714 
FOREST AND STREAM.) 
[May 5, 1906. 

What a Deer Hunter Saw. 
We have been told many times that it is not 
all of fishing to fish, and most of us know, too, 
that it is not all of hunting to hunt. After a 
man has attained years of discretion, he is likely 
to receive during his excursions into the wilder- 
ness far more gratifying and lasting satisfaction 
from the things which he sees and hears in the 
woods or upon the rivers or on the plains, than 
he gets from making a successful shot, killing 
a big head or even outwitting the wiliest old 
buck of them all. ; 
To many men the power to describe what 
they have seen on their excursions is denied; 
but there are others who with eyes wide open 
and ears alert go into the woods, see their 
beauty, hear their strange sounds, comprehend 
something of the connection between animals 
and birds and trees and plants, and then re- 
turning, set down something of what they have 
seen to the exceeding great joy and benefit of 
those who are fortunate enough to read their 
writing. 
Last autumn, Mr. W. J. Hunsaker, of the 
Saginaw Courier-Herald went on a deer hunt, 
and on his return wrote for his paper the story 
of his trip. Truth to say there was in it not 
very much of deer hunting, but a great deal 
of true woods feeling. Here is some of it: 

Sitting on a stump on a runway—a defined 
path used by deer in their travels—is the usual 
way the novice “hunts” deer. 
Watching a runway is not exciting sport, and 
it has its discomforts. But it is not all monotony, 
nor is it unattractive to one who loves the woods 
and the curious wild little people who make 
their homes therein. 
The woods are filled with a tremendous over- 
tone of silence when you listen for it; and again 
when. you listen they are loud with strange 
voices. On the runway at dawn there is not 
a sound. Morning steals up before you are 
aware, and the curious shadows and the dark 
places shift, melt and fade. Perhaps a little wind 
comes with it, and soon faintly rustles the dry 
leaves on a beech and gives you a start. You 
think it is a deer coming. It is just the wind. 
A stick snaps in the woods behind you. You 
slowly turn your head on a stiff-necked pivot 
with your rifle at ready, breathless. That is a 
deer, sure. It isn’t. Just a lively red squirrel 
starting upon its busy day’s work. Silence, and 
you look up and down the narrow trail that the 
deer have made, or through the openings be- 
tween the trees, tense, watchful, ready. Nothing. 
Then you come to with a start. A startling 
hammering resounds through the forest. The 
great cock of the woods is pounding on his 
own front door—the giant pileated woodpecker, 
biggest of his tribe, makes the echoes ring. He 
riddles dead trees at though they were shot 
full of holes with cannister, and sometimes chips 
out a deep cavity in green timber, seemingly 
for amusement, or just to show what he can do 
with his powerful chisel-beak. When he quits 
his knocking, a little woods mouse creeps 
timidly out from under your log, watches you 
intently with his bright little eyes, runs back 
in sudden panic, ventures forth again, and re- 
assured starts on an apparently perilous journey 
across the snow twenty feet away to a brush 
heap. Then you find out what it is that makes 
the curious trail in the snow, a dragging, narrow 
mark that you have wondered over. 

Did you ever hear the big black raven of the 
north woods? He is the wisest of all the forest 
people, and owns a vocabulary that is second in 
range -and variety only to the Canada jay’s— 
alias camp robber, meat bird, ghost bird, moose 
bird, whiskey jack, etc. The raven looks like 
a crow, only he is blacker and larger. A crow 
has practically only one word—caw—which he 
uses with inflections for all occasions. But a 
raven never caws—it croaks, gabbles, grates, 
cackles, grunts, yaps, gurgles, yowls, calls—a 
most astonishing variety of raucous conversa- 
tion in monologue, and copious, especially if 
something to eat is the object of concern. There 
must have been something wrong with the 
larynx of Poe’s raven—if that bird refused to 
utter more than one word. While the raven 
is more garrulous than the Canada jay, he is 
really not so gifted a linguist. This bird —the 
Canada jay—is related to the magpie family, 
and he has all the talent of his genus in vocal 
ability when he wishes to use it. If you hear 
any mysterious note in the forest that you can- 
not account for you may safely set it down to 
the credit of whiskey jack and go on. He is 
the most self-possessed of all the woods folk— 
self-reliant, familiar, unafraid, companionable 
and neighborly. He likes to come near the 
hunter on the runway—possibly the hunter will 
eat his frugal luncheon pretty soon, and there 
may fall to him the remnants. Whiskey jack 
makes no talk to you—just silently flits nearer 
and nearer, never still; restless, a gray and 
white shape, round and plump, soft of outline 
and wing, as big as a flicker. If you are reason- 
ably peaceful he will venture near enough for 
you to almost touch him. 
Out in the woods, though, you can sometimes 
hear his talking volubly, or maybe whistling like 
a boy, although he seems to have no song, at 
least in the fall. Busy, sure of himself, inde- 
pendent, he is one of the fascinating bits of life 
that make the runway far from dull. 

When he is gone, for he will not stay long 
where there is nothing to eat, a little lithe 
creature slips along a log near you, quick, swift, 
graceful—the weasel, white as the snow, except 
a deep black tip on his tail—the American 
ermine. There are many of him in the forest; 
in the summer of a darkish brown to copy the 
woods color, when the first snow falls he turns 
pure white, except the tail tip; why that is 
black is hard to say. The weasel sometimes 
turns white in two days—a most marvelous, 
protective provision of nature, granted also to 
the northern hare or “‘snowshoe rabbit.” Quite 
often the weasel turns white too soon; or at 
least he doesn’t turn back again to brown if the 
first snow melts, which it often does, and leaves 
him a most conspicious object against the dark 
background of his home. Nature provides him 
with protection in hue to harmonize with the 
snow, but she doesn’t seem to have figured on 
the necessity of a quick costume change when 
the temperature rises and the snow vanishes. 
This carelessness of: nature must irritate the 
weasel at times, especially when the owl gets 
after him. But, then, this may constitute the 
open season on weasels for the owl, which must 
live by hunting, too. 
When the sun grows higher and works up 
over the'treetops the hunter on the runway be- 
gins to think of going somewhere else. Like the 
fishing around the next bend of the stream, 
there must be plenty of deer down by the edge 
of the swamp or over on the hardwood ridges 
waiting to be shot. Anyway, if one doesn’t 
show up on the runway in just exactly five 
minutes. he will try still-hunting awhile. He 
knows he is a better still-hunter than a patient 
waiter on a stump. And while he waits the 
cheerful chickadees and black caps come chat- 
tering or scolding into the topmost boughs 
above him, or one of the numérous wood- 
pecker family, of the lesser tribes, diligently 
pecks up and down a tree trunk, searching for 
breakfast, or he hears a partridge “budding” in 
a maple off near the logging road. He keeps 
a wary eye up and down the runway all the 
time, though, but sees no movement among the 
spruces and balsams and pines and hemlocks 
and maples. 
But he does see and admire the curly shavings- 
like coat that the big yellow birch wears, and 
the smoothly snug skin of the beech, and how 
the hemlock lifts its grand trunk toward the 
sky, and the contrast between the soft curves 
of the boughs of the white pine and those of the 
coarser Norway, and the varying shades of 
green that clothe the balsams, spruces and 
tamaracks, and the fluttering, faded yellow ban- 
ners that the maple is dropping. 
The brilliant bluejay, one of the most widely 
distributed and active of native birds, flies by, 
literally hurling epithets that the hunter does 
not understand, but which he knows instinctively 
t 
are deadly insulting. Or the red squirrel sees 
him, swears at him in seven woods languages, 
flippantly twitching its tail and nervously run- 
ning back and forth on a nearby fallen tree 
trunk, finally scampering up a tree to chir-r-r-r 
out its ridiculous defiance. 

But the hunter’s legs are cramped and cold, 
and so he thinks he will cautiously stretch them 
a few moments down the nearby logging road 
—made in the old days when the haughty lum- 
berman came only for the giant white pine, for 
“board timber,’ contemptuous of the hard- 
wood all about him. And he wanders far down 
the road at snail’s pace on fruitless errand, and 
comes back to his stump to find that while he 
was gone a deer has calmly walked down the 
-runway within a few feet of where he has been 
huddled up shivering since dawn. He sees its 
sharp hoof-tracks in the snow or the damp 
black soil. Then he says things about himself, 
and starts through the woods after the deer on 
a still-hunt. 
British Columbia Game Protection. 
CuMBERLAND, B. C., April 14.—Editor Forest 
and Stream: Mr. Williams, the Provincial game 
warden, met the members of the gun club last 
Thursday evening, the t2th inst., and discussed 
with them some vital questions of game preser- 
vation. There was a good deal of heated dis- 
cussion and an emphatic denunciation of the milk- 
and-water policy adopted by the Government in 
game matters. It was finally moved that the 
club should submit the names of all its members 
for appointment as deputy wardens, without sal- 
ary. As an amendment, it was moved that a 
petition be circulated asking that the district be 
made an organized one under the game act, it 
being explained that the Canadian Pacific Railroad 
were willing to pay wardens in their own terri- 
tory, provided this was done. The amendment 
was carried. After a little more general talk the 
meeting adjourned, A 
Newfoundland Caribou. 
Granp LAKE, Newfoundland, April 10—Editor 
Forest and Stream: Our heaviest fall of snow 
for the winter came last week, but I am pleased 
to say it is now melting fast. Caribou are be- 
ginning to go north again. Several small lots 
have gone past here> We note that the caribou 
appear to be in remarkably good condition this 
spring. This is no doubt the result of the mild 
winter, and we hope to see them return from 
their summer quarters in the yet unmapped 
neg penisula carrying record heads next 
all. 
While out for a prowl a short time back, I 
picked up a single cast antler which had twenty- 
six points. 
Owing to the last big fall of snow, the 
fishing prospects for the coming summer are 
particularly rosy, both for salmon and trout. 
J. R. WHIrTAKER. 
THE strongly-worded appeal for organized re- 
sistance to the Spurious Sports bill, written by 
Dr. D’Arcy Hamilton, should have the effect of 
rousing the gun and ammunition trades, game 
farmers and pigeon shooters to energetic action. 
The doctor does not, in our opinion, over-color 
the situation that will be created by the passing of 
this bill, and it is high time that some action 
should be taken at once, by a petition or by rep- 
resentation to Members of Parliament. If noth- 
ing is done, it will be taken that those in the gun 
trade and others are indifferent to the effect of 
the bill, and it will become law. As Dr. Hamilton 
points out, this is the thin end of the wedge. and, 
if the measure is successfully carried, it will en- 
courage the faddists to go for other branches of 
sport.—Shooting Times (London). 
FRANKLIN, O.—The dear old paper is doubly 
welcome since the change of dress—so handy and 
convenient to carry in one’s pocket. I send you 
two subscribers, Bes 
