American Big Game in Its Haunts - Various
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How hard the conditions are for the hunter no one would believe who has
not himself seen the country. In many places the hills are covered with
an almost impenetrable chaparral of scrub oak, buckthorn, greasewood,
manzanita, and deer-brush, in which the wary deer have taken refuge. In
and through these, guided sometimes by the tracks of the deer, or
encouraged by the presence of such tracks even if he cannot follow them,
up steep mountains, exposed to the heat of the sun, in dust, over rocks,
and without water, toils the hunter, who accounts himself lucky if, by
tramping scores of miles through this sort of impediment, he succeeds,
after days of toil, in killing his deer. Perhaps he has been without
fresh meat for a week or a fortnight, and often on short commons; is it
to be wondered at that when a shot offers he avails himself of the
opportunity even if it be a doe that he fires at? How can the deer
withstand such concentration of fury?
Dr. Bartlett, Forest Supervisor of the Trabuco and San Jacinto Reserves,
assured me that the number of licenses to hunt in those two reserves
issued annually exceeded, in his opinion, the entire number of deer
within their boundaries.
Everyone now is ready to admit that the extermination of the herd of
buffalo in the seventies was permitted by a crude, short-sighted policy
on our part as a nation, and should we of the early twentieth century
allow the remaining deer, elk, mountain sheep, and antelope, the last of
the great bears, and the innumerable small creatures of the wild, to be
crowded off the face of the earth, we should be depriving our children
and our children's children of a satisfaction and of a source of
interest which they would keenly regret. It would be well if we bore in
mind that we stand in a sort of fiduciary relation to the people who are
to come after us, so far as the wild portion of our land is concerned,
those few remote tracts still untarnished by man's craze to convert
everything in the world, or beneath the surface of the earth, into
dollars for his own immediate profit. He has the same short-sighted
policy in his hunting. He is content to gratify the impulse of the hour
without thought of those who are to spend their lives here when we have
led our brief careers and have gone to a well merited oblivion, to reap
our reward--
Heads without names, no more remembered.
Let us look this matter squarely in the face. We are the inheritors of
these domains. It is one of the most precious assets of posterity. Here,
year by year, in steadily increasing proportion, as wisdom more
prevails, will men take comfort; and as the comprehension of nature's
charms penetrates their minds will they find content. One chief
satisfaction that every American feels from the mere fact of his
nationality is the full assurance in his heart that any measure founded
on sound reason and prompted by generous impulse will receive, if not
immediate acceptance, at all events eventual recognition. In the end
justice will prevail. Thus, in this matter before us, it will naturally
take a few years for Congress to realize that a genuine demand exists
for the creation of these refuges in every State, East as well as West,
but the interest in wild creatures, and the desire for their protection,
if not a clamorous demand, is one almost universally felt. All men,
except a meager few of the dwarfed and strictly city-bred, partake of
this, and it is so much a sign of the times that no Sunday edition is
complete without its column devoted to wild creatures, their traits,
their habits, or their eccentricities. One could hardly name, outside of
money-making and politics, an interest which all men more generally
share.
Every lad is a born naturalist, and the true wisdom, as all sensible
people know, is to carry unfatigued through life the boy's power of
enjoyment, his freshness of perception, his alertness and zest. Where
the child's capacity for close observation survives into manhood,
supplemented by man's power of sustained attention, we have the typical
temperament of the lover of the woods, the mountains, and the wild--of
the naturalist in the sense that Thoreau was a naturalist, and many
another whose memory is cherished.
It is not impossible for a man to be deeply learned and still to lack
the power of awakening enthusiasm in others; as a matter of fact, to be
so heavily freighted with information that he forgets to nourish his own
finer faculties, his intuition, his sympathy, and his insight. One must
have lived for a time in the California mountains to realize how great
is the service to the men of his own and to succeeding generations of
him who more than any one else has illuminated the study of the Sierras
and of all our forest-clad mountains, our glacier-formed hills, valleys
and glades. Not by any means do all lovers of nature, however faithful
their purpose, come to its study with the endowment of John Muir. In him
we see the trained faculties of the close and accurate observer, joined
to the temperament of the poet--the capacity to think, to see and to
feel--and by the power of sustained and strong emotion to make us the
sharers of his joy. The beauty and the majesty of the forest to him
confer the same exaltation of mind, the same intellectual transport,
which the trained musician feels when listening to the celestial
harmonies of a great orchestra. In proportion as one conceives, or can
imagine, the fineness of the musical endowment of a Bach or Beethoven,
and in proportion as he can realize in his own mind the infinity of
training and preparation which has contributed to the development of
such a master musician--in such proportion may he comprehend and
appreciate the unusual qualities and achievements of a man like Muir. He
will realize to some degree--indistinctly to be sure, "seeing men as
trees walking"--the infinity of nice and accurate observation, the
discriminating choice of illustration, the infallible tact and unvarying
sureness with which he holds our interest, and the dominant poetic
insight into the nature of things, which are spread before the reader in
lavish abundance, in Muir's two books, "The Mountains of California" and
"Our National Parks." No other books, in this province, by living
author offer to the reader so rich a feast. Recognizing the fine
endowments of Thoreau, and how greatly all are his debtors, still we of
this generation are lucky in having one greater than he among us, if
wisdom of life and joyousness be the criterion of a sound and of a sane
philosophy. The time will come when this will be generally recognized.
The verdict of posterity is the right one, and the love of mankind is
given throughout the centuries to the men of insight, who possess the
rare mental endowment of sustained pleasure. Call it perpetual youth, or
joyousness, or what you like, the fact remains that the power of
sustained enthusiasm, lightness of heart and gaiety, with the faculty of
communicating to others that state of mind, is not one of the commonest
endowments of the human brain. It is one that confers great happiness to
others, and one to whose possessor we are under great obligation.
Compare the career of Thoreau, lonely, sad, and wedded to death--on the
one hand, with that of Muir, on the other--a lover of his kind, healthful,
inspiring to gaiety, superabounding in vitality. Naturalists of this type
of mind, and so faithful in perfecting the talents entrusted to them, do
not often appear in any age.
In the designations of refuges for deer, various questions are to be
considered, such as abundance of food, proximity to water, suitable
shelter, an exposure to their liking, for they may be permitted to have
whims in a matter of this sort, just as fully as Indians or the
residents of the city, when they deign to honor the country by their
presence. The deer feel that they are entitled to a certain remote
absence from molestation; moderate hunting will not entirely discourage
them--a dash of excitement might prove rather entertaining to a young
buck with a little recklessness in his temperament--but unless a deer be
clad in bullet-proof boiler iron, there are ranges in the reserves of
southern California where he would never dare to show his face during
the open season--regular rifle ranges. Where very severely hunted, like
the road agent, they "take to the brush," that is, hide in the
chaparral. This is almost impenetrable. It is very largely composed of
scrub oak, buckthorn, chamisal or greasewood, with a scattered growth of
wild lilac, wild cherry, etc. So far as the deer make this their
permanent home, there is no fear of their extermination. They may be
hunted effectively only with the most extreme caution. Not one person in
a thousand ever attains to the level of a still-hunter whose
accomplishment guarantees him success under such conditions. There are
men of this sort, but these are artists in their pursuit, whose
attainments, like those of the professional generally, are beyond
comparison with those of the ordinary amateur. To hunt successfully in
the chaparral, requires a special genius. One must have exhaustless
patience, tact trained by a lifetime of this sort of work, perseverance
incapable of discouragement, the silence of an Indian, and in this
phrase--when we are dealing with the skill of one who can make progress
without sound through the tangles of the dry and stiff California
chaparral--is involved an exercise of skill comparable only to the
fineness of touch of a Joachim or a St. Gaudens. This sort of hunter
marks one end of the scale of perfection; near the other and more
familiar extreme is found the individual of whom this story is told. He
was an Englishman and had just returned from a trip into the jungle of
India after big game, where he was accompanied by a guide, most expert
in his profession. One of the sportsman's friends asked this man how his
employer shot while on the trip. His reply was a model of tact and
concise statement: "He shot divinely, but God was very merciful to the
animals."
He who reads this brief account may naturally ask: What were the
practical results of your Western trip? Have you any ideas which may be
of value in the solution of this problem of Game Refuges? My primary
conception of the duties of a Game Expert, sent out by a Bureau of a
United States Department, was to approach this entire subject without
preconceived theories, with an open and unbiased mind; to see as many of
the various reserves as possible, under the guidance of the best men to
be had, and, increasing in this manner my knowledge by every available
means, to reserve the period of general consideration and of specific
recommendation until the whole preliminary reconnoissance should be
accomplished. The thing of prime importance is that the game expert
should see the reserves, and see them thoroughly. In a measure of such
scope what we desire is a well thought-out plan, based on knowledge of
the actual conditions, knowledge acquired in the field for the future
use of him who has acquired it. No report can transfer to the mind of
another an impression thus derived.
I had been but a short time engaged in this campaign of education before
it seemed wise to abandon the limitations imposed by traveling in
wagons; these held one to the valleys and to the dusty ways of
men. After that emancipation I lived in the haunts of the deer,
traveling with a pack train, and cruising in about the same altitude
affected by that most thoroughbred of all the conifers, the sugar
pine. Trust the genius of that tree, the pine, of all those that grow on
any of the mountains of North America, of finest power, beauty,
individuality, and distinction, to select the most attractive altitude
for its home, the daintiest air, the air fullest of strong vitality and
determination, whether man or deer is to participate in the virtues of
the favored zone. Many a time I went far beyond the region of the sugar
pine, and not infrequently cruised beneath its lower limits.
What that tree loves is a zone of about four thousand feet in width
extending from three to seven thousand feet above the level of the sea.
The upper reaches of this belt are where the deer range during the open
season of the summer when they must be afforded protection. These were
traversed with care, and seen with as much thoroughness as
possible. More of the reserves might easily have been visited in other
States, had I been content to do this in a sketchy and cursory manner,
but my idea was to derive the greatest possible amount of instruction
for a definite specific purpose, and it seemed to me for the
accomplishment of this end to be essential that one should spend a
sufficiently long time in each forest to receive a strong impression of
its own peculiar and distinctive nature, to get an idea into one's head,
which would stick, of its individuality, and, if I may say so, of its
personal features and idiosyncrasies. Not until more than three months
had been spent in the faithful execution of this plan was the problem
studied from any other view than that refuges were to be created of
considerable size, and that their lines of demarcation would naturally
be formed by something easily grasped by the eye, either rivers or the
crests of mountain ranges.
After the lapse of that time, looking at this from every point of view,
it became my opinion that the ideal solution was the creation of many
small refuges rather than the establishment of a few large ones. To be
effective, the size of these ranges should not be less than ten miles
square; if slightly larger, so much the better. Should, therefore,
these be of about four townships each, the best results would be
obtained. The bill for the creation of Game Refuges after it had passed
the Senate, and as amended by the Committee on Public Lands of the House
of Representatives, in the spring of 1903, read:
"The President of the United States is hereby authorized to designate
such areas in the public Forest Reserves, _not exceeding one in each
State or Territory_, as should, in his opinion, be set aside for the
protection of game animals, birds, and fish, and be recognized as a
breeding place therefor."
If this bill were to become law in its present form, the object for
which it was created would be largely defeated. One may easily overlook
the fact that an area corresponding to that of California would, on the
Atlantic Coast, extend from Newport, R. I., to Charleston, S. C. It
embraces communities and interests in many respects as widely separated
as those of New England and the Atlantic Southern States. Were one Game
Refuge only to be created in the State of California, unless it included
practically the whole of the reserves south of Tehachapi, protection
would not be afforded to the different species of large a constantly
increasing population, and an ever-increasing interest in big-game
hunting. The designation of one Game Refuge in the Sierra Reserve would
practically not reduce the slaughter of deer in this whole vast region
of southern California. Were the single Game Refuge, which might under
the law be designated, to be placed in southern California, even
although it embraced the entire area of the seven southern reserves, it
would not aid to any great extent in preventing the extinction of game
in the region of the Sierra Reserve, of the Stanislaus Reserve, or of
the great reserves which are doubtless soon to be created in the
northern half of the State. A bill so conceived would not fulfill the
purpose of its creation.
[Illustration: TEMISKAMING MOOSE.]
There are just as cogent reasons of a positive nature why many small
refuges are preferable to a few large ones. It is said that in the
vicinity of George Vanderbilt's game preserves at Biltmore, North
Carolina, deer, when started by dogs even fifteen or twenty miles away,
will seek shelter within the limits of that protected forest, knowing
perfectly well that once within its bounds they will not be
disturbed. The same may be observed in the vicinity of the Yellowstone
National Park; the bears, for instance, a canny folk, and shrewd to read
the signs of the times, seem to be well aware that they are not to be
disturbed near the hotels, and they show themselves at such places
without fear; at the same time that outside the Park (and when the early
snow is on the ground their tracks are often observed going both out and
in) these same beasts are very shy indeed. The hunter soon discovers
that it is with the greatest difficulty that one ever sees them at all
outside of the bounds of the Park. Bears, as well as deer, adapt
themselves to the exigencies of the situation; the grizzly, since the
white man stole from him and the Indian the whole face of the earth, has
become a night-ranging instead of a diurnal creature. The deer, we may
safely rest assured, makes quite as close a study of humans as man does
of the deer. It is a question of life and death with them that they
should understand him and his methods. Both the deer and the hunters
would profit by the widest possible distribution of these protected
areas. Each section of the State is entitled to the benefit to be
derived from their presence in its vicinity. Moreover, and I believe
that this is a consideration of no slight moment, the creation of many
small refuges, not too close together, would obviate one great
difficulty which threatens to wreck the entire scheme. There have
appeared signs of opposition in certain quarters to the creation in the
various reserves of game refuges by Federal power on the ground that
this would be to surrender to the Government at Washington authority
which should be solely exercised by the State. In a certain sense it is
the old issue of State rights. Where this feeling exists it is adhered
to with extraordinary tenacity, and it is as catching as the measles;
just so soon as one State takes this stand, another is liable to raise
the same issue. They are jealous of any power except their own which
would close from hunting to their citizens considerable portions of the
forest reserves within the confines of the State. Their claim is that by
an abuse of such delegated power, a President of the United States
might, if so inclined, shut out the citizens from hunting at all in the
forest reserves of their own State. This argument is not an easy one to
wave aside. Should, however, the size of the individual refuges be
limited to four townships each, and the minimum distance between such
refuges be defined, one grave objection to these refuges would be
overcome, and the citizens of the various States would cooperate with
Federal authority to accomplish that which the sentiment at home in many
instances is not at present sufficiently enlightened to demand, and
which by reason of party differences the State legislatures are
powerless to effect.
[Illustration: TEMISKAMING MOOSE.]
Having elaborated in one's mind the idea that a Game Refuge, in order to
be a success, should be about ten or twelve miles square, the question
arises, how near are these to be placed to one another? If they are
established at the beginning, not less than twenty or twenty-five miles
from each other, it seems to me that the exigencies of the situation
would be met. It is not our purpose, in creating them, seriously to
interfere with the privileges of hunters adjoining the forests where
they are established. On the contrary, all that is wished is to
preserve the present number of the deer, or to allow them slightly to
increase. The system of game refuges of the size indicated, would, I
believe, accomplish this end. In all probability, at the beginning of
the open season, the deer would be distributed with a considerable
degree of uniformity throughout the reserve, outside of the game refuges
as well as within. They would go, of course, where the food and
conditions suited them. As the hunting season opened, and the game, in a
double sense, become more lively, the deer would naturally seek shelter
where they could find it. Since this, with them, would be a question
literally of vital interest, their education would progress rapidly,
particularly that of the wary old bucks, experienced in danger which
they had survived in the past simply because their bump of caution was
well developed, these would soon realize that they were safe within the
bounds of a certain tract--that there the sound of the rifle was never
heard, that there far less frequently they ran across the hateful scent
of their enemies, and for some mysterious reason were left to their own
devices. When once this idea has found firm lodgment in the head of an
astute deer, the very first thing that he will do will be to get into an
asylum of this sort, and to stay there; if he has any business to
transact beyond its boundaries, exactly as an Indian would do in similar
circumstances, he will delegate the same to a young buck who is on his
promotion, and has his reputation to make, and who possesses the
untarnished courage of ignorance and youth. It seems to me that this
system of small refuges would have the merit of fairness both to the
hunters and to the deer, and it is respectfully submitted to the
legislators of the United States. This may seem one of the simplest of
solutions, and hardly worth a summer's cruise to discover. It may prove
that this is not the first occasion when the simplest solution is the
best. Because a thing is simple it is not always the case, however,
that it finds the most ready acceptance. If, in my humble capacity of
public service, I am the indirect means of this being accomplished, I
shall feel that my summer's work was not altogether in vain.
_Alden Sampson_.
[Illustration: TEMISKAMING MOOSE.]
Temiskaming Moose
The accompanying photographs of moose were taken about the middle of
July, 1902, on the Montreal river, which flows from the Ontario side
into Lake Temiskaming.
A number of snap shots were obtained during the three days' stay in this
vicinity, but the others were at longer range and the animals appear
very small in the negative.
As is well known, during the hot summer months the moose are often to be
found feeding on the lily pads or cooling themselves in the water, being
driven from the bush where there are heat, mosquitoes and flies.
Not having been shot at nor hunted, all the moose at this time seemed
rather easy to approach. Two of these pictures are of one bull, and the
other two of one cow, the two animals taken on different occasions. I
got three snaps of each before they were too far away. When first
sighted, each was standing nibbling at the lily pads, and the final
spurt in the canoe was made in each case while the animal stood with
head clear under the water, feeding at the bottom. The distance of each
of the first photographs taken was from 45 to 55 feet.
_Paul J. Dashiell._
[Illustration: A KAHRIGUR TIGER.]
Two Trophies from India
In the early part of March, 1898, my friend, Mr. E. Townsend Irvin, and
I arrived at the bungalow of Mr. Younghusband, who was Commissioner of
the Province of Raipur, in Central India. Mr. Younghusband very kindly
gave us a letter to his neighbor, the Rajah of Kahrigur, who furnished
us with shikaris, beaters, bullock carts, two ponies and an elephant. We
had varied success the first three weeks, killing a bear, several
nilghai, wild boar and deer.
One afternoon our beaters stationed themselves on three sides of a rocky
hill and my friend and I were placed at the open end some two hundred
yards apart. The beaters had hardly begun to beat their tom toms and
yell, when a roar came from the brow of the hill, and presently a large
tiger came out from some bushes at the foot. He came cantering along in
a clumsy fashion over an open space, affording us an excellent shot, and
when he was broadside on we both fired, breaking his back. He could not
move his hind legs, but stood up on his front paws. Approaching closer,
we shot him in a vital spot.
The natives consider the death of a tiger cause for general rejoicing,
and forming a triumphal procession amid a turmoil such as only Indian
beaters can make, they carried the dead tiger to camp.
One morning word was brought to our camp, at a place called Bernara,
that a tiger had killed a buffalo, some seven miles away. The natives
had built a bamboo platform, called _machan_, in a tree by the
kill, and we stationed ourselves on this in the late afternoon. Contrary
to custom, the tiger did not come back to his kill until after the sun
had set. The night was cloudy and very dark, and although several times
we distinctly heard the tiger eating the buffalo, we could not see
it. At about midnight we were extremely stiff, and not hearing any
sound, we returned to our temporary camp; but on the advice of an old
shikari I returned with him to the _machan_ to wait until
daylight. Being tired, I fell asleep, but an hour before dawn the Hindu
woke me, as the clouds had cleared away and the moon was shining
brightly. I heard a munching sound, and could dimly discern a yellow
form by the buffalo, and taking a long aim I fired both barrels of my
rifle. I heard nothing except the scuttling off of the hyenas and
jackals that had been attracted by the dead buffalo, so I slept again
until daylight, when, to my surprise, I saw a dead leopard by the
buffalo. He had come to the kill after the tiger had finished his meal.