Feb. 29, 1908.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
337 
inconsiderable factor in such artillery practice. 
These men also shoot geese, and get only ten 
cents apiece for them, it is said. They fre¬ 
quently kill dozens at a shot, however, raking 
the sandbars and putting in the rest of the day 
picking up cripples. Three or four, or at most 
half a dozen, shots a day are all these fellows 
attempt to make, and it is known that one of 
them has killed nearly four hundred in a day’s 
shooting. This is the shame of California in a 
sporting way, and does more damage than all 
the sportsmen; for the duck clubs, when all is 
said, are at present the greatest preserving agent 
now operating in behalf of the wildfowl, not¬ 
withstanding the hundreds that tljey kill. They 
afford a large body of wealthy men such sport 
that their influence and earnest efforts are en¬ 
listed to legally preserve and prolong the shoot¬ 
ing as well as giving the birds rest, food and 
fresh water, their three great necessities of life. 
Further, the ducks at Imperial have become 
such a pest—the ranchers say—that they are 
grub-staking hunters, lodging them and even 
supplying ammunition to keep the birds off their 
fields, urging the killing of all possible. At Im¬ 
perial the country is all under the Colorado 
River, a stream whose waters carry a high per¬ 
centage of alluvial silt. Irrigation is generally 
practiced. Plowing is unnecessary. The fields 
are inclosed with dykes and the seed is scat¬ 
tered broadcast upon them, then a canal of per¬ 
haps a thousand miners’ inches is turned in over 
night covering the field from one to two feet 
with water. Undoubtedly the ducks do get away 
with an enormous quantity of the seed barley, 
for they are eminently adapted to such work. 
Some of the seed floats to the top and is gobbled 
by teal, spoonbills and other short-necked breeds 
while the sprigs root along the bottom and find 
much more. By the time the water has 
sunk into the ground it has buried the seed that 
is left under two or three inches of richest 
aluvial mud, and enormous crops are quickly 
raised whenever the ducks have not made away 
with most of the seed, which of course cannot 
" be told until by the stand of grain. Even then 
the birds uproot more or less of it from the 
still plastic mud. 
The Imperial country is about two hours’ 
flight from here judged as a duck would figure. 
To complain about the local killings when the 
law is utterly disregarded upon the same birds 
only a couple of hundred miles distant there¬ 
fore does not appeal to reason. Illegal night 
shooting is freely practiced. 
Ducks were scarce at Imperial up to the first 
of the year, but then they came in force. There 
was no marked diminution here either, and this 
proves to the sportsman’s satisfaction that there 
are more ducks than last winter when the local 
supply was below grade, and there were no more 
in the Colorado country than this winter. 
Snipe shooting has steadily declined locally 
for several years. It is undoubtedly the relent¬ 
less persecution of the bird up north that has 
brought about this result, so marked that the 
State Legislature finally put the birds in the 
game law where they belonged. A twenty-five 
bird limit is made, season opening Oct. 15 and 
closing April 1, giving some spring shooting. 
Snipe are at their best here in spring, and some 
stay to breed. March is about the best month. 
Quail hunters who had feared a dry winter, 
>vhich keeps the birds from breeding, feel re¬ 
lieved with the coming of the rains. There is 
a plenty of breeding stock left. The California 
valley quail, differing from some other birds, 
has kept pace with the improvement in sports¬ 
men’s tools until he is not far behind in the 
race now. The automobilists have given the 
birds a liberal education far and near, sampling 
each flock, and leaving behind plenty of wiser 
fowl to bring up broods. 
Edwin L. Hedderly. 
A Clever Buck. 
Raleigh, N. C., Feb. 14.— Editor Forest and 
Stream: The following described actions of a 
deer before a dog seem worthy of mention. 
The body of water where the observation was 
made is in eastern North Carolina and is about 
two miles in diameter and very shallow all over. 
THE CLIFF DOWN WHICH THE BUCKS FELL. 
It is surrounded by woods and swamps, and the 
bottom shelves gradually from nothing around 
the edges to a foot or eighteen inches of water 
over the main body of the lake. Another man 
and myself were out after geese and were oc¬ 
cupying separate blinds about seventy-five yards 
apart with our live decoys tied out between us. 
The deer in question was running ahead of a 
single hound and alternating between the woods 
and the water, being well ahead of the dog and 
keeping him guessing and moving slowly. The 
bottom of the lake is firm and a deer can lope 
across it in any direction about as easily and 
freely as in the woods, while following dogs are 
badly handicapped. 
No geese were flying and we had not fired a 
shot, but had heard the deer in the water several 
times before seeing him, the day being calm 
and the surrounding ring of woods confining and 
echoing sounds very clearly. Finally we saw 
him heading directly toward us, coming at an 
easy lope and in no way hurried, the dog at the 
time being at least half an hour behind the dec 
and finding great difficulty in following the trail. 
Although a fine trailer, he lost the trail and 
gave up soon after. The deer stopped some 
three hundred yards away and listened a minute 
to the deep bay of the hound back in the woods. 
Then he squatted in the water, sinking his body 
until the whole line of the back was submerged, 
leaving exposed nothing but the top of the head 
and a few inches of the rump. In this position, 
in water nowhere over eighteen inches deep and 
not averaging more than fifteen or sixteen inches, 
he poled himself along for three or four hundred 
yards to a small island off to one side, the 
splashing of our decoy geese having apparently 
turned him from his former course. I think he 
must have poled himself along with his fore 
feet; he could not have been on his knees, as 
that would have raised the body partly out of 
the water. The effect was very odd and the 
appearance of the animal progressing in this 
way was of a swimming alligator with a rather 
bunchy head. He seemed to make about five 
miles an hour and his belly must have been 
dragging the bottom, and he did not alter his 
course or increase his speed when I left my 
blind and splashed through the water for a 
couple of hundred yards to where our skiff was 
hidden in a patch of reeds. I poled the boat 
down to near the island where he had squatted, 
jumped him, and killed him with a quick snap 
shot as he went through the bushes, leaping high 
and wide. 
This was a new trick to me and proved to be 
unknown to all in camp, though all there had 
lots of experience with deer in this country. 
H. H. Brimley. 
A Long Journey on Snowshoes. 
A press dispatch from Toronto to the New 
York Times, dated Feb. 15, says that after a 
snowshoe tramp of 250 miles from Moose Fac¬ 
tory to MacDougall Chute, where he boarded a 
train for Toronto, Archdeacon Renison qrrived 
in this city to-day. Of his trip over the snow 
at the rate of twenty-one miles a day, he says: 
“We left Moose Factory on the first day of 
February, and it was then 40 degrees below 
zero. I was accompanied by an Indian named 
John Rich. We carried sufficient bacon and 
flour, made into cakes, to give us one pound 
each per day. We were on snowshoes, and 
while one man went ahead to break the trail the 
other pulled the toboggan with the provisions. 
The unbroken snow through which we traveled 
averaged a depth of three feet. As much as 
we could we followed the rivers, but when the 
rapids were bad we were compelled to take to 
the bush, and sometimes it was tedious going. 
“During our journey we had no tent, and at 
night we dug a hole in the snow, and after 
crawling into our rabbitskin blankets were vefy 
comfortable. We had no fire during the nights. 
About 160 miles from Moose Factory we came 
across a band of moose. Seven of them were 
standing like cattle in the snow, and never paid 
the slightest attention to us.” 
