

JuLy 20, 1907.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
95 

Massachusetts Legislation. 
Boston, July 10.—Editor Forest and Stream: 
The principal changes in and additions to the 
fish and game laws of Massachusetts made by 
the Legislature of 1907 are the following: 
The county of Bristol has hereafter the same 
open season for killing upland game birds, gray 
squirrels, hares or rabbits as the other counties. 
This will simplify the enforcement of laws in 
this and adjoining counties. ° 
The open season for gray squirrels will be be- 
tween Oct. 1 and Dee. 1, instead of from Oct. I 
to March 1. : 
The provision allowing the American herring 
gull and the black-backed gull to be killed be- 
tween Nov. 1 and May 1 has been repealed. 
Like other gulls and terns, they will be pro- 
tected at all times hereafter. 
Section 7, Acts of 1903, Chap. 287, enumerat- 
ing birds not protected, as English sparrows, 
etc., is changed in the latter part, so that instead 
of “birds of prey” it reads, “The following birds 
of prey: Sharp-shinned hawk, Cooper’s hawk, 
goshawk, red-tailed hawk, red-shouldered hawk, 
duck hawk, pigeon hawk, barred owl, great 
horned owl and snowy owl.” 
Perhaps the most important measure secured 
by the Massachusetts Fish and Game Protective 
Association was the passage of the bill requir- 
ing nonresidents to procure a: license to hunt. 
The fee is $10 and is to be issued by the Fish 
and Game Commissioners. Exception is made 
in case of. a nonresident who owns real estate 
in Massachusetts “which is assessed for taxa- 
tion at a value of not less than five hundred dol- 
lars.’ <A different fee is provided for a non- 
resident member of any club incorporated at the 
time of the passage of this‘act for the purpose 
of hunting or fishing if such club owns real 
estate in this Commonwealth which is assessed 
therein for not less than $1,000. The fee for 
such member is $1. 
Loons in or upon fresh water and eagles 
everywhere are protected. 
Domestic trout may be sold from Feb. 1 to 
April 15, the date of the opening of trout fishing. 
An act prohibits the taking of fish by seines 
and nets in the waters of Barnstable and Mash- 
pee on Nantucket Sound. This legislation has 
been asked of each Legislature for several 
years. 
Chapter 208 furnishes further protection to 
Westport River by prohibiting the use of nets 
or seines between the Ist day of May and the 
1st day of November. Chapter 264 provides that 
it shall be unlawful to hunt, shoot or kill wild 
ducks or geese from a boat or other floating 
device in any fresh water pond in Dukes county. 
The commissioners and their deputies are 
authorized to “arrest without a warrant” any 
person found in the act of setting a fire. 
The sportsmen ‘of the State are pleased with 
appropriations of $10,000 and $5,000, respectively, 
for the enlargement of the Greylock and Mount 
Tom State reservations. Such reservations are 
asylums for wild birds. 
The Metropolitan Park Commission is author- 
ized to set apart a suitable area in the Middlesex 
Fells for the establishment of a zoological 
garden by the Massachusetts Zoological So- 
cietv. 
The sum of $2,000 was donated Adam 
Rausch, of Lawrence, who was shot while in the 
discharge of his duty as a deputy. 
H. H. KimBatt. 
Goat Hunting in Washington. 
ScHenectapy, N. Y., July 6.—Editor Forest 
and Stream: In accordance with your invitation 
for photographs representing hunting and other 
similar scenes, I inclose one which was taken last 
autumn during a successful hunt for mountain 
goat. The photograph was made in the Park 
Creek Pass of the Cascade Mountains, Washing- 
ton, at an elevation of about 7,000 feet. The view 
is northwest. toward the upper end of Puget 
Sound. 
‘At the time the photograph was taken, an 
immense bank of rain-clouds was rolling inland 
from the sound. The Cascade Mountains afford 
something of a barrier to these rain-clouds. The 
storm in question reached our camp in Park 
Creek valley to the east of the pass some time 
during the night. The floors of the valleys are 
for the most part heavily timbered, except where 
snowslides have cleared it away, or fire has-run 
its course in past years. From these valley 
spaces, and from points of vantage above the 
thick timber, the sides of the mountdins are care- 
fully scanned by glasses for the goat. At the 
time of the year when we were in the mountains 
(Oct. 1) the goats were ranging above 6,000 feet. 
One of the goats killed by our party we have 
reason to believe was unusually large, measuring 
from nose to tail, 6 feet 2 inches. 
The trail over the Park Creek Pass for several 
hundred yards is across a glacier. On account 
of a light fall of snow the previous winter, the 
glacier had melted for the most part except at one 
point, where the bare ice, inclined like the roof of 

THE GOAT HUNTER. 
a house, made.traveling very difficult. The week 
before our visit, a pack horse slipped on the 
ice and was killed by falling off the glacier onto 
the rocks below. The glacier is to the left and 
below the figure in the photograph. OUDIN. 

Moving Pictures of Wild Animals. 
NEwsPAPER dispatches from the north tell of 
the departure for the Arctic of Mr. John R. 
Bradley, of New York, and Dr. Frederick A. 
Cook, the explorer. Mr. Bradley expects to hunt 
reindeer in Greenland, and in Baffin’s Bay to 
look for polar bears, walrus and other great 
game. He has with him a moving. picture 
machine with which he hopes to photograph 

polar animals. 
All the game laws of the United States and 
Canada, revised to date and now in force, are 
given in the Game Laws in Brief. See adv. 
Preparing for the Fall Shooting. 
In these days when shooting seasons are 
short and most people are very closely con- 
fined it is a hard matter to keep in good shooting 
practice. In shooting as in any other pursuit 
the more one does of it the more skillful one 
becomes, yet there are many people, especially 
antong middle-aged and elderly men, whese pro- 
fession or business take up so much of their 
time, that ‘they will perhaps not have more 
than six or seven days’ shooting during a 
whole year. Even if, during those six or seven 
days, they have many shots and toward the 
end of the time: get so that they shoot pretty 
well, it is evident that by the time another year 
has gone by without practice :they will have 
forgotten all they learned a year ago. 
he men who belong to gun clubs and who 
perhaps have several hours’ shooting during 
each week of the year are very likely to be- 
come and to continue good shots. i 
constantly in practice, they become steadily 
more and more familiar with the tool that they 
are handling and the eye and the muscles tend 
continually to act more and more together, If 
you used a pen for only a single week 
the year, the writing of a letter would become 
a terrible task for you, and your hand would 
probably be always unformed and bad. A 
Keeping 
during 

man 
who uses a hammer only a few times a year 
finds it a difficult matter to drive a nail straight 
into the wood. So it is with shooting. After 
a year of disuse the gun is taken up as a new 
tool, it comes up awkwardly, the gunner is 
likely to have to move his head around and lp 
and down in his efforts to look straight along 
the barrels, and by the time he has gotten his 
eye into the line of sight, the bird is probably 
too tar off to shoot at. There is .a way; how- 
ever, by which one may keep himself constant- 
ly at home with his gun and may have his eye 
and his muscles acting together in such a way 
that when he has an opportunity to shoot at 
birds he will find’ that he can put his gun on 
them with a reasonable assurance that he will 
shoot somewhere near them. The method is 
a very old one and has been recommended in 
books for nearly a century, but although so 
often recommended it is but little practiced. 
Partly because it requires five minutes of work 
every day. 
If, three or four months before the shooting 
season begins, you will put together your gun 
every day and will spend five minutes in an 
empty room throwing the gun up to your 
shoulder and pointing it at different objects in 
the room, you will find that in a comparatively 
short time you can so readily throw the gun up 
into the line of sight that nine times out of 
ten the gun will be directed at the object aimed 
at. After you have reached the point where you 
are quite sure of pointing the gun properly at 
the different objects in the room—as the corner 
of a picture, the top of a lamp chimney, the 
nail that supports a picture frame or any one 
of the half hundred small objects found in every 
room—it will be well for you to throw the gun 
up on some object and then to swing it as if 
you were following and overtaking a flying bird. 
Try to make a.mental calculation of how far 
the bird is from you, whether it is flying across 
or quartering from you, and then swing your 
gun toward this imaginary bird and a little be- 
yond it and imagine that you have pulled the 
trigger. Every motion of this sort that you 
make will count.in your favor when the shoot- 
ing season comes, and you will be astonished 
to find how much more ready you are with 
the gun than you would have supposed. 
I know an old man who every year before he 
goes off for his few days’ duck shooting, prac- 
tices in this way with his eleven-pound guns, 
and believes that it makes the very greatest 
difference in his shooting if he does it, and that 
in seasons when he does it he shoots very much 
better than’ in when he has omitted it. 
Another man of middle age who is perhaps 
one of the best shots at ruffed grouse in the 
United States and who. yet has very few op- 
portunities to go shooting—only a few days 
each year and sometimes a vear is skipped— 
keeps himself in admirable shooting form by 
seasons 

