: 
: 
Marcu 31, 1906.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
oe 

Some Early Sporting Reminiscences 
From “The Memoirs of Alexandre Dumas” (Pére). 
(Concluded from page 467.) 
Now that I am entering the second period of 
my youth, and laying aside the toga pretexta to 
assume the toga virilis, the reader must be intro- 
duced to the individuals who people the second 
circle of my life, as he has already been intro- 
duced to those who peopled the first. 
In the neighborhood of large forests there 
exists a peculiar folk, which, amid the general 
population, keeps its own distinctive mark, pre- 
serves its own characteristics, and furnishes to 
that universal poetry which is the soul of the 
analogy between these two classes of men. 
‘ world—its own particular contribution of poetry. 
This folk is the forest population. ; 
I have lived much with foresters and much with 
mariners; and I have always observed a ae 
oth 
are, as a rule, cold, pensive, religious; oftentimes 
the sailor or the forester—the one while he is 
making his forty or fifty knots over the ocean, the 
other while he is doing his eight or ten leagues 
through the great wood—will remain side by side 
with his closest friend without exchanging a 
single word, without appearing to hear or see any- 
thing; and yet not a sound will stir in the air 
that their ear does not seize it, not a motion will 
ruffle the surface of the water or the depths of 
the foliage but their glance has taken it in. Then, 
as the two companions have the same ideas, a 
similar philosophy and analogous feelings; as 
their silence has been, in truth, nothing but a long 
his chase, the mariner of his storms! 
unspoken converse, you will marvel that, when 
the moment comes, they will have only one word 
to utter, one gesture to make, one glance to cast, 
and in that glance, that gesture, that word, they 
will have interchanged more thoughts than other 
people could have done in a long discussion. And 
then afterward, when of an evening they chat 
around some forest bivouac, or by their own fire- 
side, rich with its embers and gleams of light, 
how fully and how graphically do these cold, 
dreamy, silent men tell the tale—the forester of 
How art- 
less and how picturesque at once is the language 
inspired by the poetry that has floated over them 
from the summit of the tree or the crest of the 
wave—the poetry of the mighty forest and the 
boundless ocean! How grand their speech, and 
yet how simple! One feels that these are indeed 
the elect of nature and of solitude—beings who 
have almost unlearned the tongue of men, to 
speak that of the wind, the trees, the torrent, the 
tempest and the sea! 
I was among this remarkable folk—remarkable 
more especially at Villers-Cotterets, because of 
the vast extent of the forest, which isolates them 
from the town, whither they go only once a week, 
to get their orders for inspection while their 
wives attend mass—it was among this folk, I say, 
that I came when—as the old saying was—lI left 
the hands of the women. My appearance among 
these men was, I may say, a thing long desired by 
them; almost all of them had hunted with my 
father (who, as we have seen, had occasional 
leave to shoot in the forest), and they preserved 
a lively recollection of his liberality; some of 
them, too, were old soldiers who had served under 
him, and whom by his influence he had got into 
the forest service; and, in short, all these brave 
fellows, who saw beforehand in me tendencies to 
be as open-handed as “the General” (it was thus 
they always called my father), had made great 
friends with me, and would ask me, every time 
they met me by chance at some bird- catching ex- . 
pedition : “Well, and when is our inspector going 
to invite you to a hunt of a more serious kind?” 
At last the invitation had come—for the fol- 
lowing Thursday; the rendezvous was at the 
Maison-Neuve on the Soissons road, at the house 
of a head forester called Choron. 
Among this people whom I have tried to sketch 
by general characteristics, there were four or five 
men who deserve especial mention, either for their 
skill or their originality—and one of them was 
Choron. I have already had occasion to speak 
of him more than once, but I have spoken of him 
under another name; to-day, as I am _ writing 
reminiscences and not a romance, he must appear 
in his real name. 
At the period we have reached—that is, the 
beginning of the year 1816—Choron was a fine 
young fellow of about thirty, with frank and open 
countenance, fair hair, blue eyes, and large whisk- 
ers, which formed an admirable frame to his 
sunny face; with a well-set figure, five feet four 
in height, and—thanks to the symmetry of his 
limbs—possessed of a Herculean strength, which 
was quoted for miles round. 
To his comrades Choron was a kind of oracle 
in everything that appertained to the hunting of 
big game. Courage soon wins itself a mighty 
power over men, and Choron did not know what 
fear was. Never had he shrunk back before man 
or beast in the world; he would go right into the 
deepest lair to rouse the boar; he would go to 
attack the poachers in their firmest strongholds. 
To say truth, Choron did, from time to time, get 
some stroke from the tusk on his thigh, or some 
small shot in his back, but in that case he had a 
method of treating his wounds which, with him, 
answered to perfection. He would bring up two 
or three bottles of white wine from his cellar, pull 
out one of his dogs from its corner, and then lay 
himself down on the ground upon a deer-skin, 
while he made Roquador or Fanfaro lick his sore; 
and meanwhile, to compensate for the blood he 
had lost, swallowed what he called his “elixir.” 
That evening, he did not appear again, and next 
morning he was cured! 
And yet withal, strangely enough, Choron was 
only a very moderate shot; and in what were 
called “hamper-chases”—that is, when the object 
of the hunt was to send off smaller game—rab- 
bits, hares, partridges and deer—to the Duc 
d’Orléans, it was very rarely that Choron sup- 
plied his quota; on these occasions he left the 
royalty of the chase either to Moinat or Mildet. 
Moinat was the first marksman at shot-fire, and 
Mildet the first at bullet-fire, in the forest of 
Villers-Cotterets. 
When Moinat’s gun covered any animal what- 
soever—from a snipe to a deer—that animal was, 
barring accidents, a dead one; and this expert- 
ness extended sometimes to those who were 
shooting in the vicinity of Moinat, M. Deviolaine, 
in his own particular expeditions, used to invite 
Moinat, declaring that he never shot well but 
when he felt Moinat at his side. One day, when 
I made a third party in one of these excursions, 
I discovered the secret. Moinat fired simultane- 
ously with M. Deviolaine—the bird fell; M. De- 
violaine fancied that he had killed it himself, and 
proceeded to pick up his game—it was Moinat 
who had killed it. Occasionally, however, he 
allowed M. Deviolaine to fire quite by himself, 
and it was seldom that these shots brought any- 
thing down—a coincidence, however, of which 
Moinat had the strength of mind never to boast, 
with the result that he remained the inspector’s 
favorite till the end of his life. 
At this period Moinat was sixty, but in strength 
of leg and keenness of eye he could challenge the 
youngest; on the open ground he got over his 
ten leagues without a stumble; in the marsh land 
he would enter the water and mire up to his mid- 
dle; in the forest he would trample through the 
thickest underwood and the most thorny bram- 
bles. Moinat had been a friend of my father’s, 
and he did me the great honor—which he did 
not do to every one—of being not only my friend 
but my master. He has had, I may say, no cause 
to regret his instructions; and in all the State 
forests—where they went so far as to suspend 
my shooting license because of the quantity of 
game I killed, and a cuff on the head I was rash 
enough to give an inspector—I have shown my- 
self his worthy pupil, at least so I trust. 
I quarreled with Moinat. much in the same 
way that Van Dyck quarreled with Rubens; one 
day I killed a buck which Moinat had just missed, 
and he never forgave me. 
Such then are our fresh actors ready on the 
scene. Thursday has come; it is 8:30 A. M., and 
we file out—M. Deviolaine, my brother-in-law, 
myself and a dozen forest guards (who had either 
started from Villers-Cotterets or joined us on the 
way)—at the turn of the forest about 400 yards 
distant from the Maison-Neuve. 
- The particular feature of these hunts, the mem- 
bers of which were mostly foresters, was the 
complete absence of all tall talk (craques). Every 
one knew his neighbor too well, and was too well 
known to impose upon him with any of those in- 
genuous fibs by which the frequenters of the St. 
Denis Plain are wont to enhance their own 
merits; we knew who were the strong men and 
who were the weak, and we rendered all justice 
to the strong, but at the same time we showed 
the weak no pity. 
Foremost among the latter was one Niquet, 
nick-named Bobino, from his devotion (we speak, 
of course, of his early days) to the game of spin- 
ning-top which bears that name. He had the 
reputation of being a witty fellow, but to this 
reputation was added—and not less deservedly— 
that of being the most clumsy marksman in the 
company; and so, while they recounted the great 
exploits of Choron and Moinat and Mildet, they 
rallied poor Bobino mercilessly. 
My mother had, as you may well imagine, put 
me under the care of M. Deviolaine; she had only 
let me go on the condition that he should not 
lose sight of me. M. Deviolaine had promised 
this, and, with a view to keeping his word strictly, 
he placed me between himself and Moinat, recom- 
mending me to keep completely hidden behind a 
large oak tree; then, if I fired at a boar and the 
boar should round upon me, I was to catch hold 
of a branch of the oak, lift myself up by my 
arms, and let the animal pass beneath me. Every 
hunter of any experience knows that this is the 
method usually adopted in these circumstances. 
Before ten minutes hal elapsed every one was 
at his post. Soon the bark of Choron’s dog, 
which had got on the scent, resounded with a full- 
ness and frequency that showed he was nearing 
the animal, Suddenly we heard a crackling in 
the underwood. For my part, I saw something 
pass by, but before I could bring my gun to my 
shoulder, that something had vanished. Moinat 
fired at a guess, but shook his head as a sign 
that he did not in the least believe he had hit the 
beast. Then, a little further off, we heard a sec- 
ond shot; then a thizd, which was immediately 
followed by the “hallali” whoop, uttered with the 
full strength of his lungs by Bobino’s voice. 
Every one ran up to the call, although when 
we recognized the voice of the caller, each ex- 
pected to be the dupe of some new hoax devised 
by the witty wag. I ran like the rest, and, in- 
deed, faster than the rest. I had never been 
present at the finish-off of a boar, and I would 
not for anything miss such a sight. In vain did 
M. Deviolaine’ call after me not to hurry. I paid 
no heed, 
Every one, as I said, expected a hoax. Un- 
paralleled, then, was the astonishment of all, 
when, on reaching the Dampleux road, which in- 
tersects the crosspath where we were posted, like 
the bar of the letter T, we saw, right in the mid- 
dle of the road, Bobino coolly seated upon his 
boar. To complete this picture, which might have 
served as a pendant to the death of the wild boar 
of Calydon, killed by Meleager, Bobino, assum- 
ing the indifferent air of a man quite accustomed 
to such deeds of prowess, had his pipe in his 
mouth and was striking a light. 
At his first shot the beast had rolled over like 
a rabbit, and had never stirred from -the place 
where it fell. You may easily imagine the chorus 
of half-mocking congratulations that arose around 
the conquering hero, who, putting on his air of 
unconcern, and capping his pipe with a bit of 
paper, to prevent the wind carrying away the 
spark, answered, between two puffs of smoke: 
“Ah, there, you see, that’s the way we’ bowl 
over these little fellows—we Provence people!” 
And indeed we could say nothing. The “bowl- 
ing over’ was done to perfection. The ball had 
struck the animal behind the ear; not Moinat, or 
Mildet, or Berthelin could have done it better.’ 
Choron was the last to come up, without hast- 
ening his steps in the least. As soon as he ap- 
peared, emerging from the wood with his hound 
in leash again, we saw him fix his astonished 
gaze upon the group formed by. us, of which’ 
Niquet was the center. On observing Choron 
approaching, we got out of the way that he 
might see what we saw without being able to be- 
lieve our eyes. 
“Hallo, what’s this they tell me, Bobino?” he 
called out directly he was within hearing distance ; 
“they say the boar’s been and thrown himself into 
your gun, like a fool!” 
“Whether he’s thrown hisself into my gun, or 
