and told us that he would take 
us to where some other hunters had dug their 
