
FOUNDERS OF THE AUDUBON SOCIETY 

Dr WILLIAM BRUETTE, Editor 

Member of Audit Bureau of Circulation 


THE OBJECT OF THIS JOURNAL WILL BE TO 
studiously promote a healthful interest in outdoor 
recreation, and a refined taste for natural objects. 
August 14, 1873. 
THE DANCE OF THE GODS 
HE stage is set. The landscape is arrayed in 
carnival colors, and old earth feels the spirit 
of abondonment, of youth in a last fling. 
Growth assumes the raiment of audacity, of a red 
man’s tribal dance. Life is furtive, restless. The 
harvests have been gathered and the gods walk 
earth again. 
Spring may boast of May and June, of poets and 
love and old madness, and pass like a wind-blown 
shadow. October commands, attracts, lures. She 
leaps like Atalanta down, hill slopes and along river 
valleys, with robes streaming with colors of sun- 
down, with hair gleaming yellow as corn, and the 
sound of her passing is pagan. Poets speak of 
angry winds and despair, desolate orchards and 
songless shruberry, lost odors, melancholy, death. 
They know not this mood of the year, this time that 
is spirit and dream and phantasy all in one. They 
know not the magic of the hunter’s moon, the carni- 
val of things, the ‘‘Te Deum” earth sings. 
Tinged with gold are the hills, islands in a sea 
of mists and crimson. Passers of the road and 
wood trails walk ankle-deep in leaves. Down stream 
float slowly vast argosies of leaves—gold spatter- 
ing silver and sable. An ashen haze hangs languor- 
ously over fields and lowlands at the foot of bar- 
baric hills, and a web of gossamer fabric trails som- 
nolent meadow waters. Earth seems a bizarre 
dream, man a small thing amid fantastic events. 
Saffron oaks shame the last colors of the sunset. 
The hickory holds aloft a crown of Etruscan gold. 
The sumach flares flame-red until old pastures 
seem ablaze with a legion pyres. Piny woodlots 
stand like measures of fresh fuel awaiting the 
march of encircling fires. Pillars, pinnacles, 
pyramids glow and burn along the frontiers of 
meadows, the line of invisible streams, the ribbon 
of gray roads strewn, the heave and dipping of 
landscape. There is the elm’s fire-gold, the birch’s 
yellow, the flicker of aspens, the flare of molten 
chestnut and the blaze of lambent beech and the 
smoke of dusky ash. Nature is bacchantic to her 
very toes. 
It is high adventure, this autumnal mood. There 
are the asters and goldenrod, the ivy and bitter- 
sweet, the witch hazel blooming with a vague, in- 
definable joy at other growths turning to brown 
wraiths. Mystery wanders foot-loose and wild. 

There is a tang and pungency to errant winds and 
lost scents, an enchantment of silence and living 
poetry, the sorcery of sounds as squadrons of wild 
geese go a-honking toward austral waters. Life 
feels like something antique and remote for it is a 
royal mood of the year. 

BIG GAME CENSUS 
HE Forest Service review of the big game 
T animals in the national forests shows in- 
creases in deer in Arizona, Florida, Idaho, 
Montana, New Mexico, and Washington, all of 
which are due primarily to a closer estimate by our 
men, who are becoming more familiar and expert 
with this phase of their work. Idaho shows an in- 
crease of about 2,200 elk, due also to closer esti- 
mates, while Montana shows a clear loss of about 
4,000, due to an error in figures for 1921 and 1922, 
wherein were included elk which are on the Yellow- 
stone National Park for the greater part of the 
year, using forests only in certain winters when 
driven out of the Park by deep snows. These should 
be counted as Park animals and not as dependent 
on the national forests. 
The total figures for deer, moose and goats show 
a general increase, mainly due to the inclusion of 
figures for Alaska in the 1923 column, from which 
no reliable estimates have been secured heretofore. 
The census shows for all the national forests, over 
511,000 deer, 49,000 elk, 7,900 moose, 18,000 moun- 
tain goats, and almost 13,000 mountain sheep. In 
general, deer and elk are increasing in numbers, 
with moose, goats and mountain sheep holding their 
own. 
California stil. stands first in the number of deer, 
187,000 head being found on the national forests 
in that State. Oregon comes second with 52,000. 
Wyoming, as heretofore, has the largest number of 
elk, 15,000; Washington, with 8,369, being second. 
The majority of the elk in Washington are known 
as the Roosevelt elk, a large number of which are 
found on the Olympic National Forest. 
Idaho with 3,400 goats and Colorado with 5,600 
mountain sheep are at the head of the list of those 
animals. Colorado for several years past has paid 
special attention to the protection of her mountain 
sheep in winter, with the natural result that they 
have increased rapidly and are found in large num- 
bers in all the forests in the State. 
Attention might be called to the fact that not all 
the large deer herds are found in the far west, the 
State of New Hampshire having 10,000 head, the 
State of Minnesota over 3,000 head, and Florida 
1,200 head. 
AMERICAN RIFLEMEN ANSWER SWISS 
OLLOWING the 1923 Free Rifle Matches when 
F the United States Team hung up a record of 
5,301 points, breaking the old Biarritz record 
by 129, the Swiss protested the acceptance of this 
total as a record; largely upon the ground that no 
European nation competed at Camp Perry. 
America’s answer to this protest was filed at 
Rheims during the 1924 matches in the form of an 
incontestible total of 5,284, a margin of 100 points 
over the Swiss total—answer enough, and in a 
most convincing form. In addition, Fisher again 
took the Individual Championship. This is an- 
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