Forest and Stream 
Copyright, 1906, by Forest and Stream Publishing Co. 




Terms, $3 a Year. 10 Cts. a Copy. 
Six Months, $1.50. 


SPECIAL NUMBER. 
Wirt this issue, enlarged to forty-eight pages, 
is given an extremely valuable and interesting 
series of illustrations of the yacht and ship models 
in the possession of the New York Yacht Club. 
Here are many divergent types, picturing the de- 
velopment of yacht building in America. 
Other illustrations are of the ways of the primi- 
tive American hunter, from photographs which 
are notable because they picture methods which 
have been followed in the West from the old 
days. The metal scraper used by the Cheyennes 
of to-day is essentially the scraper of stone 
laboriously fashioned by the hunter of the stone 
age; and the ways of using it are unchanged. 
The curing of skins, the woman’s work of to-day, 
was the woman’s work of the old times, when 
the buffalo gave sustenance to the tribes. 
The photo of deer is the second of the series 
of wonderful flashlights of wild game by Hon. 
George Shiras, 3d. 
THE WILDFOWL SEASON. 
WirH the first days of March ends for most 
of the States of the Union the wildfowl shooting 
season, It is true that there are few States which 
still permit the slaughter of ducks so long as the 
birds remain in their waters. But over practically 
all of Canada and over most of the Northern 
States a wiser policy has supplanted that of kill- 
ing the mated and breeding birds. 
Reports from all over the country indicate that 
the past winter has been one of wildfowl plenty, 
and one in which comparatively few ducks have 
been killed. Weather of unexampled mildness 
north and south and the absence of severe storms 
tended greatly toward the preservation of the 
birds, which along the sea coast sat day after day 
in large rafts, paying no attention whatever to 
decoys, and so were safe from the gunner. It was 
not until mid-winter or after that the fowl were 
driven from the Middle and Northern States 
south to their accustomed wintering ground, and 
almost immediately after the cold spell that closed 
the northern waters came another period of warm 
weather, and the birds came back again. In the 
South, on the broad waters of Virginia and North 
i 
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and South Carolina the story has been the same. 
The conditions of summer weather, the birds re- 
fusing to fly—or sometimes in stormy weather 
going out to sea—have made a poor shooting sea- 
son. Few or none of the gunning clubs along 
some of the most famous wildfowl grounds in 
the South have done well, and most of them are 
far behind their record of the last few years. 
The abundance of the fowl has been very en- 
couraging. Many notes have been printed in 
Forest AND STREAM showing that on the Great 
South Bay, on the broad waters of Virginia, on 
the southern borders of the Great Lakes and in 
the sounds of the South Atlantic coast birds 
have been extraordinarily abundant. No doubt 
two causes have contributed to this abundance. 
t NEV VORKS SA TUIDAY, MARCH 35 1906: Rae ee Tak. 
One is the abolition over a large part of the con- 
tinent of the spring shooting of wildfowl, which, 
by shortening the season, has preserved many 
breeding birds, and by leaving them undisturbed 
when they reached their breeding ground has 
tended to the rearing of large broods of young. 

The other cause which has made birds abun- 
dant is the passage in a number of States of the 
law prohibiting the sale of game. This has 
worked wonders everywhere, in the Southwest 
with special effect; and no such vast quantities of 
birds have been sent from Texas as used to be 
shipped from that State a few years ago. The 
non-sale Jaw in Illinois has had an excellent 
effect, and has unquestionably brought down 
market gunning to a point where there is little 
profit in it. 
Time passes so fast, blotting out memory of 
things past, we think it worth while to recur 
again to the conditions which prevailed when in 
1894 there was printed in these columns the 
declaration from that time to be known as the 
Forest AND STREAM Platform Plank—“The sale 
of game should be forbidden at all seasons,’ 
When this solution of the game problem was pro- 
posed, so universal was the sale of game that the 
idea of stopping it was received with derision by 
the market interests, and with well wishes com- 
bined with incredulity by those concerned for 
the preservation, The Forest AND STREAM Plank, 
it was said, was a dream, something to be dis- 
missed as desirable but unattainable. Few, in- 
deed, believed that any general prohibition of the 
sale of game could be achieved within their own 
experience. 
But the idea had force. It appealed to the 
sense of the people. It made headway. First one 
State and then another adopted it in part, in 
whole. To-day the Forest AND STREAM Platform 
Plank is the rule; the State which permits the 
sale of game is the exception. 
THE DOG. QESLA ES NORTH. 
THE dog was the first animal domesticated by 
man. Originally merely a companion and later a 
hunting assistant he came at last to be also a 
beast of burden, and such he was over a great 
part of northern North Ametrica at the time when 
the white faces of Spaniard and Englishman were 
first seen on these shores. 
Even after he had become a beast of burden, 
the dog’s function as a hunting helper did not 
cease. Even to-day the wild Eskimo and hardly 
less wild Dog Ribs of the Arctic regions turn 
loose their dogs when a bear or a herd of musk 
ox is seen, and man and his four-footed com- 
panion compete in a wild race toward the game, 
the man depending on the dogs to hold the quarry 
until he shall come near enough to kill it. In the 
same way in ancient days when the dogs carried 
burdens and hauled loads for the Indians of the 
plains, the animals were often freed from their 
VOL. LXVI.—No. 9. 
loads if game was suddenly sighted; and when, as 
sometimes happened in those days of wild animal 
abundance, buffalo or deer or rabbits ran through 
the column of the marching camp, the patient 
dogs, which had been wearily tugging and strain- 
ing at the travois or staggering under the packs, 
forgot their fatigue and started in pursuit of the 
game, scattering their loads far and wide over the 
prairie. 
In temperate zones—as has been intimated— 
the dog hauled the travois and carried the pack. 
These dogs were not like those that we see to-day 
in Indian camps, but were big and strong and 
able to carry a good load. The most ancient men, 
whose memories go back to the early part of the 
last century, describe these animals as being as 
large as wolves, long cast, of many colors, white, 
black, yellow or spotted, and as often having 
crooked legs and turned out feet, something like 
those of the dachshund or the bench-legged 
beagle of to-day. 
With the passing out of existence of America’s 
primitive people, the use of dogs as burden bear- 
ers has almost ceased. Over a vast range of this 
continent the horse has taken his place, and the 
old breeds that so well performed the labor of 
transportation have become extinct. Only in the 
farthest north the huskie remains, used by the 
Eskimo, by the Alaska miner in winter, and by 
the Indians on the border of the barren ground. 
Even these are growing scarcer, though in the 
Eskimo camps of the Far North one may still 
see splendid specimens of the sturdy breed, and 
as he walks through the camp will often be in 
danger of stumbling over a brace of tiny pups 
already being trained to the harness, and fast- 
ened to some stake driven into the frozen ground. 
It is but a few years since Maj. H. M. Robin- 
son, whose familiarity with the great lone land 
of the Far North is so well known, told in 
ForEST AND STREAM the story of the passing of 
the sledge dog. He gave an interesting picture 
of the sledge dog and of sledge travel, and one 
who reads the old books of Arctic exploration 
and of Arctic life will find this story often retold. 
It is the old tale of the change from primitive 
methods of life to those which are more complex, 
and such changes never fail to possess an interest. 

BIRD FIGURES. 
ComMMISSIONER J. A. WHEELER, of Illinois, has 
completed a census of the game birds. At his re- 
quest the wardens in the several counties have 
prepared an estimate of the numbers of quail, 
prairie chickens and other birds in each county, 
and the figures have been tabulated in the impres- 
sive aggregate of “between 200,000 and 300,000 
game birds, largely quail.” Estimates of the game 
supply in a locality are notoriously inaccurate, 
when actual figures are concerned, and the total 
given, with a leeway of 100,000, is to be accepted 
only as indicating the belief of observers that 
Illinois has a generous supply of game. 
