hunter's journal april issue

HUNTER’S JOURNALHunting Stories From � e Early 1900’s

April/May 2010 - $4.95

NEW!!! Continued StoryFur Sign... page 3

Is It Really ThatFunny...Find Out On Page 33

April/May 2010

Information on the Woodcockas seen on the cover of this issue...

The woodcocks are a group of seven or eight very similar living species of wading birds in the genus Scolopax. Only two woodcocks are widespread, the others being localized island endemics. Most are found in the Northern Hemisphere but a few range into the Wallacea. Their closest relatives are the typical snipes of the genus Gallinago.

Woodcocks have stocky bodies, cryptic brown and blackish plum-age and long slender bills. Their eyes are located on the sides of their heads, which gives them 360° vision. Unlike in most birds, the tip of the bill’s upper mandible is flexible.

As their common name implies, the woodcocks are woodland birds. They feed at night or in the evenings, searching for inverte-brates in soft ground with their long bills. This habit and their unob-trusive plumage makes it difficult to see them when they are resting in the day. Most have distinctive displays known as “roding”, usually given at dawn or dusk.

All woodcocks are popular gamebirds; the island endemic species are often quite rare already due to overhunting. The pin feathers of the woodcock are much esteemed as brushtips by artists, who use them for fine painting work. The pin feather is the most recently formed feather and found at the joint in the middle of the wing.

EDITOR’S CORNERPAGE 1

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April/May 2010PAGE 2

HUNTER’S JOURNALMAGAZINE

Features OVER PAINTING BY NED SMITH (“Sunset Woodcock”)

Mr. Smith has long been admired for his love for the outdoors and possessing the talent of placing his heart’s passion on canvas.

FUR SIGN - NEW!!! (CONTINUED STORY)

MONARCH OF RAM MOUNTAIN Here’s something pretty special from a brand- New writer. A long and exciting account of a big game hunt., In british columbia that makes you feel you’ve been in the author’s boots from start to finish. Start reading, and you’ll see exactly what we mean!

ON A LIGHTER NOTE Need A Good Laugh!!! Check “The Funnies”

CURRENT NEWS Read interesting articles of what’s happening in the world of hunting

GETTING TO KNOW HER - by Mike Ingold. Mike tells of his guided turkey hunt in Florida and his preparation for just the right equipment.

RAINBOW REUNION - There I was, perched on a narrow stringpiece, fighting a rod-bending lunker of a trout that had made up its mind to go elsewhere - fast

MY DORY IS A SWEETHEART - Here’s an article, with a “different” flavor, about a boat that’s different too. A two-man eighteen-footer, it’s equipped with outboard, sails, and oars, and the owner finds it just the thing for exciting seashore sport – tying into tuna and a 1,200-pound turtle included!

5 ARROWS 4 LIONS - The best of riflemen will have to do well just to equal the mark these archers set in Utah’s cat country.

BOTTLE-FED BLOCK BUSTER - This pet raccoon was cute, but the neighbors didn’t appreciate his fine points.

THE TALLOW POSTSCRIPT - Her father’s secret lay hidden on that lofty peak. And how could I resist when she challenged me to climb it with her?

JIM HOYLE’S PHANTOM - He shot tigers in China and brown bears in Alaska, but life held no greater thrills than his boyhood hunts for a legendary coon.

RECIPES / CLASSIFIEDS

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April/May 2010 PAGE 3

CHAPtEr IThe fi re had settled to a bed of darkening embers, but

an occasional curling breeze stole across the forest fl oor and fanned it to a mass of glowing coals topped by a fi t-ful blaze that cast grotesque shadows on the trees. Two forms showed lumpily beneath the canvas tarp of a bed roll spread near the night fi re. A gripping chill tightened down as the fi re died out. One of the shapes stirred uneasily in the blankets and resolved itself into a boy, his head propped on one arm as he peered into the black shadows under the trees. An Airedale lift-ed his head from the edge of the bed tarp, thumped his bobbed tail drowsily and resumed his nap.

“You asleep, Buck-skin?” the boy whispered.

A second boy thrust his head from the blan-kets.

“No; not quite,” he an-swered. “You notice it’s getting cold, Rawhide?”

“Sort of,” Rawhide confessed. “Who’d have guessed at the amount of wood it takes to keep a fi re all night?”

This was the fi rst night out and the newness of it all- the glamour of a dream transformed to re-ality, an outfi t bought and paid for, the prospect of a full year stretching ahead- all this was not conduc-tive to peaceful slumber. Buckskin slept at last but Rawhide gazed wide-eyed into the night. A great horned owl hooted twice from a tim-bered slope and a loon sent up its demented scream from a near-by lake. There were occasional dull thuds in the

timber as ripe walnuts, loosened by the frost, dropped to the ground with a pulpy smash of rotting hulls.

Three months before the boy had not been known as Rawhide, but as Bob Tanner, who in all his sixteen years had never been beyond earshot of the throbbing rumble of congested city traffi c, the clatter of surface cars and the rattling clang of elevated trains. None had known

him as Rawhide, the free lance of the open, for it was only on those nights when the stale air of poorly ventilated rooms rendered him sleepless that his mind had fl oat-ed afi eld. Then he had straddled a horse and ca-reened across the prairies, paddled a canoe through the watery highways of the wilderness and pi-loted it through frothing rapids or packed bales of rare furs from the winter woods. But when the gray city mornings had come around after these restless nights, he had been mere Bob Tanner of the tenements, with his stoop and his contracted chest gained from toiling long hours over an acid vat in order to contribute his bit toward the support of the overlarge family whose squalid quarters he shared, relatives of the mother he could not re-member.

Rawhide nestled clos-er in his blankets, exult-

ing in the thought that there would be no more of those city mornings, after nights of fancy, when he should face the cold reality of Bob Tanner’s daily lot. Now he was Rawhide in fact as well as fancy, a rover of the

Fur SignBy Hal G. Evarts

Battler rose and proceeded to the edge of the fi relit space.


wilderness. Soon he would roll from his blankets in the crisp cool of an autumn dawn, breakfast and pack for a long day on the trail. Sleep claimed him with this last comforting thought.

The restless prowling of the Airedale roused him with the first streak of rose in the east. There was a heavy white frost on the grass. A dozen crows shat-tered the quiet of the early morning as Rawhide drew on his clothes. He reached beneath the bed tarp and pro-duced a handful of shavings and a few dry sticks stored there the previous evening to facilitate the kindling of the morning cook-fire in case of unexpected storms dur-ing the night. Buckskin repaired to a near-by spring for water.

Both boys splashed faces and hands in a pan of the icy spring water before setting about the preparation of the morning meal. Rawhide stirred up a stiff batter of flour and water, salt and baking powder, then balanced a frying-pan on the fire. A bucket of coffee simmered and at last foamed to a boil as the flames curled round the little tin pail. Rawhide dropped a lump of lard in the frying-pan. When the grease had melted and the bot-tom of the skillet was smoking hot, he poured in a por-tion of the flapjack batter. Small flecks of white wood ash curled over the edge of the skillet and settled on the fresh dough but turned black as they absorbed the moisture. The top of the flapjack was liberally sprinkled with ashes.

“She’s ready to turn,” Rawhide pronounced.He shook the skillet gently to loosen the flap jack,

and with a little forward and upward flip of his wrist the skillet-bread was propelled a few inches above the pan, turned in mid-air and settled back with a hiss on the uncooked side.

Buckskin eyed the crisp brown side now exposed to view and smacked his lips hungrily.

“You’re the best camp cook ever,” he stated posi-tively.

Rawhide lifted his head and rubbed his streaming eyes.

“Don’t make any difference what side of the fire you move to,” he said. “The wind veers round to follow you and blow smoke in your eyes. But I expect this fryin’-pan bread will go pretty good — aside from a handful of ashes.”

The flapjack was halved and the two adventurers sat cross-legged on the ground, each washing down his por-tion with steaming coffee while a second sheet of batter sizzled in the skillet. The Airedale rested with his head flat between his paws and eyed the banqueters wistfully. Whenever he caught the eye of either boy he raised his head and jerked his stumped tail in supplication. He gave one soft bark to gain their attention.

“Your turn will come, Battler,” Rawhide announced. “I’ll spoil one likely and that will go to you.”

Some of the flapjacks were scorched on one side. All were well seasoned with wood ashes and once Rawhide misgauged his toss and caught the flapjack on edge on its return to the frying-pan. This lumpy ruin was tossed to Battler and the Airedale bolted the morsel with evi-dent relish.

“I’ll go run in the horse herd while you get ready to pack,” Buckskin volunteered, when the dishes had been washed.

Rawhide strapped the bed roll and gathered all loose articles into compact bundles. He had finished by the time Buckskin returned with a little bay horse.

The harness consisted of a band that circled the po-ny’s body behind the shoulders, while a second, heavily padded, served as a breast strap was buckled to the first on either side. The tips of two long slender poles were thrust through loops fashioned in the sides of the back-strap and lashed firmly in place, so that the entire pull would be taken up by the padded strap that crossed the breast.

An hour later a strange cavalcade filed from the tim-ber and struck out across the rolling grassland of the Flint Hills. Rawhide chose the route and held the lead rope of Warrior, the little bay horse. Warrior was bur-dened with perhaps the first Indian litter that had tra-versed the Flint Hills in five decades. The ends of the poles trailed well out behind him and upon this primi-tive but serviceable conveyance the bulk of the outfit was firmly lashed.

Buckskin followed, leading Battler, and the Airedale was similarly burdened by a tiny litter, to his very evi-dent disgust. This was but his second day in the capacity of a beast of burden, and if left to follow his own prefer-ences he would have elected to range far to either side and hunt en route. Rawhide shouldered a shotgun as he led the way while Buckskin carried a twenty-two rifle.

The course of this strange cavalcade led down-coun-try between two streams, the north and south forks of the Clearwater. Off to the right the Flint Hills dipped away to the bottom of the North Fork. Hills rose tier upon tier on the far side of the South Fork, their slopes clothed with hardwood and showing now in a whirl of flaming color where autumn frost had plied its magic paintbrush and splashed the landscape with a thousand blazing hues.

The Forks converged three miles below and a patch of heavy timber marked the flat at the confluence. Be-yond the Forks the bottoms widened out into hay mead-ows that shot their tongues back into the breaks of the Flint Hills flanking the Clearwater. The boys hastened down the last grassy slope and struck the timber at the

April/May 2010

Forks, the prospective site of their winter trapping camp. Before noon the camp was pitched. A tent eight feet

by ten stood under a giant elm mid-way between the two streams, the bed roll spread in one corner and the slen-der stock of utensils and supplies stored inside. The two adventurers viewed their work with pride, the thrill of ownership swelling high within them.

“We’d better start stringing out our traps,” Buckskin suggested. “The sooner we begin catching fur, the more money we’ll have in the spring.”

Rawhide dumped ten small steel traps from a burlap sack. Their hopes for the future centered around those little steel contrivances.

Battler left off tunneling under a down-log and fol-lowed them as they set off through the timber.

“Where will we make the first set? “ Buckskin in-quired.

“We’ll have to locate fur sign first,” Rawhide stated. “We’ll likely find some soon. Then we’ll make a set.”

Their speech savored of the jargon of the trap line, yet neither boy had ever before set a trap. The partners were up against the first real trial of their venture.

“Muskrats live in the water,” Buckskin asserted. “It might be a good plan to follow the creek.”

Two hours later they returned to camp and the traps were all set. Three had been placed on the crest of the creek bank at points where claw marks testified that rats used this route of exit from their watery abode. Buck-skin had killed a cottontail, and the head and entrails had been suspended from a low-hanging limb and a trap set on the ground some two feet below. The rest of the traps had been placed in hollow trees and covered light-ly with wood rot.

That night the partners sat on either side of a fire that blazed before the tent. The arms of both boys were stained a deep brown to the elbows but three bushels of hulled walnuts, spread on the ground to dry, explained this strange discoloration. All through the afternoon they had been engaged in pounding the hulls from fallen nuts and packing them into camp.

“They’re worth a dollar a bushel,” Rawhide com-mented. “Maybe more. We ought to gather twenty bush-els within walking range of camp. That will buy our grub for the next two months.”

“I wonder if there’s anything in the traps,” Buckskin said, after a long silence. “We ought to make a good catch of fur to-night. I like it out here fine — and I hope we can make it through and not have to go back.”

For Buckskin too was a product of the tenements. Not long since he had been Wallace Porter, ringleader of a corner gang and known as Wally to his intimates. The same welfare society had sent the two waifs into the country for a month and they had worked for their

board on adjoining farms. Together they had planned to stay on after the month was up. They had worked on through the summer and the little money they had earned had sufficed to buy the outfit. Warrior was an old pony and had been bought for a ten-dollar bill. The tent, the pump gun, rifle and utensils had been picked up here and there at figures greatly reduced from their original cost. There was sufficient food supply for a month and a cash surplus of two dollars and a dime in camp.

“We won’t go back,” Rawhide asserted sturdily. “We’ll manage to weather it through some way or an-other.”

Battler suddenly lifted his head from between his paws and sniffed the wind. A curling tongue of wood smoke assailed his nostrils and he sneezed, then rose and proceeded to the edge of the firelit space and gazed off into the black shadows under the trees. The hackle fur bristled into a roach along his spine and a rumble sounded deep in his throat but was suppressed. It was not the Airedale’s way to rage hysterically except at the finish of a hunt. He was a quiet, businesslike dog, a si-lent trailer, and when he worked out a track he made no sound to warn the intended prey of approach till within striking distance; then loosed his fighting bellow and rushed his quarry. When Battler hunted, there was no such ringing music as filled the night when a bay-ing hound ran a track in the hills. Battler disappeared in the night and a moment there-after his savage snarls issued from the timber. A man’s voice angrily ordered him off. This startled both boys and a vague suspicion of the stranger crept into their minds. Why this silent approach, unless with the purpose of spying on their camp?

“You Battler! Come here!” Buckskin commanded. “Get on in here! You!”

They stepped outside the circle of light cast by the fire, and after their pupils became re-adjusted to the darkness they could make out the form of a man a few yards away through the trees.

“Call off this dog,” he ordered. “He gave me a start, pouncing out on me thataway.”

Battler withdrew under the combined urging of both boys but it was evident that this retreat was against the Airedale’s will and he eyed the stranger with thinly veiled hostility when he came to the fire.

“I wore rubber boots so’s I could wade across to your camp,” the man volunteered, as he sat on a down-log and held out his hands toward the heat of the fire. “Them rubber soles don’t give off much noise so I guess the dog didn’t hear me till I was coming up the near bank of the creek.”

He tapped one knee to indicate the hip boots with which he was shod.

PAGE 7


“My name is Reese Neil,” he went on. “I’m camped down below. You’re the boys Snyder and Brown was telling me about, likely — the fellows they give permis-sion to trap on their leases.”

Rawhide nodded.“That’s us,” he agreed.“This is a big country through here,” Neil observed.

“There’s room for us all. I’m trapping a little myself.”The country for twenty miles around was utilized

mainly for pasture. The stockmen cut over the grassy bottoms for hay rather than rip up the scattered flats with a plow and seed them to crops. Brown had nine sections under fence, his holdings extending some four miles downstream from the forks. Snyder held a simi-lar block stretching up country. The hills above this last lease were mostly timber holdings or Government land.

“Yes; there’s plenty of room,” Rawhide agreed. “There’s several hundred sections of Flint Hill country to trap.”

“That’s what I was just going to say,” Neil announced. “Our minds work the same. Snyder and Brown told me they’d give you the right to trap on their leases and that I’d better camp somewheres else. I was just thinking that we all might as well get together on that. I’ll trap the leases if it comes handy to me and you trap outside whenever the notion takes hold. That way we can any of us range the whole country. What do you say?”

Each boy found Neil’s personality unprepossessing to an extreme. His stubby beard was caked with dirt, his clothing equally disreputable, and his small ferrety eyes shifted constantly as if it tired him to fix them on any one object for more than a second at a time.

“I hardly know,” Rawhide hesitated. “It sounds all right and we want to play square. But of course we couldn’t give you the right to trap the leases unless we’d see Brown and Snyder first. You see how it is.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” Neil returned easily. “Neither of them cares a snap. But of course you’re dead right to tell them. Always play open and square. That’s my way. I’ll maybe throw out a few traps up in here and then any time you see Brown or Snyder you can tell them about our arrangement.”

“ No, I expect we’d better let things rest as they are,” Buckskin decided. “At least till after we see Mr. Sny-der. I worked on his home place during the summer and know him right well. Whatever he says goes with me. But up till then you’d better not trap on the leases.”

Neil nodded, apparently undisturbed by this flat re-fusal.

“I hear talk that you all are trapping to make a stake to go to Wyoming and homestead,” he said.

“Maybe,” Rawhide confessed. “But not for a year or two yet. That country is a long way from here and we

may never get started.” “No reason,” Neil stated. “There’s land a-plenty out

there. But I’d head out pretty soon before the best is picked over. I’ve got relatives out around Two Buttes. I’m headed for there myself before long.”

For an hour he entertained them with tales of the trap line and of hunts for big game in western hills. Their original suspicions lulled and forgotten under the magic interest he wove around the country both longed to see. At last Neil rose and stretched.

“I’m camped two mile below Brown’s line fence, south side of the creek,” he said. “Drop down and pay me a visit.”

After his departure they sat and gazed into the em-bers of the dying fire.

“Maybe he isn’t so bad,” Buckskin remarked after a while.

“No. But his boots were dry when he came to the fire,” Rawhide stated. “He said he’d just waded out of the creek. He must have been standing this side of it for ten minutes, at least, or the water would have showed on his boots.”

“Then he lied,” Buckskin said. “ He was trying to hang round and get a line on our camp. But it don’t mat-ter much. He can’t trap the leases without we say the word.”

The boys sought their bed roll and a vast content filled their souls. They had planned big plans for the future and these centered round the ten traps strung out through the timber. Their hopes might have run less high if they had realized that they had made the mis-takes common to beginners; that their trap line as now set would not be apt to yield one catch in a month. But the wonder of this first night in camp was not clouded by knowledge of these flaws in their reckoning.

The shadows of the fire flickered across the walls of the tent. It was a good old world. They were on their own, and out of all humanity there was not one single soul to waste more than a casual thought as to their whereabouts or to feel one pang of regret if they should never again return to the city slum from which they sprang. It was up to them. Battler bedded down in the door of the tent as the fire died down, and they slept to dream of rich harvests of fur on the morrow.

CHAPtEr IIOld Jack Kennedy rode through the north pasture and

leaned from his saddle to inspect some strange marks. His mind flashed back nearly a half century into the past to a time when similar marks would have given rise to serious reflections.

“Looks for all the world like the drag of an Indian litter,” he told the horse. “But I reckon not.”

April/May 2010

He followed the trail to a bare spot and dismounted to study the sign. The hoofprints of a horse showed be-tween the marks of dragging poles.

“ Now there’s been some sort of a gypsy outfit trail-ing through here for a fact,” he said. “That’s the first time I’ve seen the marks of a litter drag in many a moon—close onto forty years.”

He swung to the saddle and followed the trail out of sheer curiosity. It led to the little tent pitched at the forks of the Clearwater. The Airedale was off on a hunt and the two boys had no warning of his approach till a voice hailed them from outside.

They emerged from the tent to find a stranger sit-ting his horse in their dooryard. He seemed the incar-nation of the great outdoors as Rawhide had pictured it. He wore a battered slouch hat, a leather vest, and overalls with the legs tucked into high-heeled riding boots. The drooping white mustache showed in marked relief against the weathered mahogany background of his face.

Rawhide had read that distances were far in wilder-ness, that the traveler was ever hungry. Custom de-manded that the wayfaring stranger should be fed. That was the courtesy of the open as Rawhide understood it.

“Get down, stranger,” he said. “Get down and eat. I’ll start cooking up a bite.”

The maze of sun wrinkles deepened round Kenne-dy’s keen old blue eyes but he repressed the smile that struggled to break through.

“Don’t bother, boys,” he said. “I’ve fed. But I’ll step off and visit round for a spell. It appears likely we’re going to be neighbors for the winter. I’m feeding stock and ridin’ fence for Snyder and Brown. They was tell-ing me a pair of trappers was going to work the Forks. My shack is up the North Fork about four mile.”

Rawhide essayed introductions.“My name is Rawhide,” he volunteered. “And my

friend here goes by the name of Buckskin. We’re sure glad to have you drop in.”

The sun wrinkles deepened again at these fanciful titles but the old man answered gravely enough.

“And mine is Kennedy,” he informed. “ I’m right glad to have you folks for neighbors. We’ll have to visit back and forth.”

He sat on a down-log near the tent and fired up his pipe. Battler came into camp and sniffed the newcomer critically, then rested his jaws on the stranger’s knee and looked up into his face as Kennedy scratched his head.

“How’s the luck?” Kennedy queried. “I expect you’re catching fur a-plenty.”

“Not any great quantity,” Rawhide confessed. “Fur

seems rather scarce.”“Why, man, this country is just all littered up with fur

sign,” Kennedy objected. “I’ve been noticing. Fur has been way down for the last few seasons and the Forks haven’t been trapped in two years. You ought to clean up a nice little stake this winter.”

“Then why haven’t we made a catch in three rounds of the trap line?” Buckskin asked. “Not one single pelt.”

Kennedy failed to answer this question direct. Dur-ing his ride through the timbered flat he had discovered two traps set in hollows, another on the bare earth of the creek bank. He rambled on about a variety of subjects and drew the partners out to talk about themselves. Ken-nedy sensed what this venture meant to these two waifs without home or parents. He knew, too, that if left to their devices they could not make enough to keep grub in camp even in a land where fur was plentiful. Those trap sets had branded them as raw novices. He could start them right if they would heed his suggestions. Ken-nedy rose and knocked the ashes from his pipe.

“I’ll be sauntering on back,” he said. “I’ve been pinching toes and stretching pelts for the best part of fif-ty years. If there’s anything I can tell you don’t hesitate to ask. Now if you find a few spare hours you might drop round and look my shack over some time to-morrow.”

Battler followed Kennedy’s horse a few hundred yards through the timber and stood looking after him. A few nights past he had also followed Reese Neil when he departed from camp, but on that occasion the Airedale had kept his distance from the man, plainly evidencing his dislike by his stiff, aloof manner and the half-raised hackle fur on the point of his shoulders.

“You can always count on an Airedale’s judgment,” Rawhide asserted. “He likes Kennedy fine but he didn’t care much for Reese Neil.”

“Then he and I are agreed,” Buckskin commented. “Neither did I.”

The boys showed up at Kennedy’s cabin soon after breakfast on the following day. This was conclusive evidence that they had accepted his proffer of friendly counsel as to the ways of the trap line.

“What about this fellow Neil?” Rawhide asked after a while. “He wants to trap the leases and let us trap out-side. That way we can any of us trap where we please.”

“You can trap wherever you please right now,” Ken-nedy stated. “And Neil can’t work the leases because Snyder and Brown won’t let any one cut in on you boys unless you say the word. You’d be giving him the best end of deal. I’d keep him off. He’s got plenty country to trap without bothering you. Then you can tell him to take all the country below Brown’s line fence while you boys work from there up.”

PAGE 9

April/May 2010

Kennedy produced a thin, tapering board.“This is a rat board,” he said. “If I’m going to show

you the game we might as well start at the first. You mustn’t slit fur open down the middle like you peel the hide from a cow. It’s got to be cased, pulled off like you’d pull off a sock wrong side out, and stretched on a casing board. You’ll need stretchers a-plenty, once you start knocking out fur. I’ve marked the measurements out on this pattern. That’s for big rats. You’ll have to make a sprinkling of boards a half inch smaller through-out.”

The pattern was made from quarter-inch stuff. It was twenty inches long and six inches across at the base, ta-pering almost imperceptibly to a width of five and a half inches at the point where the shoulders would come. From this point the board was sloped more abruptly to a blunt rounded end for the nose of the pelt. The patterns for opossum and skunk were shaped much the same, a trifle more peaked at the noses and the measurements larger throughout, the boards being thirty inches long, eight across the base and six and a half at the shoulders. For small or medium pelts these could be scaled down a half-inch for each smaller hide. The stretcher for civet and mink was made in two parts; a pair of two-inch strips of thin board, each tapered very slightly on one side and rounded off at the nose. A hide cased on these could be stretched very long and almost the same width from tail to nose, a wedge inserted between the two halves of the pattern to take up the slack and to facilitate the removal of the board after the pelt had been cured.

“Now you’ll want to amplify your outfit a little,” Kennedy said. “It’s a dandy as far as it goes. But you want a hundred traps instead of ten. Then each of you can cover a separate route, once you’re lined out. Trap-ping is like anything else. You have to work hard at your job to make good. You’ll want a little stove in that tent. Outside cooking is alright in weather like this, or any time in a pinch, but it’s miserable business to crawl out in the morning in two foot of fresh snow and get breakfast with the water dripping down your neck and into the frying-pan, day after day. Lots of your trapping will be creek or marsh work, so you’ll both need hip boots. I guess that will cover the layout.”

“But how can we get all that with only two dollars between the pair of us?” Rawhide asked. “It just can’t be done.”

“Sounds sort of staggering,” Kennedy admitted. “But it won’t require much of an outlay. Those walnuts of yours ought nearly to cover the cost. You boys pounce onto collecting a few more bushels of nuts. I’ve got to make a trip to town for supplies and I’ll bring a wagon down to the Forks on the way and haul the nuts into market. A little later I’ll pitch a teepee down at your

camp. Right now it’s handy to live up here while I’m working at Snyder’s hill fences. When the storms hit and the grass is snowed under, the stock will drift down below the Forks to the bottoms where we put up the hay. Then I’ll have to stay down there and feed. You better take up what traps you’ve got out. We’ll throw out a line when the time comes but the fur won’t be prime for another ten days.”

“Every month with an R,” Rawhide said. “That’s what I’ve heard; and this is October. Neil

came up to see us last night after you left. He’s already caught two hundred pelts.”

“Then that settles Neil’s case right off,” Kennedy stated. “Fur don’t prime up in this country till some time in November. If Neil has collected two hundred pelts up to date he’s a sooner. No wonder he wants to trap the Forks. He’s cleaned the best fur out of his own territory before it was prime and now he wants to trap yours. A sooner is always a hog. Those pelts won’t bring a third what they would if caught two weeks later on. A good trapper never works his country too close but leaves plenty of fur-critters to raise another crop for next year. We’ll keep this man Neil off the leases. Seems like I’ve cut his trail somewheres before but I can’t just recollect. There’s all kinds of trappers, the most part of them shift-less, but a sooner’s the worst of the lot.”

Just ten days later the two boys sat in the tent and waited for Kennedy to come. The air was crisp outside but the heat of the stove kept the tent snug and warm. The stove was a simple contrivance of sheet steel with no floor, the bare earth forming the bottom of the fire box. It was so constructed that the heat was sucked back around the oven. The outfit stood complete and Rawhide sighed with satisfaction as he viewed it. A hundred traps hung on pegs driven into the trunk of the big elm. A sol-id homemade grub chest was generously stocked with food. There were two pairs of hip boots; two belt axes hung from the tent pole and the camp was well stocked with homemade furniture; a table with split poles for a top, three stools made by sawing cross-sections from a ten-inch log and nailing a square board on one end; and a log edging on the ground in one corner of the tent to serve as a bunk, this filled with ten inches of hay on which to spread the bed roll. Fifty casing boards of all sizes and patterns were piled against a tree. A dozen boxes of shotgun shells and a thousand rounds of am-munition for the little rifle were stored in the grub chest, for Kennedy had impressed upon them that both must learn to shoot and so live largely “off the country” by keeping the camp well supplied with meat. Their com-bined assets after marketing the walnuts had totaled but twenty-four dollars and the expenditures had exceeded this amount. They were indebted to Jack Kennedy to the

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sum of eight dollars.When Kennedy rode up to camp he brought his own

boots in a sack lashed on behind his saddle. In addition he had brought two more canvas grain bags.

“I fashioned you a pair of trapping sacks,” he an-nounced. “Every trapper ought to tote a pack sack to carry his stuff so his hands won’t be eternally full of something or other. Each of you take ten traps and we’ll make a start. One of you bring that duck Rawhide killed last night.”

The canvas sacks had been cut down to a trifle less than half-length, leaving a two-inch strip of canvas on each side to serve as straps and fashioned into shoulder loops. The boys loaded up, slipped their arms through the loops and followed Kennedy as he headed for the North Fork and waded out into the stream. Within a few yards of the start Kennedy halted and indicated a point at the water line under an overhanging grassy bank stud-ded with clumps of willows. There was a slight excava-tion at the water’s edge and the roots of slough grass and willows were exposed.

“That’s where rats have been scratching,” he said. “They come up here and scratch, sitting half in the water while they clip off a root or two. They’ve been feeding for ten feet either way from here, but that hollow shows more use than the rest. Here’s where we make the first set.”

He cut a smooth willow sapling an inch through at the butt and with the first branches cropping out mid-way of its length. He set the trap on a flat bed of mud under three inches of water, shoved the butt of the wil-low through the ring of the trap chain and pushed it well home in the bank a few inches under the water line. The branches trailed out in the current and were forced un-der water.

“Now that acts as a slide pole,” he said.“It’s the most effective drown-set I know. The rat

will make for deep water when the trap grips his foot. The ring slides down the pole till the branches snub it short. That keeps the rat from getting out on the bank and in five minutes he’s drowned. A muskrat will foot himself nine times out of ten if left where he can get up on the bank. And this slide pole blends in with the other willows dragging out in the stream and leaves no sign to help fur thieves locate your sets. Now you boys try and find rat sign and make sets yourselves.”

A thicket of willows grew on the opposite shore of the creek some fifty yards farther upstream. The water line was honeycombed with rat workings and the boys located the spot.

“Good enough,” said Kennedy. “Might as well make two sets along here. The sign shows a whole colony of rats are using this willow-brush patch.”

Rawhide cut a slide pole and was first to, complete his set.

“Only one thing wrong,” Kennedy said. “The rat will come to the trap from the water, not down the bank. Always turn your trap with the free jaw toward the side where your catch will come in. Your trap’s turned wrong side, with the dog toward the creek. If a rat stepped in from the side of the pinioned jaw it’s likely the dog would throw his foot clear of the trap as it flipped up when the spring was released.”

Kennedy peered down into the clear water of the stream and examined the bank. He pointed to the mouth of a hole that showed some eight inches under the water.

“Likely that’s the mouth of the den,” he explained. “Bank rats tunnel up from below water line. By pros-pecting those holes with a willow you can tell whether they go clear back or are only false leads.”

He cut a slender willow wand and inserted the end in the hole. The pliable rod followed the curves of the tunnel and was easily thrust into the bank for five feet.

“That’s the entrance,” Kennedy decided. “Buckskin, you smack a trap in that hole.”

After a little study it was easy to locate rat sign, even to tell with fair accuracy whether or not it was fresh. Each boy made another set within the next hundred yards. Then Kennedy pointed to a steep bank beneath the roots of a mighty elm. A fringe of lacy rootlets lapped the water and acted as a screen to conceal a long narrow shelf under the bank.

“There’s a little shelf runs along behind those roots,” Kennedy said. “A sure-fire rat set, and any other fur that swims down the creek is pretty apt to follow through it. There’s about three inches of water laps over the shelf. Plant a trap back in there.”

Round the next bend a partly submerged down-log slanted out of the water.

“Notice that rats have been using that log,” Kennedy pointed out. “A mink or a coon will walk out on it, too, for a rest. We’ll make a new kind of a set.”

He took Rawhide’s hand-ax and chopped a notch in the log a few inches below water line, motioning the boys back beyond reach of the pray. This made a flat bed for the trap and he wired the trap chain to an outcrop-ping snag well under water.

There was a flat on the north shore of the stream. This pinched out to a narrow bench under the higher bank and a dimly defined trail threaded this shelf and rounded the roots of a giant cottonwood tree.

“Most fur, even ‘possum and such, follow the streams even though they seldom take to the water themselves,” Kennedy informed the boys. “They’ll saunter along and at some points there’s natural obstacles that crowd them into passing over the same route, like right here. We’ll

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bird claws. That’s the trail of a ‘possum. A smashing big skunk has been down for a drink. Notice his ob-long pads, pinching off rounded at the heel, and his long claws overreaching in front. This track is exactly the same, only about one-third the size. That’s a civet. These trails that look like they might be made by frogs were left by muskrats out prowling round in the mud. See where their tails dragged now and then. Here’s mink track, but it’s old. Their toe prints show up like a cat ani-mal’s, only spread farther apart. You want to learn every track in the hills and right here’s a good place to begin. Every kind of fur in the woods has visited this log jam in the last couple of weeks.”

The bait set at this point took the last of the traps.“That’ll be all for to-day,” Kennedy stated. “I’ve

showed you some of the best kind of sets and now you’ll have to work things out for yourselves. You’ll catch fur to-night and tomorrow I’ll show you how to skin out and handle your catch. If a hide is worth trapping at all it deserves a good job of handling. Every scrap of fat must come off. If you leave it on it grease-burns the pelt. Even if they don’t heat, a bunch of fat hides won’t bring much over half on the market as what they would if they’d been clean-fleshed on the start.”

That night seemed overlong and both boys waked many times and wondered how soon the dawn would come. They were out with the first streak of light and elected to run the trap line before breakfasting.

Rawhide stooped to examine the first set. The light was dim but sufficient to enable him to determine that the trap was gone from its bed.

“It’s gone,” he said. “I can’t see it anywhere.”Buckskin seized the slide pole and lifted the sub-

merged branches from the water. The trap chain hung straight down with a weight at the end of it. There would be many thrills in the life of each boy but few that could equal the tingle of joy that flooded their souls at lifting that first drowned muskrat from the Clear-water.

The trap was reset and they waded on to the willow thicket above. Rawhide’s set and the trap in the under-water hole each held a rat. The third was unsprung.

“We’ve made a bigger catch than I’d expected even if we don’t get another rat,” Buckskin exulted. “This is catching fur right!”

There was no fur in the next few sets before reaching the watery shelf behind the lacy rootlets under the elm. This trap, too, was gone.

“Another rat,” Rawhide stated as he lifted the slide pole and caught the chain.

“That’s no rat!” Buckskin exclaimed. “It’s got a bushy tail. It’s a squirrel.”

Rawhide nearly dropped his catch back into the stream as he discovered its species.

throw out a bait set now. Let’s have that duck.”He placed a chunk of log parallel to one of the out-

cropping roots and roofed this lane over with slabs of bark from a down-log. The entrails of the duck were placed in the bait pen and the rear end solidly blocked. A section of three-inch stick was wedged across the mouth of the pen and the trap set just behind it so that the ani-mal that entered must step over the stick and place a foot on the trap pan. The chain was wired to the tip end of a ten-foot pole. This would serve as a drag and yet have sufficient spring to prevent a trapped fur bearer from getting a solid pull in his struggles to free himself from the trap. Kennedy plucked the soft down from the breast of the duck and covered the trap to a depth of two inches. The stick at the fore end of the pen prevented the feathers from blowing away. He pulled the stiff wing feathers and scattered them near the spot.

“The more feathers the better,” he stated. “ Even if a critter is up-wind and don’t scent the bait he may see the feathers floating about and it appears like something has made a kill down here under the bank. He’ll wander down to have a look and we’ll pinch his toes. There’s all kinds of bait sets, but for this country the feather set is by all odds the best. Duck or fish bait will draw any fur that ranges through here. The feathers make soft cover-ing and won’t clog the trap like wood rot or trash often does.”

As they proceeded Kennedy explained that a hollow down-log made an ideal bait pen if dragged to the edge of the stream. Fur bearers were prone to investigate hol-low logs along their routes for dormant insects, nests of mice or for stray cottontails that might have sought shelter inside. A fish or a duck’s head back in the hollow and a few feathers floating around the mouth would be certain to challenge the interest of any meat-eater pass-ing that way.

A windfall log spanned the creek at one point and this formed a natural crossing for the fur folk. Kennedy chopped a notch in which to bed the trap and covered it with thin strips of the fibrous inner bark of a dead cot-tonwood.

Some quarter of a mile above camp a huge log jam was piled at a bend in the creek. The mud flat at its edge was littered with tracks.

“You want to make a bait set at every log jam on the creek,” Kennedy informed. “Fur critters just can’t pass one up without investigating a bit. Notice how this flat is tracked up.”

He pointed to a track that appeared to be the print of a baby’s hand.

“That’s a coon track, and a big one, too. This line of tracks looks a trifle similar, only more straggling, the toes spread well apart sort of star shaped and more like

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“Mink!” he said. “That’s what it is. That hide is worth four or five rats. If this keeps up we’ll have all the fur in the country in the first day’s catch.”

The set on the partially submerged log was untouched and the bait trap under the roots of the big cottonwood was also undisturbed. Another rat had been added to the load in the pack sacks when they reached the down-log spanning the creek. A big opossum prowled back and forth on the log, his foot fast in the trap. One more rat was the yield of the two traps between that point and the log jam. Buckskin gripped his friend’s arm as they neared this last set.

“What’s that?” he demanded.Some black thing moved on the bank where the bait

pen had been constructed, at the edge of the log jam.“Skunk,” Rawhide announced. “We’ve got him. He’s

worth two dollars, that fellow, if he’s worth a cent.”But the skunk was worth far more than that. He was

a huge old boar, as black as a crow except for a forked spot of white on his head.

“A split-cap,” Buckskin said as they gazed at the prize. “A black skunk, sure enough!”

A shot from the twenty-two finished the skunk. An hour later the boys were back in camp. A mink, a ‘pos-sum, a skunk and six rats were arranged in a row on a down-log and the boys waited for Kennedy to come and show them how to handle their catch.

CHAPtEr IIIRawhide crouched in a blind fashioned in the tall

grass that flanked the pond, waiting for the first morning light. The whir of unseen pinions sounded all about him, the soft wing whistles of slow-flying ducks and the hiss-ing screech of speedsters hurtling by. A sheet of water stretched away for a hundred yards and a dozen decoys bobbed on the surface of the pond some little distance from his blind. He gripped the shotgun as a flock of red-heads tumbled into the water beyond the decoys.

The sky turned rose in the east and he saw a dark moving streak against its glow as a flock of mallards headed for the big marsh a mile farther down the stream. The pond was a half-mile below camp and the bottoms had widened out, with flat hay meadows extending back into the narrow breaks between outcropping spurs of the Flint Hills. The stream below the Forks flowed smoothly between grassy shores free of timber except for numerous thickets of willow. The shadows lifted and Rawhide could see the dark shapes that were mounds of hay in Brown’s stack-yards. Ducks streaked in all direc-tions across the sky and a squadron of great gray geese honked overhead. The big flight of the season was on.

The boy ducked convulsively as fifty blue-bills hurtled just above the grass tops all about his head and

were gone before he could shoot. A dark line of red-heads swept over the pond, wheeled into the wind with set wings and slanted down for the decoys. He fired at the thickest mass of birds and the flock held straight on at the jarring report. He shot twice again as they left. One bird sagged under the rest, gave up the struggle and struck the water with a splash on the far side of the pond. Two drakes floated dead just outside the decoys.

He crammed more shells into the magazine as a cloud of ducks wheeled over the pond, swung away and circled again. These acted in an entirely different man-ner from the redheads. At the first report they scattered and climbed, some with wings spread flat against the wind to retard their advance toward the blind. He fired three more shots without making a kill.

Rawhide had yet to learn that different species of ducks adopt various tactics; that canvasbacks, bluebills and redheads will seldom scatter or dodge at a shot, but hold straight on their course, while mallards will scatter and climb. A compact bunch of speeding teal will dis-perse like a puff of smoke with a shot; and so on, all the way down through the species.

Black swarms rose from the hay land and the big marsh below. A flock screeched over the pond, circling it twice as if to diminish their speed, and headed straight for the blind. They wheeled gracefully and he fired as they made the turn. The bottom seemed to drop from the flock and as the heavy bodies splashed on the surface he poured four shots after the vanishing birds. There were four canvasbacks down on the pond, three from the first luck shot on the turn and but one lone duck brought to bag by the other four shots. Rawhide fired another doz-en shells and dropped but three more ducks, then waded out into the pond and picked up his ten birds.

He reached camp before the fiery ball of the sun swung above the Flint Hills. Buckskin had the morn-ing meal prepared and after breakfasting they set forth to run their separate trap lines. Kennedy had mapped out a tentative route for each of them. Rawhide’s line followed the North Fork for five miles upstream, then swung away from the creek and back through the open Flint Hills to the south of it. Thus he traveled in a loop and avoided a waste of time by covering any of the same ground twice. Buckskin’s line was laid out a like dis-tance up the South Fork, his back trip also leading down through the hills between the two streams, their two routes converging a mile above camp at the far edge of the timbered flat.

Rawhide had found fewer rat signs as the timber thickened up on the bank, only isolated colonies scat-tered along. He had made sets at these but for the most part he bait-trapped. Every log jam was a site for a bait pen and he had become adept in building these little

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structures so they blended in with surroundings. He had dragged hollow logs to the water’s edge at points where broad flats pinched out to narrow shelves under the bank and so made natural leads for fur bearers to follow. At one of these points the bank was littered with mink tracks and there were fish scales padded thick in the mud. A smoothly worn hole showed in the bank two feet above water line and there was a similar entrance a foot under water. He had placed a trap in each of these, knowing the spot for a mink den. The family had long since departed on its travels and for three days the traps had remained undisturbed. But this fact had not brought discouragement, for Rawhide had already learned much of the ways of fur animals, some little from his own observations but mainly from inquiring of Kennedy. He knew that the mink was a traveler and that he followed a regular route. Where once he found fresh mink sign it was certain that the animal would eventually return; it might be in five days or it might be in ten, according to the length of his route, but unless picked up by a trap at some other part of his circle he would surely be back. Also mink sometimes traveled in groups and where he caught one he stood a good chance to find others fast in near-by traps. Therefore, Rawhide held high hopes regarding these mink sets a mile above camp.

His pack sack contained an opossum and two rats when he reached the spot. There were fresh mink tracks on the bank both ways from the old den and the trap was gone from the water set. Rawhide’s heart beat rapidly as he lifted the sagging tip of the slide pole from the water and a sickening shock of disappointment flooded him as he found the trap empty.

There was a brown patch midway of the jaws, show-ing in distinct relief against the greenish secretion which the water had spread over the balance of the trap.

“Had him for a minute, anyway,” he said. “But he pulled out of the trap.”

A rat set some twenty yards along the shore had also made a catch.

“Likely I’ve got him here,” Rawhide said as he lifted the slide pole.

This trap too was empty.“These minks are hard to hold,” he lamented. “That’s

a tough blow, having two break away.”It did not occur to him that an animal so securely

gripped as to leave a mark where its leg had worn through the greenish erosion on the metal was incapable of extracting the member without leaving evidence in the shape of a foot or at least a few severed toes.

The remaining four miles of his creek route yielded only one opossum but there was one other trap from which some fur animal had made good its escape.

“Strange how it runs like that,” Rawhide mused.

“One day you’ll hold every catch, and the next day the biggest part pull out of the traps.”

Near the upper end of his line a bait set in the end of a hollow log had made a catch. The soft dirt had been torn up for three feet in all directions by the prisoner’s struggles to escape. There was a splotch of fresh blood near the shore line but this was almost obliterated by the action of water that had been splashed across it. The trap lay in the edge of the creek but the mark where the jaws had gripped the animal’s leg was still evident and a few matted hairs still adhered to the metal.

“It was a big coon,” Rawhide said. “And he’s not been gone long. That blood is right fresh. He must have taken a dive in the creek when he broke the trap’s hold. That’s the reason he didn’t leave a track in the mud to show where he went. He kicked about a barrel of water behind him when he landed and it nearly washed that blood off the bank.”

Thus Rawhide read the signs. He was beginning to learn. But there was one prowler whose sign he failed to take into account, a creature who has no special range but whose habitat includes all countries where traps are set out for the fur bearers. His name is Fur Thief and his numbers are legion.

Rawhide took up the trap and deposited it with oth-ers which he carried in his pack sack for the purpose of making sets at any fresh sign along his route. He swung aside from the creek, traversed the quarter-mile strip of timber that flanked it, and came out into the grass-cov-ered Flint Hills. There were scattered patches of trees at the heads of the gulches. These marked the sites of sidehill seeps and below them were trickling spring runs that meandered through the narrow bottoms.

Kennedy had explained that out in these hills he would find skunk dens and that all sorts of fur animals would seek the open country at night. Opossums, civets and skunks would be on the hunt for insects, ground squirrels and mice. Raccoons would prospect the spring holes for crawfish and minks would follow the course of the spring runs. Small colonies of rats would be using the marshy expanses.

He visited two bait sets in patches of timber with-out making a catch. The next trap had been set in the mouth of a skunk den and lightly covered with trash. A big short-stripe skunk was waiting for him. Two narrow pinstripes of white branched away from the white spot on the animal’s head and forked back to the shoulders. For the rest the pelt was crow black. Rawhide killed the prize and swung the animal at the end of a pole which he carried across his shoulder to avoid scenting his cloth-ing with the strong musk of the species.

The next den set was unsprung but Rawhide had also learned something of the habit of skunks and he did not

April/May 2010 PAGE 15remove the trap. He knew that the mere fact of having failed to make a catch was no indication that the den was deserted. Skunks do not travel widely, as do minks, but instead hold largely to the home range, holing up in groups that sometimes number a dozen individuals in one den. At this season of year, when the nights are cold and the animals have put on their heavy layers of fat for the lean winter months, skunks prowl abroad only irregularly. Rawhide knew that there might be one or two animals still using the den but that the inclination to rove had failed to operate the preceding night. Perhaps on the next they would feel the urge to prowl and he would find one in the trap.

A narrow-stripe skunk rewarded him at the next den set and he found a civet in a bait trap. His load was proving burdensome so he halted and skinned out a part of his catch. He swung wide to either side of his course to prospect for new sets. Two narrow trails, pad-ded through a weed patch on a sandy knoll, led him to a skunk den and he made a set in the mouth of it. Later he found a sand-bar along a spring run. This had been tracked up by a coon. Clam shells and the remains of crawfish were scattered on the bar and he knew that the animal had repaired to this spot to wash his food before dining. Kennedy had explained this trait of the coon. Rawhide essayed a new sort of set. He placed a trap in the shallow riffle of the spring run, a piece of bright tin clamped on the pan. This would glitter and flash in the moonlight as the water rippled over it and would chal-lenge the curiosity of any stray coon passing by. Raw-hide bagged an opossum in a bait set and two rats along the spring branches before reaching the end of his line.

Buckskin was in camp before him and they set about preparing their catch. They had learned to case their pelts by making a straight clean cut from the heel of one hind foot across to the opposite heel, a shorter incision at right angles, leading from the center of this original opening to the root of the tail. Through this one orifice the hide was peeled off wrong side out and skinned clear to the lips.

Rawhide set about fleshing out a skunk pelt. A short pole some three inches in diameter had been rounded off on one end with a wood rasp. He slid the pelt over this with the flesh side out. A strip of canvas served as an apron to keep the grease from his clothing as he rested the nose of the hide against his body while the far end of the pole was braced against the ground at the base of a tree. He gripped a steel skate in both hands, the runner blade resting on the nose of the skunk pelt, and pushed away with short strokes. The flat edge of the skate scraped off the fat in rolls without injuring the pelt and this was worked back toward the rear end of the hide.

As the pelts were stretched on the casing boards they

were hung up in the shade of a tarpaulin rigged between two trees. Kennedy had explained that fur must be dried in the shade; that the sun blackened even prime hides of mink, possum and skunk which should cure out flint white on the flesh side of the skin; prime rats should cure out a yellowish red but these too were turned black when sun-dried.

Buckskin had netted a huge raccoon and this piece of fur was skinned open by slitting the under parts from tail to chin and running an incision at right angles along the under side of each leg. Rawhide cut some light wil-low poles and fashioned a frame four feet square. The coon hide was spread flat in the center of this hollow frame. A sacking needle was threaded with heavy twine and one whole side of the skin was caught at intervals of one inch, the stitches looping round the pole of the frame. The other side and both ends of the pelt were similarly sewed to their respective sides of the rack. Then the loops were drawn tight by taking up the slack. This lacing constituted a pliable stretching apparatus of great sensitiveness, for any strain could be eased off at one point while exerting increased pressure at others. The hide was stretched in a perfect square, as tight as a drum, and the lacing frame placed on edge in the shade of the canvas tarp.

Kennedy had pitched his teepee near the tent and he rode into camp while the boys still worked at their catch. He sat on a down-log and watched their opera-tions with interest.

“You’re getting to be old heads at that work,” he praised. “That’s a good clean-fleshed bunch of fur you’ve got hanging there. Come another season and you’ll be showing me new tricks, you two.”

“Neil doesn’t bother to flesh his hides very clean,” Buckskin remarked. “We were down to his camp a few days ago. He says it doesn’t pay for the time it takes up.”

“Neil is like the main run of trappers,” Kennedy said. “Only worse. First off he’s a sooner and traps out his territory before fur primes up. That knocks his prices in half. Then he’s too lazy to flesh his pelts and that cuts into his returns again. When the weather turns off cold and fur stuff holes up and don’t prowl outside much — why then Neil, he’ll hole up too. He won’t work hard at a trap line that only nets one or two pelts a day. That don’t seem like much but the aggregate at the end of a month counts up big. If you boys work hard after the freeze-up you’ll knock off right at forty to fifty pelts in a month, and he won’t. That’s where most trappers fail. They overlook those little points. This Neil is poor sort of folks.”

“He still angles around to make a deal so we’ll let him trap on the Forks,” Buckskin said. “If his country is all trapped out why don’t he move camp?”


“There’s some trapper or other working most ev-ery part of the Flint Hills,” Kennedy said. “He’ll be bumping into some other outfit’s territory whenever he shifts; so now he wants to work yours. I run across him a few days back down below. He’s not the Neil I had him figured to be, but about the same sort. There was a layout of Neils holding out down in the Santag Swamp, about forty miles below where the Clearwater dumps into the Santag River. That would be around fifty miles from here. Folks got down on them, sort of, and they pulled out for the West. When he was telling you about his folks in Wyoming I imagined it was one of those Neils that had come sauntering back, but this fellow’s not one of the lot.”

Rawhide was dumping the odds and ends from his trap sack as Kennedy inspected the freshly stretched coon skin.

“That’s a good job of lacing,” he praised. “It’s the best job of stretching you’ve done on a coon up to date.”

Rawhide held up a trap.“We’d have had another to stretch if this fellow

hadn’t pulled out,” he stated.Kennedy idly inspected the trap, noting the few

clinging hairs and the mark on the jaws where the ani-mal’s leg had been gripped.

“He tore up the bank all around,” Rawhide went on. “Left the ground smeared with blood, then pulled out and took to the creek without leaving a track in the mud. I lost two mink too. The traps just hung empty out at the end of the slide pole but the mink had pulled out.”

“Hum,” Kennedy said. “There’s one thing about a slide-pole set. A critter can’t get a solid pull on/that rub-bery willow tip any more than he could on a fish rod. Any time a trap gets enough of a hold on a mink so that he can drag it the length of the slide pole out into deep water he’s a drowned mink, that’s all! A coon that’s gripped high enough to stay in a trap till he’s torn up the bank all around isn’t apt to pull free without leaving at least a few toes. A trapped fur bearer don’t shed any blood till you arrive and kill him by a blow on the head; then he always bleeds at the nose.”

Kennedy took a squint at the sun and found it three hours high.

“Let’s have a look at that spot,” he suggested. “There’s a new kind of critter prowling your line. We’d better ride, for it’s a good piece from here and we won’t make it by sundown if we go afoot. I’ll run Warrior in and rig up a rope hackamore. You can straddle him bare-back.”

An hour later they waded into the stream at the point where the coon had escaped. Kennedy carefully studied the sign.

“A fur thief helped your coon to break loose,” he in-

formed. “He got your mink too. He splashed water all over the bank to wash off the blood but he did a poor job. It’s two to one that Neil is the fur snatcher that is doing this work.”

“But his camp is several miles down below,” Raw-hide objected.

“It doesn’t matter where a man’s camp is if he’s out to steal fur,” Kennedy stated.

He led the way downstream, examining the bottoms of the shallows. At last he pointed to a boot print under six inches of water.

“Notice the non-slip pattern on the sole of that boot is different from the tracks your boots leave,” he in-structed.

The print was dim and partially filled in with a thin film of sediment but the difference in the sole pattern was apparent.

“That’s Neil’s track,” Kennedy stated. “I noticed his boot soles a few days back, just in case the information might come in handy sometime.”

“But I should think we’d have met him somewhere before now if he’s running our lines,” Rawhide argued.

“He doesn’t work it that way,” Kennedy answered. “He could strike the creek a mile above camp at daylight and work it upstream. Even if you started when he did he would still have a mile lead on you and he’d move right along. He’s in the creek all the way and out of your sight. Likely he doesn’t run your sets out in the open hill country. You might sight him and he’d be sure to leave sign. Probably he just runs your creek sets where he can work from the water, then swings off south and circles back to his camp. Have you been missing other catches of late?”

“About two days ago,” Rawhide recalled. “There were three sprung traps on their slide poles and some-thing had pulled out of a trap on a down-log that bridges the creek. Then the same thing happened a couple of days before that, and one day last week I lost several catches.”

“He works on your line every two days, likely,” Ken-nedy said. “It would be interesting to know what hap-pened on Buckskin’s line on the off days between.”

It transpired that Buckskin too had missed many catches but attributed the loss to natural causes. Now that the theft had been fastened on Neil both boys were incensed to the point where their only wish was to raid Neil’s camp and recover their fur without an hour’s delay. The three friends held a council of war round a camp fire that had been kindled between the tent and the teepee.

“Neil shipped all his fur two weeks back,” Buckskin said. “Most of what he’s got on hand now is ours. I’m for going down right to-night and getting it back.”


“Let’s go,” Rawhide seconded. “I’m ready right now.”

Kennedy laid a hand on his shoulder.“Calm down, Son,” he counseled. “Let your hair set-

tle back on your scalp. We’ll break even with Neil and maybe a little ahead; but right now we haven’t any shred of proof except a boot print under the water and the fact that a few traps have missed fi re. If we raid his camp in the open he’d have us all tossed into jail. We’ll trip him up in the morning and plan to get our fur back while he’s out on his rounds. We’ll map out a return steal. Or-dinarily I’m not up to that sort of thing but the way to handle a fur thief is just any old way that will get good results. I’ve got a scheme in mind that will leave him guessing as to whether or not it was us that took the fur from his camp.”

“I don’t want him to do any guessing,” Rawhide asserted. “I want him to know for sure. The fur’s ours and he stole it — and I want him to be right cer-tain that we got it back.”

“All right; then later we’ll tell him,” Kennedy said. “But up until trapping season is over it won’t do any harm to have him con-siderable worried. Then he won’t have so much time to put in worrying us. You all turn in for the night and to-morrow we’ll clamp down on Neil.”

CHAPtEr IV“Rawhide whistled

cheerily as he neared Neil’s camp. He had left Warrior tethered a quarter of a mile back in the timber, having ridden through the wooded hills south of the Clearwater to reach the spot unob-served. If he should fi nd Neil in camp it was his purpose to stop and visit for an hour; an act which would seem natural enough. Should he fi nd the camp unoccupied he would simply wait. There was no answering call from the tent when he hailed the camp. Neil was gone.

He entered the tent and inspected the fur suspended from the tent pole, — an assortment of some sixty pelts, most of them cured but a few still drying on the stretch-

ers. Rawhide moved to the edge of the trees and sat on a down-log. His eyes were trained on the bald point of a sandstone knob some seven miles up the country. From that point would come the signal which would deter-mine his course. His mind was occupied with specula-tions concerning the activities of his two friends back in camp.

At that precise moment Buckskin and Kenneth were concealed in a thicket of hazel brush which afforded a clear view of a section of the creek where the low fl at banks would not furnish suffi cient cover to screen any

one wading the stream. If Neil should elect to run Buckskin’s line he must pass this point, a spot some four miles above camp. They had been stationed there for the best part of an hour, ever since the fi rst light of day.

Battler rose from beside them and Kennedy laid a restraining hand on the big Airedale’s head as the dog made a move toward the edge of the thicket.

“Down, Battler,” he commanded. “You stay right here.”

The dog fl attened down once more but his nose quivered eagerly as he tested the wind that drifted from the creek. A soft growl rumbled in his throat.

Kennedy touched Buck-skin’s arm and pointed. A man’s hat appeared above the bank of the creek. It dis-appeared behind a clump of trees but after the lapse

of a minute it came into view once more as the wearer approached the low fl at bank. The man progressed an-other fi fty yards upstream and the watchers could see all of Neil from his knees up. Again he disappeared behind high timbered banks.

The two stalkers moved out of the hazel thicket and angled swiftly across a bend in the creek. Battler’s hack-le fur fl uffed into a roach on his shoulders and Kennedy slipped a short rope through his collar to prevent the dog from making any sudden rush toward the spot from whence came Neil’s scent. The two stationed themselves

The watchers could see all of Neil.

April/May 2010

on the bank upstream from the fur thief and sauntered down to meet him. Kennedy slipped the rope when the splash of boots in the water announced that Neil was but a few yards downstream.

The Airedale dashed ahead and came out on the bank a few feet from Neil, his teeth bared at the man in the stream. Buckskin and Kennedy hastened toward the sound of his snarls and halted as if in surprise at the sight of Neil.

“Hello,” Kennedy hailed. “Battler! You! Come back here! We thought he’d treed a coon or something from the noise he was making,” he explained to Neil. “He won’t jump you, now that he’s recognized you for a friend.”

Neil’s composure was returning with this evidence that the two on the bank had discovered him through accident and apparently failed to suspect his activities.

“He give me a start,” he confessed. “I had just come down across the hills and hadn’t more’n stepped into the creek when he bounced out an’ bellowed right in my face. I stayed all night over at Newt Martin’s camp across on the Otter Fork and started back before day-light. I was aiming to drop by your camp on the way down.”

“Come right along,” Kennedy invited. “We haven’t breakfasted yet ourselves. Three nights hand-running we’ve heard a wolf howl up in here — first I’ve heard in the Flint Hills for close onto five years — so we turned out to see if we could get a shot at daylight. Raw-hide cut across to run a part of his traps on the way down and we moved off across here. Come on and mosey back with us and we’ll stir up a bite to eat.”

Neil was entirely reassured by this rambling explana-tion and he stepped out on the bank.

“Don’t bother to run your line down to camp,” Ken-nedy said to Buckskin. “Why don’t you swing back in the open and try to knock down a couple of chickens on the way in?”

Buckskin departed with the shotgun. He knew that Kennedy would keep to the bottoms where the timber obscured the view, and once out of sight he sprinted for the point of a lofty sandstone knob half a mile away. He knelt on the summit and touched a match to a pile of dry weeds which he had placed there before daylight.

Miles down the bottoms, Rawhide sat on a log and waited. He consulted his watch. In another thirty min-utes he would leave and go to his horse. He started from his seat and peered anxiously at the summit of the dis-tant knob. It seemed that a fine line of white smoke rose from it but he could not be sure. Then the column deep-ened in shade and he knew it for smoke.

Rawhide hastened back to Neil’s tent and swiftly stripped the green fur from the casing boards. He packed

these into a canvas grain sack which he carried, added the pelts already cured and headed swiftly for his horse, then lashed the sack on behind his saddle, mounted and made off through the wooded hills south of the creek, holding the horse to a stiff trot. In less than an hour he drew abreast of his camp at the Forks and stationed himself in the timber a quarter of a mile up the slope that broke up from the South Fork. Presently the ringing strokes of an ax reached his prearranged evidence that Kennedy was in camp with Neil.

He headed Warrior along the slope, angled down and forded the South Fork half a mile above camp and rode straight through the heavy timber of the flat to the bank of the North Fork. Kennedy’s saddle was stripped from Warrior and the little bay horse was left free to graze. Rawhide cached both the sack of fur and the saddle in a windfall jam, slipped off Kennedy’s moccasins, which he had worn to avoid leaving the least sight around Neil’s camp, and donned his own boots. These, along with his trap-sack, had been planted at this spot by Ken-nedy. The trap-sack was heavy and he found that it con-tained two rats and a possum. Buckskin and Kennedy had run a few sets near camp before daylight to lend a touch of reality to Rawhide’s return from the trap line. He followed the bank to a point near the camp, then took to the stream and came out over the bank when abreast of the tent. Buckskin had beat him to camp by not over ten minutes and had three plump prairie hens to show for the morning’s hunt. The return of Kennedy and Neil had not exceeded his own by more than half an hour.

“Not much of a catch,” Rawhide stated, dumping the two rats and the possum from the pack sack. “But I didn’t cover much of my line.”

Neil jerked a thumb at his own sack.“I’ve got a few critters in there,” he said. “ Picked

them up last evening in some traps I’ve got out on the ridges; took ‘em out on my way over to Martin’s but didn’t bother to peel ‘em last night. I’ll have to hustle back to camp right after breakfast and snatch the pelts off them before they spoil.”

Rawhide knew that the contents of Neil’s pack sack had been lifted from their own trap line that morning but he was content to see the fur thief depart with his spoils when he reflected upon that sack of fur cached in the windfall.

Neil departed immediately after breakfast.“There he goes,” Kennedy observed, gazing after

him, “congratulating himself on what a blind outfit we are. There’s a hard jolt waiting him when he gets back and finds his fur gone. He won’t be able to figure how any of us had a hand in raiding his camp.”

Two days later they heard that Neil had broken camp and moved out, announcing his destination as the San-

PAGE 18


ter the ice sets in so we’ll reserve them till later on. This way you’ll do better than if you’d slapped down traps haphazard on the start.”

Kennedy had impressed upon them the necessity of properly arranging their work to avoid doubling and so wasting a part of their time. Buckskin covered the lower rat lines in the boat while Rawhide took over all the bait sets up country. In this latter work Rawhide found that he could cover far more territory when mounted on Warrior

than when trapping on foot. He increased his range to extend two miles farther up the open hills between the Forks, then explored the wooded ridges on the far side of the South Fork. This last investigation was rewarded by the discov-ery of several skunk and possum dens under the soapstone ledges. He also found two mighty trees, one a sycamore and the other an elm, hollow well toward the tops and used as den trees by coons. He made bait sets near these, using the method Kennedy had told him was often employed in winter trap-ping for foxes. There were many spring pools that never froze over in winter, their overfl ow carried off by tiny streams that trick-led from their lower ex-tremities. He chose one of these and wired a duck to a rock, placing it in the cen-ter of the pool. A trap was set midway between the bait and the bank, the shal-low water just covering the jaws, while a tuft of moss was secured to the trap pan

and this rose above the surface, forming an inviting spot upon which to step as an animal neared the bait. The jaws were draped by shreds of the stringy green moss that had formed in the pool. A similar set was made on the far side of the bait.

It was on this same day that Battler struck some sort of a trail well back among the hills and commenced working it out. Rawhide followed on Warrior, hoping

tag Swamp.“It looks like he might be one of that Neil outfi t that

used to hang out down there,” Kennedy remarked when he heard this news. “But I never saw him around with them.”

The stream below the Forks was too deep for wad-ing at many points and Kennedy had hauled in lum-ber for the construction of a row-boat. They put the fi nishing touches on the boat on the day that the news of Neil’s departure reached them. The muskrats had been well thinned out on the Forks and out on the spring runs and the boys pulled up their rat traps preparatory to working the main Clearwater below, leaving only some forty bait sets and den traps up country for other fur. They set off downstream with sixty traps in the boat. At this point the Clearwater wandered through fl at hay meadows, its shores lined with matted patches of slough grass and jungles of willows. Small brush-covered islands studded its course.

This stretch was a veri-table muskrat paradise and every rod of shore line was littered with sign. They trapped the north bank downstream, working the near side of every island en route, and covered the south bank on the up trip, each one taking his turn at the oars while the other put out traps.

“You’ll make some heavy catches of rats down there,” Kennedy predicted on their return. “One point of good trapping is to work your territory after a system that will bring best results on the whole. First you cleaned out the scattering rats up above. Now you can concentrate on those below the Forks and trap out the thickest of them before the freeze-up. It’s hard trapping for bank rats after the ice takes. The big marsh is swarming with muskrats but we’ll pass them up for now. You can trap marsh rats af-

April/May 2010

that the dog would lead him to some den tree or a hole in the ledges. Rawhide had come to know that the Aire-dale’s nose was infallible. On half a dozen nights he had disappeared from camp. Later his voice had drift-ed back to them as he bayed at the foot of some tree which held his prey. The boys had never failed to take the lantern and hasten to the point, and there were pelts of civet, possum and coon to show that never lied when he bawled the news that his prey was treed.

Battler stopped on the crest of a ridge and gazed off across the country. As Rawhide peered off in the same direction he saw a man cross between two strips of tim-ber. The stranger was undersized, almost dwarfed, and waddled on short bandy legs as he walked. Rawhide attached no special significance to this occurrence and called Battler from the track.

Rawhide’s rounds yielded fewer pelts than at first, for muskrats, easiest of all fur to trap, had been cleaned out along the upper lines to the limit which Kennedy considered advisable. The old man never failed to im-press upon the boys the fact that a good trapper never traps his territory too closely. But by working hard and riding for new sets every day he never failed to bring in some fur. Civet, possum and skunk, an occasional mink or raccoon, all these helped swell the growing assort-ment of fur in camp. Day after day Buckskin brought in heavy catches of musk-rats from the line below the Forks.

A vast content filled the hearts of both boys. Already their catch exceeded all their highest anticipations for the first year’s work.

Rawhide was obsessed with the hope of attaining one spot on the earth which he might call his own, — the ambition for ownership. He had seen much of poverty and had observed that those who worked from day to day with no thought of saving for the morrow were al-ways harassed by a swarm of petty apprehensions; fear of losing their jobs; uneasiness lest the next week’s pay check would not cover all that they desired to purchase; collectors ever at their doors. In his observations it had occurred to him that people who were owners suffered no such afflictions. One day he would have a piece of land stocked with horses and cows of his own. And this first season’s catch would be a big start toward the at-tainment of his one great ambition.

Both boys had insisted that the catch should split three ways and that Kennedy should take his third. Kennedy had vetoed this suggestion and explained that a hundred head of the cows being wintered in the leases were his own.

“And I’ve got a little other stuff scattered round,” he said. “I don’t rustle from necessity these days; it’s just habit. Brown and I are old friends and he feels that ev-

erything will run along all right with me on the job. I get restless when I’m holed up inside and this keeps me outdoors. I feed out a little bunch of stock with his every year. That would hardly be the right thing for me to do, to cut in on your catch when you’re just making a start.”

The first snow of the season was falling and as they sat round the stove they could hear the soft rustle of flakes among the naked branches overhead. An occa-sional drop of water trickled through the vent left for the stovepipe and splashed with a sharp hiss on the stove.

“I wonder if those foxes will come again on this snow,” Rawhide said. Two days before Kennedy pointed out the tracks of two foxes on a muddy shore. “Maybe we’ll catch one in a spring pool set.”

“Maybe — but not likely,” Kennedy returned.“Why not?” Rawhide asked. “Because they’re too

smart?”“No, because they’re too scarce,” Kennedy said.

“There’s not many round here, only an occasional stray red drifting through. You can catch any sort of a critter after you learn his habits and what sort of a set will fool him. Their ways of traveling, feeding and such are dif-ferent, and with different degrees of intelligence all the way down the line. Such stuff as possum, skunk and civ-et will go out of their way to get in a trap. A marten will go a mile to get caught and a lynx or bobcat is plumb stupid after you learn how to attract their attention and get them up near a set. Beaver is as easy to trap as a muskrat. A bear is smart in a good many ways. You’ve got your hands full when you set out to still-hunt a bear, but he’ll walk smack into a trap. Mink and coon are a trifle more shy but not hard to catch. Fox is a whole lot more clever but it’s no hard job for a good trapper to bag him. An otter is about the hardest critter to catch, on ac-count of his habits. A coyote is next — on account of his brains. You’ll run up against all of those, more or less, when you get out into that country you’re headed for. Then you’ll have a try for the coyotes and learn what real trapping is. You’ll be an artist on the trap line any time you can pinch the toes of the little yellow wolves.”

“I’m craving a try at them,” Buckskin stated.“You’ll find that oftentimes there’s more money in

trapping in a small-fur country than there is out in some mountain country working on coyote, cat and such sort of larger fur,” Kennedy predicted. “It’s a mite more ex-citing maybe but not always so profitable.”

He produced a price list and studied it.“Fur is crawling up every month,” he said. “It’s near

double what it was last year. You’ll have a nice fat little stake by spring.”

To Be Continued...

PAGE 20

Have you ever had saddle pains? Those horrible, knife-like stabs of agony that are the result of too many jarring hours in the saddle? I hope, for your sake, you haven’t; but according to seasoned skyline riders, you’ve never really earned your spurs until you’ve gone through this torture.

You can twist and turn every which way in your saddle but the knife is still there, twisting your guts to a pulp, nev-er relenting, never lessening in intensity, until the end of the ride – and a few hours’ rest – have eased the pressure.

The riding cramp I had that day, far up the Yalakom River country of British Columbia, famous for its bighorns, was about the worst I’ve ever had. I sat my saddle every way I knew and a couple I made up going along; but cold as it was, beads of perspiration were running down my face, proof of the agony that was turning a pleasant junket into plain, unadulterated torture.

I might have known it would be like that, for just be-fore we started out that clear, crisp October morning, Bob Land, the guide I had joined at Moha, farther downriver, had paused in his last-minute check of packs and saddles.

“We’ve got maybe three days of clear weather ahead,” he remarked. “I know you can take a long, fast ride, so we’re gonna make time.”

Normally, Bob went on to explain, a storm in those parts – west of the Fraser River and maybe 120 air miles north of Vancouver – was followed by a couple of weeks of clear weather before another one blew up. But this year, ever since the middle of September, it had been just one storm after another, with only about three clear days between. So our cue was to reach sheep country in a single day, hope to pick up a good ram the next – and clear out.

“When those Yalakom trails get iced up,” Bob fi nished, “there are certain places you can’t get the horses around without standing to lose some – and we don’t want to be on ‘em when they start to roll. So let’s ride!”

And ride we had, for twenty-fi ve miles, with a couple more to go – all at a fast pace. At one spot, icy rock had nearly spelled doom for the whole pack train when a heav-ily loaded nag slipped off the trail in a particularly bad place, rolled over once, and dragged three more horses with him, to roll and slide a couple of hundred feet, in a welter of hoofs, heads, and packs. No casualties ensued, but that possibility had been too close for comfort.

Now, twenty yards ahead of me, Bob Land rode side-hunched in his saddle, his posture spelling weariness to the bone. Four pack horses strung out behind him, snow-caked

MONARCH

ley from us reared lofty Shulaps Peak – altitude 9,450 feet – snow covered, glacier-ribbed, heavily cut with deep-cleft draws and rocky ridges.

One big hump in the towering Shulaps, its ugly face a mile-wide span of glittering ice, Bob said was called Ram Mountain. Why? Because in that area so many rams had taken their last look at their age-old foe, man. “But,” he continued, “that was in the old days. Late years, there’s only one band of sheep that ever goes up there, and not often at that. Prospectors and trappers hunting meat have run the rest across the canyon or in to the south end of the range.

packs testifying to the recent spell that had nearly made coyote bait out of them. The three pack animals behind me dragged back on their ropes, as they slipped and slid or scrambled up the steep spots.

A few inches of snow covered the ground in the open pine slopes we were riding through. Where the trail wound around slides we got off and walked, breaking a path for our mounts and alert to the ever-present danger that one of them would lose his footing and pile up the whole outfi t. I had ridden this same trail the year before, but it had been in September, nearly a month earlier in the fall. That, I could plainly see, is the best time to hunt bighorns in this country.

My riding path grew in intensity with every jarring step my cayuse took, and I was unashamedly clutching my side and wishing for an early death. Just when I thought I’d have to call for a break. Bob pulled his little sorrel gelding up and, as he swung off, called back:

“This is a good spot to camp. There’s water in that pot-hole over there, and plenty of wood.”

We yanked the packs, fed some of the hay and grain we’d packed in to the horses, and set up camp. After we’d tucked a tremendous amount of juicy venison under our belts, my discomfort bedded down for the night and the world took on a brighter aspect.

Our camp was on the point of a ridge that jutted out over a deep canyon. At some time in the past a fi re had swept through the bench and left the skeletons of trees standing. Later a high wind had blown half of them down in a tan-gle of trunks and brittle-dry branches, none of which lent beauty to the spot but which we found convenient for fuel.

Blue Creek, a trickle of water in the canyon bottom far below, meandered in and out among rock benches and ar-eas of muskeg and beaver-created ponds, ice-rimmed and bordered by breaks of tamarack and birch. Across the val-

of RAM MOUNTAIN

April/May 2010

riot of pinks and blues, we were in the saddle. We traveled slowly that morning. The bright, hot sunshine of the day before had melted a lot of the snow on the trail, and the snapping cold of the night before had turned the slush into a glare of ice. The ponies were sharpshod and calked, but even so, much of the going was treacherous.

Soon we left the steep slope and came to a winding val-ley, cut with shallow ravines and little ridges covered with thick stands of jack pine. Another half mile brought us to the foot of Nine Mile Ridge, for untold years one of the finest sheep ranges in British Columbia.

We tethered the horses in a small meadow, pulled off saddles, and started to climb on foot. For half an hour we worked up a steep ridge, bald save for a few stunted tim-berline firs. Then we were in the rocks. There was nearly a foot of snow up here – dry, powdery stuff that fluffed when you stepped in it. The first rim we peered over, we spotted a band of ewes and lambs. They were scattered all through a basin, feeding and all apparently headed for the rocky screes higher up.

We worked to the west a good mile, through a conve-nient ravine, fought our way to a ridge overlooking a series of basins, and started to use the binoculars. Nearly every-where we looked, there were bands of ewes and lambs, but no rams. The entire area was crisscrossed with the blunt tracks of sheep, all heading up.

“It was pretty nice yesterday,” Bob whispered. “The sheep are working up out of the timber to the roof, and it’s a cinch the rams went first. Let’s go up through this draw toward that glacier, swing to the left, and see can we get a peek into that big basin.”

We had hardly started when Bob motioned for a halt. Looking in the direction he pointed, I made out a strag-gling line of figures on the skyline a mile away. We eased below a huge snow-covered boulder and put the glasses on them. Even a novice could make out the heavy, high-curled horns, but only one ram had what at that distance looked to be a trophy head.

They seemed in no hurry to go anyplace, standing im-mobile for minutes at a time, then pawing in the snow for a bit of lichen or some other tidbit. At last two of the twelve lay down, curled their heads back on their sides, and pre-pared to take a nap. The rest seemed undecided. A couple of them squared away for a little set-to, but the big fellow with the heavy horns sidled in stiff-legged and they hopped away like a couple of frisky calves on a frosty morning. By this time the sun was well up, and the whole band, with the exception of the old head ram, decided to take a nap, so they plunked down right against the skyline.

“Thunder!” Bob growled, “We’re stuck until that big ram either beds down or takes a walk for himself. He’s the lookout, and if we waggle an eyebrow above this rock, those babies will just be from there.”

The minutes dragged. An hour… two… three. Our

Darkness settled down in the valley, then marched up the mountain to camp. Stars came out one by one, and the sharp, clear cold encountered at 7,000 feet of altitude set-tled around us. The crackle of dry pine in the fire, and the far away howl of a black wolf, were like a rhapsody in the night.

Bob lit a long-stemmed brier and leaned back against a log, his eyes slitted against the smoke of the campfire.

“Just one ridge back of Ram Mountain, a prospector got his last sheep,” he reminisced, as much to himself as to me. “Got a band of rams in a little box canyon one day, picked out a nice one and let drive. He was a dead shot and the sheep dropped like a rock. The others streamed out of there and over the rim like they was scorched.”

Bob sucked on his pipe, decided the tobacco was dead, refilled the bowl, cocked a coal on top, and drew long, slow puffs. I knew there was more to come, and waited patiently.

“Well, this old fellow laid his rifle on a rock, pulled out his skinning knife, and walked over to clean out his win-ter’s meat. Apparently the ram wasn’t dead – because in a few minutes there wasn’t much left of the prospector, as his partner discovered a week later when he tracked him down. What bighorns can do with their horns and feet, once they get worked up, is terrific. That ram tore the poor guy up worse than a grizzly would have.”

“Never catch me doing a fool stunt like that!” I assured my guide, remembering the bad time a wounded mule-deer buck had once given me. I proceeded to elaborate on the foolhardiness of setting a gun aside and approaching any game animal before making sure it’s down for keeps, un-til Bob’s polite yawns suggested the topic had been over-played, and we headed for the sacks.

That night I had an old-fashioned nightmare. A band of tremendous bighorns kept chasing me over cliffs, and I babbled in my sleep, until Bob woke me with: “If you’re going to yelp like that, mosey out on the ridge and squall with that coyote!”

So I lay awake for a while and listened to a very sick sounding coyote serenade his lady love. After a while I drifted off, but almost as soon as I was asleep the rams came back to life, in Technicolor and with sound, and start-ed thumping me around with horns that would make a head hunter’s mouth water.

Over the breakfast coffee I told Bob, “One ram like the ones I was dreaming about last night, and I’ll be satisfied. I can hang up my guns and retire. Just coast on my reputa-tion.”

Bob chuckled. “That’s one thing about a sheep hunter – he’s one for keeps. Oh, he might go a season or two with-out a try, but he’ll always come back for more. It gets in his blood. Easy to form the habit, but hard to quit.”

By the time the first rays of the early morning sun be-gan to turn the high, snow-covered peaks a kaleidoscopic

PAGE 24

April/May 2010

blankets on them for added protection, fed and watered them – and turned at last to our own needs.

The wind was blowing so hard a campfire was out of the question. We dug a little G. I. stove out of one of the pack boxes, grabbed up a couple of cans of soup, beans, a loaf of bread and some jam, dived into the umbrella tent, and tied the flap shut.

The icy blast was screaming fiendishly, and it was a good thing that tent had a floor and a couple of boys to hold it down, or I’m sure it would have blowing into Blue Creek and quite out of this story.

Thawed out with hot food and the heat from the dy-namic little gasoline stove, we sat back and planned our next move. The acetylene flame from a small miner’s lamp plainly showed the worry in Bob’s face as he spoke;

“Mac, just how bad do you want a ram?”I took a long pull on my cigarette, let smoke dribble out

slowly, while I pondered. Then: “Bad enough to risk my neck, I guess, if necessary. Just

how much chance have we got” and as if in answer, a gust of wind tore at the little tent with renewed fury.

“None at all, if it stays like this,” Bob answered soberly. “You saw what happened up in Nine Mile Ridge today. That wind will drive every head of game in the country into timber. This time of year the snow probably won’t be much to worry about. There wasn’t any down the valley fifteen miles away, you know, and up above us there isn’t more than a foot or so at most. But that wind raises hob with the hunting. Sheep won’t face it, nor will anything else.”

Bob paused to listen to the howling wind outside. “We’ve got horse feed for a couple more days,” he went on. “Suppose we see what it looks like day after tomorrow. Until then, even if the weather breaks clear by morning, there’s only one chance in a million sheep would be up on the ridge tops, where we could get at ‘em.”

“What about the Shulaps side?” I queried. “That coun-try looked awful good this morning and if this storm puts the sheep down into Blue Creek maybe they’ll head up Ram Mountain way next. The wind must have scattered our scent and that of the horses all over this side of the valley.”

Bob’s face, deeply lined from bucking storm upon storm in the north country, cracked into his infectious grin.

“I saw you working Shulaps and Ram over with the glasses this morning while I was getting ‘dishpan hands,’ ” he smiled. “There might be some sheep over there, but Nine Mile Ridge is better hunting and not so rough. As I told you, there’s only been one small band of sheep up in Ram Mountain country, the last several years. Maybe a dozen ewes and half that many rams. Most of the rams are little five and six year olds, not fit for trophies.

“Still and all, he mused. “Once in awhile a really big ram has been reported up there. Some of the trappers have

boulder was wide but not high; not high enough to stand up behind anyway. The boss ram was apparently neither hungry nor sleepy, nor did he have any other interests that would distract him from keeping a sharp lookout for any danger that might threaten his little band.

Bob and I took turns watching while the other stretched out on the nice, soft, fluffy snow and tried to coax the kinks out of his system. One started to raise a fuss in the bottom of my foot, and I finally had to drag off a tight-stuck shoe-pac to get at it. Bob was still chuckling at my contortions when he got a kink in the same place. I didn’t laugh at him; I just sneered!

A bit later I noticed a peculiar haze hanging over the end of the ridge. I watched it for long minutes, thinking at first it probably came from some prospector’s fire. Then it dawned on me that the column must be half a mile high, and that a whole mountainside would have to be on fire to make that much smoke.

“Hey, what’s that column of smoke?” I finally asked.Bob poked his head above our sheltering rock. “That’s

not smoke, that’s a snowstorm!” he exclaimed. “Look at the rams. That storm’s five miles away, but already they know what’s coming!”

They did, for a fact. They were racing for the timber of the lower ridges, pausing occasionally to turn and sniff the atmosphere, then continuing down the slope in a ge-ography-covering gait that would make a race horse pull a tendon.

Bob jumped up. “Let’s copy the rams and get back to the horses before that wind hits. If they ever break those picket ropes ---.” He didn’t finish, and he didn’t have to; fighting a blizzard on horseback and fighting it on foot are two very different matters.

We tore along as fast as we could, slipping and sliding, not making nearly as good time as the sheep had, but not doing badly. When we reached the horses those first puffs of wind were beginning to blow the snow in little swirls along the edge of the meadow. We threw on the saddles, bucked on chaps and spurs, untied our heavy coats from behind the cantles and bundled and buttoned up like a couple of mummies before spurring the ponies into a trot.

As we hit the first good vantage point on the way back to camp I turned in my saddle and looked toward Nine Mile Ridge. What had been a gorgeous panorama of snow-covered slopes and glittering glaciers such a short time before now resembled an impressionistic picture I once saw, entitled “London, Under Fog.” Twenty yards behind us was a blank gray wall. Swirling clouds of powder-like snow all but blinded us, and stung the skin, besides.

We made camp just before dark, iced up like arctic ex-plorers, and the horses we’d left behind nickered a wel-coming greeting. We beat the frozen knots out of their ropes, tied them farther back in a timbered draw that af-forded better shelter from the wind, strapped their saddle

PAGE 25

April/May 2010

seen him with the little fellows. You know, we might do some good at that – after the wind dies down.

The last thing I heard, as I drifted off to sleep that night, was the desolate moaning of the icy blast as it tore at our fl imsy shelter. The fi rst thing I heard next morning? The same miserable sound!

We bundled up in heavy gear and fought our way to the horses. They seemed plenty glad to see us, but maybe it was the huge canvas sacks of hay and the buckets of oats that made them muzzle us. They were fairly well sheltered in the belt of timber, and after making sure they were ac-curately tied, we slogged back to our tent and proceeded to moan on each other’s shoulders over the weather, at the same time stowing away prodigious quantities of goat chops and hotcakes. Even foul weather can’t take the edge from a hunter’s appetite!

A couple of hours later, stretched out on our sleeping bags, we were arguing which was better – to mount a tro-phy head over a papier-mache form or over the natural skull – when suddenly Bobby held up his hand.

For a minute I didn’t get it; then we both made a dive for the tent fl ap at once. A sudden stillness had settled out-side, and with the fl ap open we discovered a rapidly clear-ing sky. Gradually the canyon became visible, the haze of

windborne snow dissolved as the solar rays broke through the murk, and in a couple of hours the sun was shining as brightly as it had the day before.

“I’m going to take a picture of Ram Mountain before it blacks out again,” I chuckled. “Then I’ll have something to show my grandchildren, anyway. Kind of a ‘McAlmond was here’!”

We spent the rest of the day scanning the slopes for the dragging trails of sheep tracks, gathering fi rewood, and staking the horses on a high ridge, where thick stands of bunch grass – the protein of the high country – pushed through the snow.

At bedtime that night the stars were glittering in a cloudless sky, and Bob’s last admonition before turning in was, “When I holler in the morning, don’t give me that old business of , ‘Yeah, I’m awake; be right out.’ You wanta get up, ‘cause I think tomorrow will be your last ram hunt on the Yalakom this year.”

We were up and had the horses saddled and fed before the coffee boiled. When the fi rst pink of sunrise started to gild the tip of Shulaps, we rode down the slope for Blue Creek.

We hit the creek and unmistakable sheep sign at the same time. A string of blunt tracks led through birch and

PAGE 26

April/May 2010tamarack, following the watercourse, for half a mile, and then struck up a ridge. We tied the horses in a little open-ing, worked back up the hill we had just quit, and gave the opposite slope a going over with the glasses. The narrow line of sheep tracks zigzagged up to a bench, and then we lost it. Higher up on the slope we found lines in the snow that could have been more tracks, but at that distance it was impossible to tell.

Bob squinted at the sun, lit a cigarette, and watched the smoke curl lazily upward until a tiny, unseen air current caught it and wafted it down toward the valley.

The wind’s blowing down the canyon, and that’s fi ne if those sheep went up on Shulaps. We’ll have to leave the horses here and hit the slope on foot. Let’s go.”

After dropping back down to Blue Creek, we climbed rapidly for a few hundred yards over bare rock covered with fi ne moss and a couple of inches of snow. For every step we took ahead, we seemed to slide back two. At the fi rst bench we found our sheep trail and with the glasses followed if straight along a narrow, snow-fi lled draw up into the rimrocks.

It took a couple of hours to climb that slope, but at last we lev-eled out on the ridge. It was comparatively fl at, but cut with little draws, and every few hundred yards a huge snow-fi lled basin groped upward to the next peak. Little clumps of timberline conifers broke the mo-notony of snow; every saddle between the peaks was gale-scoured clean of vegetation.

We hunted slowly now easing up to every depression on hands and knees and carefully scanning each new sec-tion of terrain before exposing any portion of ourselves over the skyline. At about the third basin the tracks and pawings for moss and lichen were so fresh the snow was still sifting into them. Up there the snow was nearly a foot deep, and that made for easy tracking. Good tracking – but where were the sheep?

“Keep a cartridge in that barrel and get ready to shoot. I

smell rams!” Bob breathed excitedly.Now, I’ve heard of individuals who can smell game

of one kind or another, but this was the fi rst time I’d ever hunted with one and I was curious to see the outcome. I hadn’t long to wait.

An old pot-bellied ewe stalked out from behind a little clump of alpine growth and stared at us in disgust for a minute or two. Then she paddled up over the skyline, as casually as a matron off for a Saturday shopping trip. The little clump of roof-top trees was a scant fi fty yards from us. There wasn’t room enough behind it to hide any more

sheep, and from there to the top of the next mountain point was a good 300 yards of clean white snow, with not so much as a rock to mar its white, fl eecy surface.

I started to make a few caustic remarks about guys who look like wolves but lack their keenness of scent, but Bob was already headed on a dead run for the next rim. Lack-ing anything better to do at the moment, I fl oun-dered along in his wake. Six feet from the top of the ridge he yanked off his hat, motioned for me to do likewise, and we eased up to peer over.

The little bowl on the other side, at fi rst glance, seemed to be alive with sheep. Then I saw thaw that there were actually only fourteen – all ewes

and lambs. Pawing the snow away for nibble of sweet moss and tiny shrub leaves, they worked up the side of a steep slide, and in minutes were out of sight.

Once more we made a mad dash for the next rise, re-moved our hats, and took a gander over the skyline. This time Bob turned his head toward me with a smug “I told you so” grimace on his good-natured face.

Not twenty yards from us were two of the smallest bighorns I’ve ever seen, possible fi ve years old, their tiny horns fl aring aback slightly over their sweet little heads.

“I told you I smelled rams!” And this time the Wolf of the Yalakom fairly gurgled. “I never make a mistake in the smell of those babies.”

PAGE 27

April/May 2010

“Babies is right!” I hooted. “Surely you don’t call those things rams? Throw ‘em back, boy, and let ‘em grow up. I came up here for the king-pin himself, not camp meat. By the way, is your wrist lame?”

“OK, so they aren’t record heads. They’re rams, aren’t they? It isn’t everybody that can smell a ram, you know… Sure my wrist is all right. Why should it be lame?”

“From patting yourself on the back!” I said – and ducked.

Meanwhile, the diminutive he-sheep had been working into a little draw; now they moseyed out of sight, ahead to the next promontory, when an ewe appeared on the rise. We sank quickly to our knees and, wriggling our legs like a couple of caterpillars, eased backward out of sight. The ewe seemed un-decided about her next move. She sniffed the wind to the west, shuf-fl ed her feet, swung her head this way and that for a moment, then trot-ted a few steps down the slope.

Close behind her trailed a couple of lambs. Then came an-other ewe and, strung along the slope for 100 yards, the rest of the band of fourteen ewes and lambs we had seen earlier.

Their very attitude indicated apprehension, but of what we couldn’t fi gure. The sky was clear except for a few feathery clouds, the air was motionless, and not a sound broke the intense stillness of Shulaps Peak.

Suddenly the fi ve-year olds broke over the rim on a dead run, raced halfway down the slope, skidded to an abrupt halt, and turned to face fearfully back the way they had come, every line of their little bodies full of foreboding.

“What’s the matter with those fool sheep?” Bob growled. “They act like the Old Nick was prodding ‘em with a hot poker!” And, almost in the next breath, “Look at that!”

Trotting along, covering ground with an effortless ease that belied his actual bulk, his magnifi cent outcurling horns waving, came the boss ram himself. Despite the distance

between us, and the fact that I hadn’t had too much experi-ence in looking over bighorns, I knew this was a trophy ram.

His course was parallel to us, and he appeared to have a defi nite goal in view, for he looked neither to right nor left but paced straight through the ranks of his little band, over the brink of the canyon and out of sight. We waited an agonizing couple of minutes while the two baby rams and the ewes and lambs scuttled over the edge in his wake.

“Come on – get that pepperbox of yours ready for ac-tion,” Bob snapped, jumping to his feet and taking off in his regulation mountain gait. “It takes a lot to spook those

babies like that, and I think it’s more wind. They can smell a storm farther than any weather man.”

We pulled up short at the top of the far-fl ung mountain slope. Blue Creek was a couple of miles below. Some scattered ledges and, at the extreme lower side of the mountain, a few clumps of timberline spruce afforded the only cover in the entire ba-sin. Far below us our lit-tle band of sheep stood, their heads all turned up the canyon, appar-ently sniffi ng the air that eddied gently down the valley. The one big ram, his gigantic horns raised, was on a little promontory a couple of hundred feet above the others. He was a beauti-ful sight – but it would

soon fade from the pic-ture, so far as I could judge.

Bob’s face was serious as, after one quick look through his glasses, he lowered them and looked at me.

That’s a forty-incher, but our hopes of getting him are mighty slim. There’s a wind coming, and the faster we get down out of here the better chance we’ll have of hunting sheep another time. I can overcome pretty near everything but the weather. About that, I can do nothing. We’d better start now before it hits us.”

“Can’t we kind of trail along after that ram?” I persisted. “And maybe get a shot at him, down below someplace?”

I knew that to try to return to this country again that

PAGE 28

April/May 2010

year, if we once got out, would be suicidal. The sands of opportunity had about run out along with the horse feed; but I wanted another squint at that ram, this time through the tube of the Weaver scope on my .30/06 bolt-action Sav-age, Model 40, which my fingers were now caressing with a “rub the lamp and make a wish” attitude.

“We’ll try,” Bob muttered and headed down the slope. As he did so he pulled his parka hood in place over his head and buttoned his heavy coat, for now the first tiny puff of frigid mountain air sighed around the shoulder of the ridge. Little scuds of snow vapor were settling over the brows of the higher peaks, and we knew we were in for it.

We worked down the slope a short distance, then head-ed for the snow-filled draw up which we had plodded ear-lier in the day. The trail the sheep had made, climbing, was easy to follow down the mountainside, and we shuffled along in silence, each with his own thoughts. Mine were pretty gloomy, for each minute was taking me farther and farther away from the big ram.

Half a mile from Blue Creek the storm hit us, with all the pent-up fury those mountain winds can develop. Snow, gale-driven, lashed at us, and visibility shut down to a mat-ter of yards. Right under the lowest bench we paused, part-ly protected from the wind, to get our breath, scrape snow off our whiskers, and slap our arms around, for in spite of the fur-lined gloves we wore, our fingers were stiff from the cold. Then we dived out into the blasting wind once more and fought our way through willows into the creek bottom.

Upon reaching the horses I buckled on chaps and spurs and – with Bob close behind, dragging the pack horse we had brought along in case of a kill – headed down the canyon. The wind was blowing in sporadic, gale-strength gusts now. There’d be several terrific blasts …. a pause long enough for the swirling snow to settle…. and then a repeat.

When I came to the almost obliterated tracks our horses had made earlier in the day, proceeding down the ridge from camp. I pulled up and turned in the saddle to ask Bob if he wanted to take the same way back. I found him stopped 100 yards behind me, his head tilted toward the mountain we had just quit. His eyes were slitted, his face was a study of amazement. He motioned imperatively, and I wheeled my horse and spurred back to him.

“There go our sheep!” he cried. “See those tracks? I’ll bet they aren’t more’n ten minutes ahead of us. Let’s keep on down the canyon, fast as we can. And if you spot that big ram, for Pete’s sake shoot straight. It’s your last chance!”

Every 100 yards or so we could see the fresh tracks of the little band along the timbered lower slope, now and then dropping almost to the creek bottom, then winding uphill for a short distance. We followed them nearly a mile, and I’ll confess I was getting more dispirited every slip-ping, sliding step my horse took. The wind was moving

the snow around in circles - “rolling it all up in a bunch,” as Bob said afterward, “and then chucking it in our faces.” We worked through a willow-choked draw and came out on an open, snow-covered slope, bordered by frowning rimrock.

And then we hit the jackpot. Fourteen ewes and lambs stared at us with eyes that fairly popped.

Two startled young rams bounded out of the willows just below us. And the monarch himself was square in the center of an open snow field, with no shelter for nearly a quarter of a mile in his choice of three directions.

For once, all my reactions worked like a flash, and in unison. But for that matter, so did the ram’s! Someone once said that a prime bighorn ran, if really spooked, can outrun nearly any other animal on this planet. I believe this one could have spotted the fastest of quadrupeds 100 yards, that stormy afternoon, and beat him in a 220-yard dash.

The cross hair in my Weaver scope rested on the ram’s weaving figure, blurred up with snow mist, and cleared momentarily, only to jiggle all around the target for the space of a heartbeat. Then, when the field was filled with rough, tan hair, I squeezed off the trigger.

Nothing happened, except that the huge sheep increased his speed by a few knots. Yanking the rifle bolt, I slammed another cartridge into the chamber, rested the cross hair on the rapidly disappearing body, and pulled the trigger again.

A second later there wasn’t a thing to be seen – no ram, no ewes, no lambs, nothing but three horses, a very dis-gusted guide, and one hunter whose ego was rapidly reach-ing a new low.

I stuffed a fresh clip into my rifle and, mumbling that I’d take a look, just on the chance I’d hit my ram, struggled up the slope, chaps flapping, spurs tripping me every third step. Before I got to the spot where the ram had taken off, I saw the yard-wide streak of scarlet in the snow. Joyfully I whirled and shouted, “Hey, I got him!” Without waiting for an answer, I galloped on up the ridge.

The blood trail streaked the side of the mountain, clear to the rimrocks. That 180-grain expanding bullet had done terrific damage, apparently, for that ram was really leak-ing. A quarter of a mile up the slope I stopped to catch a breath. Down below me, Bob was leading the horse into a sheltering patch of willows. Then a scud of wind-driven snow blotted out the whole area, and the wind tore at me as though to drive me from the tracks I was so hotly fol-lowing up.

Into the rocks the trail led, winding in and out – some-times a great patch of scarlet showing where the ram had pause for a brief rest, then a thin sprinkling as he staggered on, then another blotch of red.

I gained a rocky ledge, stepped around a boulder – and came face to face with my wounded quarry. Noble head hanging, swaying from side to side, the sheep stood, propped on legs from which the strength was fast ebbing.

PAGE 29

April/May 2010

He took one hesitant step toward me, staggered, and fell. His eyes were still bright, but I could see the hole in his side plainly now, blood dripping out of it onto the snow.

Propping my rifle against a bush, I unbuttoned my coat, reached for my hunting knife, turned back – and faced death, in the form of a very much alive bighorn ram!

His head was held high, a trickle of blood and va-por came from his tight-pinched nostrils, and the look in his eyes was not that of a dying animal at the end of the trail; rather it was the age-old, defiant, last-ditch stand of a wounded animal at bay – dying, but capable of terrific damage with the last few beats of a mighty heart.

I whirled back and seized my ri-fle, pushing off the safety as I turned. Then the mountainside slammed into me and knocked me almost off my feet. The ram had struck me a glanc-ing blow on the hip. And now, from fifteen feet away, bounding on legs that were strong with the desire to kill, he came at me again in a charge that was for keeps!

There was no time to aim; it was all I could do to point my Savage Su-per Sporter in his general direction and pull the trigger. But at the roar

of the shot the sheep reared like a tightly reined horse and came down on stiff legs, to shake his head vigorously as though bee-stung.

With the click-clack of the bolt his eyes focused on me again. This time, however, the cross in the scope was on the point of his shoulder, and before he could gather his forces the bullet crashed into him.

The drama was over.It must have been twenty below, up there on the face of

the mountain, but sweat was running down my face – and freezing on my chin. Weakly I struggled to my feet and,

approaching gingerly, examined the ram for any sign of further violence. My precautions were unnecessary, however. His beautiful golden eyes were dimming and in a moment had glazed in death.

While I stood admiring the mag-nificent specimen that had fallen, game to the last, to my rifle, Bob’s voice sounded out of the storm:

“What’s going on up here?” And after a pause, while he climbed around the rock and reached my side: “Wow! That’s some ram! What’d you shoot twice for – slipping?”

“I squirted one over his head, then

PAGE 30

April/May 2010

got the next one in his shoulder,” I explained. “This wind isn’t just ideal for shooting.”

Then and there, in the foul weather, we cleaned out the carcass, probing as we went. One of my shots had hit well back in the ribs, blown up, and made a mess of the intes-tines. Another had landed just above the kidneys, smashing a section of the back and tearing a hole out the other side as large as a man’s fi st. The last shot, in the shoulder, had blown the noble heart to bits – and saved me a real rough-ing up, perhaps death, I decided as I silently observed it.

Both horns were broomed, and there was no way of knowing how much of their tips were gone. But Bob’s fi rst estimate had been accurate, as the horns had an extreme outside curl of forty and one quarter inches and the cir-cumference at base measured sixteen and one eighth inch-es – no world’s record but getting up there just the same.

As for the meat, it was as delicious as any epicure’s dream – fi nely fl avored and textured, in spite of the ram’s age, which, according to the rings on the horns was better than fourteen years.

It was not until the next day, when we stopped far down the Yalakom to give the horses a blow and to tighten packs, that we noticed the deep groove in the ram’s left horn, where my bullet had stopped him in his tracks and

given me time for the fi nishing shot.When Bob Land reads this, it will be the fi rst intima-

tion he will have had that, in spite of all the gabbling I did about how a hunter mustnever put aside his rifl e before making sure the quarry is down for the count, I did that very thing – and almost for the last time.

Somehow, I just didn’t have the guts to tell him.

Outdoor Life – June 1947

PAGE 31

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April/May 2010

ON A LIGHTER NOTE!

Mean Pit BullA woman was leaving a 7-11 with her morning coffee when she noticed a most unusual funeral procession approach-ing the nearby cemetery. A long black hearse was followed by a second long black hearse about 50 feet behind.

Behind the second hearse was a solitary woman walking a pit bull on a leash.

Behind her were 200 women walking single file.

The woman couldn’t stand her curiosity. She respectfully approached the woman walking the dog and said “I am so sorry for your loss and I know now is a bad time to disturb you, but I’ve never seen a funeral like this.

Whose funeral is it?”

The woman replied “Well, that first hearse is for my husband.”

“What happened to him?”

The woman replied “My dog attacked and killed him.”

She inquired further, “Well, who is in the second hearse?”

The woman answered, “My mother-in-law. She was trying to help my husband when the dog turned on her.”

A poignant and thoughtful moment of silence passes between the two women.

“Could I borrow that dog?”

Get in line.”

tough Call!!!A group of friends went deer hunting and paired off in twos for the day. That night, one of the hunters re-turned alone, staggering under the weight of an eight-point buck. “Where’s Henry?” “Henry had a stroke of some kind. He’s a couple of miles back up the trail.” “You left Henry laying out there and carried the deer back!?!” “A tough call,” nodded the hunter, “but I figured no one is going to steal Henry.”

PAGE 33


CURRENT NEWSPennsylvania deer harvest down 8% from 2008

The state’s estimated deer harvest was the lowest since 1986-87.The 2009-10 Pennsylvania deer season was the least successful season

for hunters in 23 years, according to figures released Monday by the state Game Commission.

Hunters harvested an estimated 308,920 deer in Pennsylvania this past season - a drop of 8 percent from the 2008-09 season.

That figure was the lowest since 1986-87, the first year of the Game Com-mission issuing a calculated harvest, rather than a reported harvest, to com-pensate for a decline in hunter reporting rates.

The 1986-87 estimated harvest was 300,014. In subsequent years, the deer harvest rose in a mostly steady fashion, peaking at 517,529 in 2002-03 - the first year of the Game Commission’s antler restrictions.

Applications for 2010 Pronghorn and Elk HuntsPHOENIX - The regulations for Arizona’s 2010 elk and pronghorn antelope

seasons are available online at www.azgfd.gov/draw and hunters interested in obtaining a hunt permit-tag via the draw process can start applying now.

Applications must be submitted to the Arizona Game and Fish Department by U.S. mail to P.O. Box 74020, Phoenix, AZ 85087-1052 or hand-delivered to any department office by Tuesday, Feb. 9, 2010 by 7 p.m. (MST) - postmarks do not count.

Hunters are reminded a 2010 hunting license is required to apply. Depart-ment officials encourage hunters to get their license before applying for an elk or antelope hunt permit-tag if they wish to do any other hunting in early 2010. Licenses purchased through the draw process will not be mailed out until after the draw is completed.

Gettin’ to Know Her

April/May 2010

As I looked through the palmetto branches I could see several hens approaching our blind. They worked their way, scratching and pecking up to the decoys, taking a good look at them. As they leisure-ly moved on my guide, award winning Pennsylva-nia call maker, Pat Strawser, said in a quiet whis-per, “the boys should be along anytime now.”It was about 4:00 o’clock in the afternoon and the warm Florida sun was just starting to cast a few shadows on the pasture where I was hunting for Osceola tur-key. I was sitting there thinking,” it has been a year since I was last on this ranch near Orlando, turkey hunting and here I am on opening day again.” Pat gave a few yelps on one of his custom slate calls and sure enough, it was no time, when through the brush to our left I spotted two red heads.

I was hunting with friend and out-fitter, Jim Conley, for the fourth year and I knew my chances would be great for a turkey on this piece of property. Jim re-ally knows his prop-erties and puts a lot of time and work into offering a first class Osceola turkey hunting experience. Along with great property to hunt, he is fortunate to have two great guides, Pat Strawser and Scott Basehore. Scott is also from Pennsylvania and a NWTF awarding winning box call maker and ex-perienced guide. Jim’s credentials are impressive, with 27 year’s experience outfitting and guiding for Osceola turkey in Florida. It is such an honor to hunt with these fine guys. I have learned a lot about turkey hunting and calling from them over the past few years. Jim and his team really know how to do things right. They do not pressure birds by overhunting their areas or take more birds than the area can comfortably produce. His main concern is to practice sound turkey management. He wants to make sure the last hunters in camp for the season

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have equal chances at birds as do the first hunters. Jim’s record for the last few years reflects his qual-ity operation, with 100% of his clients having op-portunities at birds.

As the two adult gobblers approached, I was glad to see they were already concentrating on the mounted full strut gobbler and hen decoys we had positioned in front of our blind. I was hoping they would work their way to us and end up around the decoys for a good close shot. I was looking at the pair through my binoculars when Pat gave them sev-eral more soft yelps and they were hooked. Pat had his video camera trained on the two fine birds and it looked like I was only going to be minutes away from a perfect opportunity at an Osceola gobbler.

I slowly eased the 20 gauge up to my shoulder and in no time I was looking down the rib, placing the glowing sights on the larger of the two toms. Both birds were intrigued with their new gobbler pal and paid us no atten-tion in the blind. As the pair reached the decoys they started to strut and display.As I was beginning

to take finer aim at the lead bird there was no doubt in my mind the 20 gauge I was shooting would do the job. I had completed my pre-hunt preparation “gettin’ to know her” at home, weeks before this moment.

With recent developments in chokes, shot shell turkey loads, calls, decoys and other equipment hunters have an array of great products to choose from. These products can help make their turkey hunting experience more enjoyable and productive. I decided on the 20 gauge as the gun of choice this year to take a Grand Slam. I thought it would add an extra element of excitement and challenge to an already thrilling hunt. I knew if I was going to use a 20 gauge, I would need to take the necessary steps

April/May 2010

to make sure my equipment was in order and the best it could be for the four bird quest. I have de-coys, good camouflage, a vest, well worn but still usable, a pair of Russell turkey boots, optics, and a good foam seat cushion. Calls are an important aspect of the hunt, so I decided to buy a few extras from Pat and Scott and add to my arsenal. You just can’t have enough quality turkey calls, if you know what I mean.

The firearm and ammo was all that remained to get ready. Most any model 20 gauge will work for turkey hunting if it patterns well. The 20 gauge is a great turkey gun for youngsters or ladies and proved to be very effective in the field for me as well. The lighter weight, smaller dimensions and less recoil makes it the perfect gun for the smaller frame hunt-ers. I already own a Beretta 391 20 gauge automatic that has been on a lot of upland hunts and sport-ing clay ranges, so why not use it for the season. It’s a sporting model with non-reflective oil finished wood and has a 26” barrel. All I added was camo tape to most of the metal to cut down the shine. I did not want to scope the gun with optics, even though that is a great option for a turkey gun, be-cause of drilling the receiver for mounts or buying special mounts and optics. It did however need a better sighting system rather than a silver bead, so I installed a HiViz set of glow sights to make aiming more visible and accurate. Now all I needed was the right choke and efficient patterning ammo to com-plete the 20 gauge turkey package.

The first thing to do was call my friend, Joe Mo-rales, at Rhino for one of his super shooting turkey

chokes to fit the Beretta. Over the years, using Joe’s choke tubes for sporting clays, waterfowl, turkey and upland I knew with the right ammo the 20 gauge would be lethal on gobblers. After testing numerous models of after market choke tubes in 12 gauges, I was convinced that the longer length and ventilated design delivers better overall shot patterns than most factory supplied tubes. I had another turkey choke by Pure Gold and I would also test the factory, full to provide three options. The ammo was the next thing to get together. While at the NWTF convention in Atlanta I talked with Mike Goodwill from Hevi-Shot about their 20 gauge turkey loads. Hevi-Shot holds many NWTF World records on paper targets so it must be great patterning loads. The pellets are made of a denser tungsten material which is heavier than lead so it has more down range energy provid-ing increased knock down power at extended turkey ranges. You can also shoot smaller shot like 6’s with the same knock down energy as the next size larger in lead. With more pellets in the load of a smaller size you understandably should get a denser pattern. In the 20 gauge I selected 3” 1 ounce #5’s and #6’s and purchased some for my testing. I also had oth-er 3” loads to test from other manufactures in #5’s so the test would be accurate and comparable. You can do this type of testing to whatever lengths you want. In 12 gauges you can try several models of choke tubes with different choke constrictions and all types of loads 2 ”, 3”, 3 ”, plus different shot sizes, to find out what combination yields the best patterns. Depending on what you want to spend, the sky is the limit. For the 20 gauge it’s pretty much a

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April/May 2010

standard 3” with 1 ounce of shot, so I had what I needed to make an evaluation and select a combina-tion that would be effective.

My testing objective was to determine the opti-mum choke and load combination that produced the best overall uniform patterns. I also wanted to get an idea of what my maximum effective range was go-ing to be with the right combination. For the pattern performance testing, I was going to start with paper tar-gets showing a turkey head and neck silhou-ette exposing the neck bone and skull struc-ture, outlined for easy reference. The instruc-tions on the targets was to start at a mid range, say 30 yards and work back until at least 5 pellets were stillin the harvest zone of the head and neck.After just 2 shots I saw quickly that I could easily move back 5 or 10 yards so I placed my shooing bench at 40 yards, measured with my Nikon range finder. I wanted a better pattern than just 5 pellets in the harvest zone, so I decided the bench-mark would be 7 or more. Before going to the range I made a chart on a piece of paper with each choke tube and load that I was going to try so I could keep things straight and record the results. I also had all of my targets labeled to correspond with my chart so I could record data at the range or at home later. For safety and comfort I used shooting glasses, hearing protection and a shoulder pad from Sims to tame the recoil. I was now ready for a full bore testing session. I began to test all three choke tubes with each of the shot shells. I quickly noticed that all the loads in the after market chokes performed as I had hoped with 7 or more pellets in the harvest zone. The factory full choke, however, did not perform nearly as well at 40 yards so I eliminated it as a choice. It was difficult to see on the small sheet of paper but I noticed that some of the patterns were a little off to one side or the other or up and down and

had a few holes. This could affect the count in the harvest zone because of the thin upright position of the turkey head and neck. Aiming a shotgun barrel shooting a shot string is much different than aiming a scoped rifle shooting one projectile.

I remembered reading an illustration in the Hevi-Shot literature that showed a test with10” circles

and counting the den-sity of the pellets so I decided to do more testing with that meth-od. I bought some large 22”x 28” sheets of white paper for my test. I drew lines from corner to corner to get dead center. Next I took an 11” dinner plate, positioned it in the center of the paper and drew a circle. The circle was divided up

into 4 quadrants from the crossed lines and made for easy pellet hole counting in each pie shaped area. Then I placed in the center of the 11” circle a stick on orange 3” bull’s eye or you can draw a 3” circle and colored it in so, you have a perfect aiming point, like the head of a big tom. I also made up a few extra sheets so I could test the gun with bird shot at closer ranges to make sure the barrel was aligned with the sights. I drew up another chart, as before, to keep things in order and I was ready for the range again.

Once at the range I moved the bench to 20 yards and positioned my sand bags to provide a steady rest. I shot the sight in test targets at 20 and 30 yards using the bird shot with excellent results. The gun was shooting perfect, so I moved the bench to 40 yards and began the test. I noticed while shooting it was much easier to sight and position the gun the same each time on the bright colored bull’s eye. You could really see the difference in patterns on the large sheet of white paper. I noticed quickly that Hevi-Shot had a large concentration of hits in the 11” circle plus an even number of hits over the rest of the paper. Trying to count all those little pellet holes takes time, so I waited until I was back home to

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April/May 2010

finish the task. After recording and reviewing the re-sults it was evident that the Hevi-Shot load with the Rhino choke tube was the best combination. Several other combinations of chokes and shells also passed my test bench mark and would have been effective choices as well. I was very pleased with my testing research and was confident the 20 gauge would eas-ily harvest a gobbler at 40 to 45 yards if conditions were right and the shot was true. It was well worth the time and effort “gettin’ to know her” and what she could do at the moment of truth. A lot of hunting success is confidence in your equipment and how it will perform in the field.

The glowing sights settled just below the big gobblers red head. As I squeezed the trigger I real-ized I was about to take my fourth Osceola turkey in as many years. The shot was perfect and the big tom crumpled to the ground. The second gobbler spun

around and then paused to check out his buddy flop-ping by the decoys before he left the scene. Just a few rolls on the ground and he was finished. The twenty had closed the deal and my quest for the 20 gauge Grand Slam was under way. Pat and I sat tight for a few minutes and talked about the sequence of events that had just happened. It was a great reward-ing hunt for both of us. It’s nice to share your hunt-ing experiences with someone that shares your pas-sion for the great wild turkey. When we approached the downed bird we could tell he was a nice gobbler. We took him back to camp for pictures and some measurements. He was 20 pounds with a thick 9 ” beard and 1 ” hooked spurs. Jim was all smiles and I told him to hold my spot for next year. What a great Osceola tom and end to a perfect Florida tur-key hunt.

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Author; December, 2008 Outfitter; Jim Conley Mike Ingold Outdoor Adventures Ltd.1308 Wrenwood Ct Orlando FL.Salisbury, NC 28146 Osceola Turkey704-798-0667 (407) [email protected]

Equipment:Beretta 391 20 gauge automaticHevi-Shot ammoHiViz sightsPat Strawser slate callsNikon binoculars and range finderMossy Oak camoRhino choke tubes

It’s true what they say about rainbows!” my son Lowell called to me from across the narrow river. On a rock by his side lay three rainbow trout weighing up to two pounds apiece. And he’d been in that spot only fifteen minutes.

He made another cast. His crazy looking fly, a big thing predominantly yellow, landed where the swift cur-rent of the Dean slowed down as it flowed into a pool that was almost the size of a pond. Near the pool’s cen-ter and beyond casting range, a big rainbow had been rolling at the surface now and then, leaving wide rings. Lowell released line and the current took the fly and swept it toward those eye-filling rises. I watched.

The boy’s rod jerked violently and his reel screamed so loudly I could hear it above the chuckle of the water. Lowell’s eyes fairly popped. He held his rod high but could no more check that fish than if it had been a range steer. There was no backing on his reel. The line peeled off, the rod momentarily took a dangerous curve, and then something snapped. Lowell looked at his gear in dismay. “Oh boy,” he yelled, “these rainbows are fight-ing fools! That was a buster – as strong as a tarpon.”

I was wet from top to toe and chilled through, but I had to smile. My memory went back eighteen years to the day when my son, then only ten, and I fished a lake in northern Vermont and he caught his very first fish – a

there I was, perched on a nar-row stringpiece, fighting a rod-bending lunker of a trout that had made up its mind to goelsewhere - fast

Rainbow Reunion

4 ½ pound lake trout. Cradling it in his arms, he told me it had fought “like a tarpon.” Now it seemed like a pretty good world to a father who could have the chance to fish once more with his son after a ten year wait.

This trip into British Columbia combined a reunion and a long delayed fishing date. Our last trip together had been way back in 1940, just before Lowell, fresh out of high school, had enlisted in the Army. A long stretch of service in Europe followed – three wounds, capture and escape, a decoration, steady progress, and finally a battlefield promotion to command of an infan-try company. Then came the end of the war, and he took a four year course in Washington State College, almost across the wide continent from his New Jersey home.

And then his gradu-ation in 1950 – with his dad’s attendance a must. At last, after ten years, a fishing reunion was possible.

Ray Cole, a friend of mine living in the Puget Sound area, learned that I was coming out to the commencement and would spend a few days fishing with my son, so he shot an air mail letter to me. “Hold everything,” he wrote. “I’ll drive over to the college right after com-mencement, get you and your son, and take you to a place I’ve fished for ten years, up in British Columbia. It will be a little early for the best fishing, but we’ll have sport. Both the rainbows and the country are really wild.”

“Offer accepted, thanks,” I wired back. “This should be good.”

Ray drove us about 750 miles northwestward into the interior of Brit-ish Columbia, to a moose, grizzly, and mule deer region where a name on the map doesn’t indicate a town or village but a log ranch house on the only road in a vast wilderness. The railroad was some 200 miles away, the nearest store 100.

We passed through tiny places with such flavorful names as Lac la Hache, 150 Mile House, and Cache Creek. It was the first week in June, yet the ice had left many of the lakes only a few days earlier. Back in New Jersey the trees had been in full leaf when I left, the lilacs had blossomed and gone, and the meadows were knee-deep in grass. But up here the aspens were just coming into bud, and the lofty mountains still carried

byALLEN PArSONS

April/May 2010

sheets of snow from their crests almost to the valleys at their feet. Even the names of the rivers sounded wintry – Chilcotin, Chilenko, and Chilko.

The recent winter had been wintry enough. Sam Bar-riman, proprietor of a little hotel at Alexis Creek, re-membered it with loathing. He’d spent many a sleepless night stoking his wood burning stoves so the plumbing wouldn’t freeze. Temperatures ranged continuously from 40 to 64 degrees below zero. The day came when he could write in his diary: “Mercury has risen to 22 below. Thank God spring is here.”

That winter Barriman’s wood burners required stok-ing every half hour. He discovered that it took a teakettle the same length of time to come to a boil on the red-hot stove. So, in order to get some sleep, he fitted a whistle into its spout. Then he’d stoke the fire and flop down on a couch for a cat nap until the whistle screeched. He’d jump up, stoke the fire, and refill the kettle.

He burned more than thirty cords of wood that sea-son. And even then he couldn’t always keep the frost out of his hotel.

“I’ve seen some queer things in my time, too, and paid for the privilege. Take that couple last year. There’s a lake not far from here – Winter Lake – that doesn’t have many trout, but what it does have are big. Last year a man and his wife were stopping here who could really fish – and swim! The man bet me $5 he could swim out into the lake with a fully rigged rod, cast while swimming, and take a trout. I covered his bet, and then his wife said, “I’ll bet you another $5 I can do the same thing.”

“Well,” Ray Cole continued, “that looked like a sure thing, so I covered her bet too. And each of them swam way out into the lake and take a fine trout apiece. It was worth the ten bucks to see them do it.”

After a brief stop at Barriman’s we moved on to Kleena Kleene, our destination. There we had a wide choice of lakes and streams for our first day’s fishing, and we settled on the Dean River. Ray’s car was too low to clear the primitive road we had to travel to the river, so Clarence MacKill, our host at a ranch lodge, drove us over. The going was really rugged. We got mired twice and had to corduroy the ruts with timber to get out. The tires took a beating – we had three flats.

The Kleena Kleene country is very thinly populated, with more Indians than whites. Its few log ranch houses are far apart, and cattle raising is the chief activity. As we drove along we noticed that each pothole near the road had its pair of ducks – mallards, widgeon, pintails, or teal. The only travelers we met were Indians – in

each case, riding a farm wagon mounted on automobile wheels and drawn by two horses. Two fat squaws were on the driver’s seat, and the wagon body crawled with swarthy kids. Each wagon was accompanied by Indian men mounted on roman-nosed horses.

From the air the Dean River must look like turquoise beads strung loosely along a silver wire. The beads are small ponds – widenings of the river – and separating them are stretches of rapids, pools, and glides, with the water the color of weak coffee. We stopped at a primi-tive little wooden bridge spanning the stream, and I got out in a hurry to see what the river was like.

When you approach a water new to you – water that’s been highly praised – you learn to discount the advance reports. Too many times in the past you’ve been met with alibis – water too low, too high, too clear, too mud-dy; weather too cold, too hot, too windy; wind in wrong quarter; low barometer; and lots of others. Just once you’d like to fish a place where alibis aren’t needed. I was looking at such a place – but I didn’t know it then.

As I stood on the bridge I noticed a stranded log, perhaps fifty feet downstream. The swift current hit it, bounced back, swung to the left, and then raced around it, leaving a small foam-flecked eddy. As I watched I saw a big swirl in the eddy. I ran back to the car where Ray, Clarence, and Lowell had started to eat their sand-wiches.

“Put your rod together quick,” I bade Lowell. “A big trout just rose below the bridge.”

“You take him, Dad,” he replied. “I’m hungry as a wolf.”

There wasn’t time to put on wading boots. You have to get a trout like that while the feeding mood is on him. My fingers were all thumbs as I feverishly threaded the line through the guides and tied on a new nine-foot nylon leader, fresh from its crisp envelope. Then I at-tached a No. 8 Grizzly King wet fly, for rainbow seem to like color. Never before had the first trout I’d seen on a fishing trip been of trophy size, and it was too much to hope that my initial cast would be successful. If I cast an inch too far the fly would catch on the log; if I dropped the lure two feet short it would miss the eddy and be hurried away by the current.

I made several false casts, letting out line until it seemed I had just enough. And when I actually cast, judgment – and luck – dropped that fly only two inches from the log and sent it fluttering into the eddy. The water bulged and I struck.

What is the supreme moment in fly fishing? Is it the sight of the rise as a trout makes a pass at a natural in-

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sect, telling you it’s on the feed? Is it the cast that lands the artificial fly within the widening rings made by the rising fish? Is it the rise to your fly? Is it the solid little thunk when, with turn of wrist, you set the hook? Is it the ply of the fish on a light rod that seems to throb with life as every movement of the trout is carried to your hand? Or is it the final act of netting?

Every instant of that sequence is pleasurable, of course, but for me the biggest thrill, the supreme mo-ment, comes when a rise follows a good cast.

That rainbow was rambunctious. It was no trick to set the hook in his mouth, and it was probably the first time he had every felt one. To say that he was affronted by it is an understatement – he was out-and-out furious! He jumped, his pink-and-silver side flashing in the sun, then fell back with a shattering splash. He must have decided on his strategy while he was still in the air, for he didn’t pause a second after he hit the water, but raced around the end of the log and started for distant parts.

“Aye-yee!” I yelled. Let others pretend indifference when they hook a big one; I like to let myself go. When this trout had come out into the open I’d seen his dimen-sions, and to a New Jersey fisherman they were unbe-lievable. I just had to yell.

The sandwich eaters spilled out of the car in haste, their jaws working. An Indian family – squaws, chil-dren, horse-drawn wagon and outriders, passing on the road – stopped to see what all the ruckus was about. My reel was screaming bloody murder, the rod was in a vio-lent curve, and I was scrambling to get off that bridge down to where I could have it out with the fish on his own level. My thumb was getting a friction burn from pressing down on the rapidly departing line.

“Dad hooks in to a big one the first cast he makes,” said Lowell. “Just what kind of a river is this, anyway?”

“Looks as though mebbe he’s enjoying himself,” grinned Ray.

Hideous uncertainty hit me. When I’d put my rod together I’d hastily grabbed the first leader I’d touched. Just how strong was it? In my pouch were nine-foot leaders in an assortment of tapers that included 1X, 2X, 3X, and 4X. Now, you don’t get rough in laying a big rainbow on a leader with a 4X point. And I had to as-sume – since I didn’t know – that it was a 4X. A leader of that size is, of course, the most trifling of trifles to an indignant big fish unless you’re extremely careful in handling him and it.

By now my casting line was down to its backing – time to turn on a little pressure if that trout was to be halted in its flight. It tightened a little, half expecting

the leader point to break, since it was fighting not only the fish but the swift current. It held and the rainbow slowed up, then paused motionless in the water. Ah! The fish turned and shot back upstream.

Just for fun sometime, try playing a lunker fish as you scramble along the stringpiece of a bridge, leap from it to the ground below, and then weave through alders that reach out to clutch your rod and line, meanwhile grind-ing away at the reel handle. If you’re bothered with insomnia, summer complaint, sluggish liver, athlete’s foot, or the miseries of a gumboil, you’ll forget it. The whole act must look funny. I’d like to see someone else do it.

Now at last I was at stream level, with the trout still on. He put on an aerial show for the benefit of the gal-lery, and it met with applause. Lowell forgot to chew on his sandwich, while the Indians absorbed by the perfor-mance, made guttural sounds of approval.

“That’s no hatchery fish,” I yelled, when the rainbow pinwheeled violently along the surface of the river in a cascade of flying drops of water.

“Hatchery!” Ray snorted. “There never was a hatch-ery fish in these water. This is the real thing.”

The rainbow’s next run downriver fell short of the first in distance. His exertions were telling on him. He’d lived, an abundant, shrimp-fed life, and his own weight was telling on him. No longer did he heat up the reel; his runs became slow surges instead of swift, powerful flights.

The bank was thick with alders, allowing me no room in which to land the fish. Lowell was ready with his net, a commencement present from his sister, and stood by to christen it on its first fish.

Looking anxiously about, I noticed a quiet tongue of water behind the big log where I’d raised the trout. It was deep enough to prevent the fish from using its bottom as a springboard. I coaxed the rainbow out of the current and led him, like a stubborn calf, into this placid haven. Soon I figured it was safe to tow him to-ward where Lowell was waiting, but he stopped before I could get him very far.

Lowell leaned forward and peered into the water. “It’s no use, Dad,” he called. “There’s a lot of water-logged driftwood in there!”

I tested the big log with one foot; it seemed to be an-chored firmly. Lowell shoved the landing net under my left arm and I teetered out on the slippery log, rod held high. Now the rainbow was right below me, his gills working painfully and spasmodically, licked to a finish. I squatted and reached out with the net. It neared the

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trout’s nose, slid gently under his bulky body, and I was all ready for the big hoist.

Then the log rolled under my feet, almost pitching me into the water. I never did any of that log birling that you see in newsreels, and don’t want to. I swung like the pendulum of a clock, first forward, then backward. A fellow in that plight knows full well that he’s in for it, and might as well take his ducking, but hope dies hard. The landing net was no longer under the trout, but swishing though the air as though I were after but-terflies. No doubt the spectators were goggle-eyed, but I gave them no thought. Maybe the pendulum which was me tocked when it should have ticked. Anyway, I pitched head foremost right onto that trout.

Clarence charged into the water and pulled me out. I was gasping for breath, for that water had come straight from melting snow and ice. The trout, of course, was gone.

“That’s a new stunt, Dad,” said Lowell, “diving for trout.”

There was a cold wind out of the north, but I sat on a sunny knoll, peeled off all my clothes, wrung them out, then put the clammy things on again. As I did this I

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wondered: Was the leader I had on when I lost my rain-bow tapered to 1X, 2X, 3X, or 4X? Only a fragment of it was left, so I’ll never know.

Lowell, Ray, and I fished only about 100 yards of that river, down to where it entered the pond below, be-fore we quit to get me back to dry clothes and a hot stove. But we took twenty fine trout. Ray put back a 3 ¼ pound rainbow that was pink all over – a spawner – and Lowell did the same thing a few minutes later on one almost the same size.

“Wow!” he exclaimed. “I never thought the time would come when I’d be putting back three-pound trout!”

On the way to the lodge he told me: “Dad, we had to wait ten years for our fishing date, but the rainbows waited too.”

As I write this, Lowell is on the firing line in Korea, for the Army has him again. Will he often think of leap-ing rainbow in the Dean, and of his dad’s icy bath? I’m sure he will.



Here’s an article, with a “different” flavor, about a boat that’s different too. A two-man eighteen-footer, it’s equipped with outboard, sails, and oars, and the owner finds it just the thing for exciting seashore sport – tying into tuna and a 1,200-pound turtle in-cluded!

This craft – a modified Grand Banks dory, with a square stern and a special bottom designed for speed – is Moore’s own idea. It’s cheap to build, and he tells briefly how to do so. But even if you have no notion of duplicat-ing it, you’ll enjoy the author’s affectionate description of the selfsame skiff that figured in “I Went Whaling – Alone!”

That is one of the most excit-ing adventure stories we ever published. Now, in this article, Moore has other thrilling tales to tell about his stanch little dory!

Among an angler’s collection of rods there will al-ways be one special one. It probably has a set and likely is battered, but this makes little difference, for the rod is a trusted companion. It suits the man and his fishing, and so he loves the slender bamboo perhaps because, like himself, it is not perfect.

My Dory is a Sweetheartby Phil H. Moore

We took to the water when that wounded bear climbed into our little boat without an invitation!

April/May 2010

And so it is with other things, such as guns – and boats. Boats are what I like best. I have a dory --- But let me tell you about it in a moment, because fi rst I must put down how a friend of mine feels about his boat, for he sums up so well the way a man can have a fondness for a craft. My friend is an Indian, and one day I gave him a really beautiful canvas-covered canoe in a guide’s model. But I noted that he seldom used the craft. In-stead, he generally appeared paddling a little old birch-bark canoe that he’d made himself. He had fashioned it without nail or rivet; it was sewn together with pliable fi r roots, and pitched in the seams to make it tight. When I asked him why he didn’t use the nice new canvas canoe, he said, “I like him fi ne, your little paint boat. Great for show-off when summer girls come, but no good for Injun chasin’ grub. My bark, it’s wild like the food I go after. It’s quiet – same as good still hunter.” (A bark canoe does not “ring” when a paddle drops.) “My bark knows just what to do all the time.”

The Indian loved his boat. It was part of his life. There is nothing sentimental about it, just an understand-ing of wildlife, wild places – “hunches” if you will – that a man must cultivate before he can enjoy to its full the pleasure of fi shing, hunting, and camping.

As the Indian loved his bark canoe above all others, so in my own experience have I learned to value and trust one little boat among many others of different types and models. As mentioned, there is no sentiment to speak of attached to this skiff. But after you have been towed in a small boat by a bull moose, a lot of big sharks, an extremely angry 400-pound hooded seal, plenty of 1,000-pound tuna and swordfi sh, more than one buck deer, and a couple of black bears, a 650- pound sunfi sh, and a 1,200 – pound turtle, plus several grampuses and whales – and outlived it because of the sturdy type of boat you were in – you do get to have a fondness for the craft!

The ugliest “sea monster” this boat ever encountered was a big domestic bull. Some of the farmers near my camp have a large fl at-bottomed scow with rails on it. They use this for towing cattle out to pasture on some islands. My boat was lashed alongside and shoving the barge. A bull became frightened, made a couple of wild heaves, broke his halter, smashed through the rail, and fell into my dory! He immediately had the little ship all to himself. The bull struggled to his feet and the dory all but went over.

As the animal did not like the noise the outboard en-gine was making, he lunged toward it and tried to hook it. Over went the dory – but not all the way. The bull went into the water, and the dory – like the good little craft she is – righted herself. Then the critter tired to climb aboard the barge, fi lled, and headed for land a mile away. The owner, who was on the barge, nearly went crazy for alive

that bull was worth $1,000; in beef, about $100. He of-fered me $50 to save the animal, so my son and I jumped in the dory. My boy started the engine while I bailed out the water with a bucket. By the time we’d overhauled the bull, it was a very tired beast – and still ugly.

We managed to get a spare line over its short horns; but this it did not like, and again it headed for the shore, now towing the dory. The engine was cut off; but we knew this could not last. Soon the animal was exhausted and its head kept going under water, so we hauled up on the tow rope. When we got close the bull made a last des-perate effort to get one foot over the rail. But the effort was too much and the beast started to sink. We hauled up and took a hitch around its nose, yanked its head clear of the water, and made the rope fast to a cleat. Then my boy started the engine and navigated us to the shallow water of the beach at the landing. It took quite a while and the bull looked about dead by the time we arrived. That hitch around its nose must have made breathing diffi cult. Both of us jumped out into the shallow water and pulled the animal in as far as we could, meanwhile holding its head above water. Then we shook off the nose hitch. The old duffer gave a heave and a groan, and jumped to its feet with a grunt. It promptly charged at me but I dodged around the bow of the boat. The try was a valiant one but the animal was sick and weak. Nevertheless, its head hit the dory with a wallop like a smack from the tail of a whale! And my brand-new spare painter was still fast to the dory and the bull’s horns.

The boy helped me push the boat off into deeper water while the critter was gaining strength, and we tumbled into the craft. Here the water was too deep for the bull to make a fast rush at us, but it waded out and looked us over just the same. Paying out rope, we poled the boat over to the wharf and threw a couple of hitches over a

When the boat was crammed with trophies, we headed for the salt water

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April/May 2010

pile. At last we had the prize animal safely moored to the dock. The owner could take it from there – maybe!

Then we went back to the drifting barge with its load of angry men and bleating animals. And believe it or not, that man-cow stood knee-deep in the water and roared as it watched us go! Never had my dory and I seen such persistent attempts made by beast or fish to get the boat and its crew. That bull was worse than a bear. Of course, there was some carpentry work to be done to fix up the little boat inside, though her planking and timbers were not damaged. The creation of this tough, if small, hull was almost an accident in the first place. It seems to me as though I have spent half a merry lifetime building boats and then trying to smash ‘em up!

Some of you may remember a huge and wicked de-pression that struck the world like a hurricane away back in 1929. It may be recalled that the lack of money at that period forced many boat enthusiasts to change their plans suddenly. Conditions likewise changed the plans of a lot of marine architects and boat yards.

One day I found myself without a boat. Nevertheless, I had planned a hunting trip among the big lakes of Nova Scotia, and I had to have a craft for the trip – depression or otherwise. As I had somehow saved one ten-horse-power two-cylinder outboard motor from the wreck, it looked as though I had better get a boat upon which I could use this motor. I needed a craft that could stand the very rough seas on the Lake Rossignol waters, and yet be transported on a trailer or wagon. No varnished-over plaything would do.

So I went to Lunenburg, where they build Grand Banks dories for deep-sea fishing. The ordinary pointed stern of a dory being no good for an outboard engine, I ordered a regular two-man dory in all respects, with the exception of making the stern square. The dory build-ers laughed at me but built it just the same. I ordered it Monday morning and took it away from the shop the fol-lowing Wednesday afternoon, though the paint was still sticky. The bill for this craft was a mere $40! I bought a secondhand dory mainsail and jib. Later I cut a slit in the boat’s bottom and build a centerboard box, hanging an iron centerboard in it.

This boat was an instant success. She would go to windward under sail sufficiently to help me get home, and under power she would plane with two men in her. In putting on a square-stern transom the builders had tak-en all the curve, or shear, out of the bottom and garboards from amidships aft, and had quite unwittingly made a hydroplane of her.

Our Lake Rossignol trip lasted two weeks. The boat performed splendidly in the rough inland waters; also she brought us luck. From her we lassoed a buck deer which we released; shot a big bull moose that had taken to the water; and from her we also tangled with a bear –

the affair ending by us hunters taking to the water when bruin climbed aboard! Wounded animals are likely to do unpredictable things. Needless to say, my carbine was temporarily mislaid. But we got the bear finally, and so the new dory was full of game the first trip. Later we took her down to the ocean.

Now, after many more years of adventure and of knocking about under rugged conditions, and tangling with all sorts of sea monsters, as well as an ocean trip of many hours in tow of a large whale, I found the craft needed some repairs. That story about the dory’s adven-ture with the whale appeared in Outdoor Life in March 1945, and was reprinted in book form in the Best Sport Stories of 1945. Not many cheaply built boats could have stood the yanking and pounding this dory had to en-dure in a rough sea – with a whale doing the dirty work. But Grand Banks dories are stoutly built. In all the years I used mine I never had to fix up any strained timbers, nor did anything pull apart. Ordinary rot, and nothing else, dictated the recent repairs that made this old craft practically new again.

During the late war the dory did stunts along this coast that are still secret. She could go anyplace where there was water. On one occasion, while being dropped to leeward with oars, she was swamped by a breaking wave and tipped out her two life-jacketed passengers. The craft all but rolled over, filled, righted herself, and slopped out some of the water. Then the men scrambled back in and bailed out the rest. Now, beneath the after thwart had been lashed two empty five-gallon gas cans for just such an emergency. Luckily the engine had not been running when the accident occurred. The “tanks” offset the weight of the engine. A few yanks of the start-ing cord, and the kicker began to percolate; but if it had not, there were extra oars tied in and a sail. Our people still insist that even though the motor had failed function, they would have used the dory to rescue the foreign guys who were hanging desperately onto a life raft. It seems the authorities wished to save these suspicious characters for questioning. They got their wish.

The old boat was often being beaten up. If rough work in bad water was necessary, it was always: “Take the dory.” If one of the big tuna boats had engine trouble, it was: “Take the dory and tow her in.” When trunks or other baggage had to be moved from Chester to camp, somehow the men always chose the dory for the work. If a guy came along and wished to catch a big tuna, but did not want to spend $35 or $40 for one of the regular sport boats, we would put him in the dory, and he could catch his tuna just as well for about $15. Often a bunch of kids wanted a play boat for cod fishing; then one guide and the dory would give them as nice a day – and as safe a one – as they could get from the hiring of a bigger craft. And many a chap who had never run an outboard engine

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April/May 2010

before would go gaily off for a day’s bait fishing among the islands after five minutes instruction on the dory. Though the dory rescued many a stalled motor-boat or becalmed sailboat, she herself has yet to be towed in. She rowed easily and the mast could be shipped for sail-ing in a few seconds. A compass and a chart were carried as part of the regular equipment. Almost any youngster can read a chart well enough to get home, if you show him his departure point on the chart before he starts out. That goes for the girls too.

Speaking of gals who like water; during the war my camp was a sort of handy rendezvous for Wacs, Waves, Spars, Wrens, and Seagulls, to say nothing of the lads with wings, fins, and belaying pins who met ‘em there! The gals came from everywhere: England, France, South America, the West Coast – and even China, Alaska, Ha-waii, and Russia. It was amazing how many of them were able boatmen. They could buzz an outboard, use oars and sail, and swim like loons. These young people were reckless, high-strung, and headstrong, but seemed to have the vim and pep to hop quickly out of any trou-ble they fell into. Tomorrow did not seem to count with them, but I noticed that when they used my boats they showed proper respect and care for tackle and gear.

The only poor boatmen we had to deal with came from the various navy organizations. Few of these men we en-tertained knew the first principles of small-boat handling. They did not even know enough to make a boat fast to the wharf with sufficient scope at the painters so that the tide could rise and fall and not hang a vessel up on the lines. These boys were great guys, nevertheless, and you could not keep them out of the small boats. When they suddenly decided to play with something else, they just jumped out of the craft they happened to be in, and ran off and left her. As for the canoes! I had to put the entire flotilla under lock and key for the duration. Every kid with a navy uniform on wanted to take his girl out pad-dling. From an old guide’s point of view, it was painful and very, very damp. But I am digressing.

The old dory played a great part in many exciting war-time adventures. But as already intimated, at last came a day when she needed some repairs. That day was but a few weeks ago. As I had to put on new bottom planks and garboards anyhow, I decided to put a V-shaped sec-tion on her bottom forward, so she would not pound so much in a heavy sea. This boat can and does travel along at fifteen miles an hour with a nine-horsepower four-cylinder outboard – and clips off twenty with a sixteen-horsepower motor – so you can readily understand that when she begins to jump from chop to chop, she would spank your top plate out, if you did not slow her down. Not that the pounding hurt her any, but it was a little hard on a passenger if kept up.

The trick I had in mind was to keep strictly to the

cheap dory construction – keep the hull from amidships aft exactly as it was, and still put the V in her bottom forward. The accompanying sketch shows the result – without the centerboard, for the sake of simplicity. We had to use the steam box on the new garboards and bot-tom planks in order to twist them so that they could meet the rabbit in the new lower section of the stem. Hence we could not groove and tongue the bottom boards in the usual dory-building way. We had to caulk her, and the side planking is, of course, lapstreaked and riveted and needs no wicking.

As the planking – the bottom boards of this type of craft - is seven eighths of an inch thick, a builder cannot just twist or bend such thick boards to make a V-shaped fit without steaming. Now, whether or not that process will still leave the dory what may be called strictly a do-ry-built boat, I am not prepared to say; but we did use the same timbers, or natural knees, and kept in the same important “dory slant.” For the new bow we carved out three pairs of special knees to hold the V-bottom in its required shape. We do our work in a fully equipped boat-building shop, and have every sort of a clamp and device with which to work. We could put a corkscrew bottom on a boat if it was ordered!

In case you’re interested, here’s how to make my change-over. Turn the hull bottom up; remove the bottom planking, and spring off (or take off) the old garboards. Then lay a new hardwood keel from the stern transom to what will be approximately the new stem piece. This new keel will lie flat along the center of the old timbers or knees until it leaves the old curved bottom of the boat. From there on the new keel goes straight to the elongated stem. This takes all the curve out of the bottom. The next step is to notch the keel into the new piece of stem, as is done in any “round-bottomed” boat. The three pairs of new timbers, shaped to follow the V-lines of the scheme, should be placed inside the boat to act as forms for the new bow. Side-splice these timbers to the top part of the old ones. Then plank up and caulk the hull – and you’ve got a V-bottom on a dory-built craft.

And how did all this work out in the water? Fine! Although the boat is now a little heavier in the bow than before, she travels more easily in sloppy weather. The spanking has stopped, for the bow cuts the waves and curls them aside rather than pounding down on them. The change-over has removed much of the vibration, and in a perfectly smooth sea the wetted surface is no more than it was before. The craft still planes on its after half when speeding. When I say “speed” I do not mean to infer that the dory is any racing boat – but she is very fast for her heavy type of construction. Moreover, our dory is not even a perfect hydroplane; she is too narrow. But here again the now-famous dory slant helps out. The flare in her sides is pronounced and gives her added bur-

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April/May 2010

den the minute she starts to settle or hit any waves at all. Also, the same dory slant makes her one of the best-acting hulls on a quick turn that I have ever seen.

I have used a 32- horsepower outboard on the dory and the motor worked fine – the hull did not mind the weight in the least. But that engine drove the dory at such a fast clip that it was not practical for a work boat. It’s hard to make passengers sit down and stay down and after one or two had been tossed out on a sudden turn, we quit using this motor. Such an engine is too heavy for outboard purposes in our business. It would be better to use an inboard engine, and be done with it. But here again we would be getting away from the simplicity and practical mobility of the outboard dory. There would be too much machinery and fittings – plus a shaft and other encumbrances – for this type of working craft. With a smallish outboard we can run the dory right up on any old beach – and land her anywhere. When an outboard engine is too heavy for one man to handle easily, it is too big for our type of business.

We have a ten-gallon pressurized gas tank installed beneath the forward thwart. A copper pipe runs from it to a rubber hose, equipped with valve and strainer at the stern of the boat. We put a few pounds of air pressure in the tank with a hand pump. When we wish to fill the engine tank, we just stick in the hose, open the valve and let her squirt. This is handier than trying to stand up in a boat with a gas can in hand, and then attempting to fill up without spilling. We have also used about all types of mechanical filling pumps but always return to the old air pressure tank and hose. Its simplicity recommends it for we dislike extra machinery or devices that might be kicked loose when we are busy fighting a gale or a fish. The way you have to scramble around the inside of a dory in a breeze or wind – when trying to get a towline on a tuna, shark, or whale – leaves no room for pretty little thingumbobs.

The object of this article is to put forward a word of encouragement for those who would like to own a boat but feel that they haven’t sufficient income to indulge in having fun with a small boat. I submit that it would take but a very modest sum of money to own and operate such a craft as the dory I’ve described. Any boat builder can make one. In fact, almost any amateur boat builder could construct one if he had the lines and particulars. Its fifteen feet long on the bottom, three feet wide, and eighteen overall. In its original form, with a flat bottom from end to end, a Grand Banks dory with a square stern is only a little harder to put together than a skiff.

Time and the experience of many years have proved that such a dory is no toy. You can row, sail, or push the hull with an outboard. It will withstand hard work and rough going. It will give you a turn of speed if you apply the power. And it will last for years if coppered on the

bottom and kept painted.As to building this type and size of boat, costs in those

times are abnormal – but entirely fluid. One builder might quote a high price, another a lower one. The changes and repairs on my old dory came to $100. The only parts of the original hull that were not completely renewed were two strakes of side planking on either side, the timbers or ribs, the upper part of the stem, and the stern transom. I judge that such a boat could be built new at today’s prices in our local shops for about $200. If an order were given to a dory builder for a fleet of these boats, I believe the price could be shaded.

For the convenience of those interested, wages at this time appear to make up about two thirds of the hull’s cost. As there are no expensive castings or fittings to be made for this craft – such as would be required in a yacht, or an inboard powered motorboat – the proportion of wages-to-material costs for the dory is quite different than in conventional yacht or work-boat building. Hence if you can furnish your own labor you would get a dory at low cost. But whatever you pay – I’ll bet you never regret it!


PAGE 49

Putting a bullet into a mountain lion is something not everyone gets a chance to do, or can do. And to many – archers excepted – killing one of the big cats with an ar-row seems like quite a stunt. Recently, in a letter of mine, which was published in OUTDOOR LIFE, I mentioned a lion hunt in which I took part last spring. It made many readers prick up their ears and ask for more details. Natu-rally, I’d hate to disappoint them, so here goes:

Four of us, all archery enthusiasts, set out with our guide, Jack Butler, from our base camp at Podunk Can-yon, near the western boundary of Bryce Canyon Nation-al Park in Utah. We had decided to explore the East Fork Mountains – good cat county. The party included Henry

Bitzenburger, who makes archery tackle, Stew Foster, president of the California Bowmen Hunters, R. W. Ste-phens, and me. We were armed with bow s and arrows – and that was all!

Not far from the camp a veteran hound paused, then threw back his head to send an exultant cry rolling and echoing through the canon. “Lion!” shouted Jack. He dismounted quickly and ran over to where the dog had bayed, to examine the cat sign. “This trail is red hot,” he said, “and it was made by a big tom!”

What happened next we’ll long remember. The pack drove forward in full cry, and the whole party broke into a gallop across the rock-strewn fl oor of that mile-deep

The best of rifl emen will have to do well just to equal the markthese archers set in Utah’s cat country.

By L. L. Maull


canyon. Headlong we raced ahead, then began to climb, detouring immense boulders, pressing on to keep close to those baying hounds.

For three hours we followed them at a pell-mell pace, clear into the next canyon. Then jack, who was in the lead, held up his hand and we pulled up.

“Listen!” he said. “They’ve got him treed!”Together we dashed around a bluff. We found the

pack ringing a gnarled pinon tree, and crouched against one of its branches was our quarry – tawny, big, a snarl-ing bundle of muscle and meanness. I watched the tip of the cat’s tail lashing back and forth, and felt uneasy.

Meanwhile, Henry was stringing the bow. The night before, we had cut a deck of cards, and Henry won first chance at a trophy. Ever so carefully he drew the arrow back, then released it. I could hear the bow’s twang clear-ly. It was followed by a thud as the metal shaft went into the animal two inches below its heart. The range was less than twenty yards.

The big cat gave a blood-chilling snarl and sailed out of that tree – landing some thirty feet from the base. For a second of so it crouched there as the hounds bore down upon it. The lion cuffed at the first dog to come within reach. Then, turning, it outdistanced the whole pack to the next pinon tree about 100 yards away.

Henry had a better target for his second shot, as this time the beast lay clearly exposed on a branch at a height of thirty feet. Again my friend drew his bow. The broad-head arrow buried itself in the animal’s heart, and the great cougar (as it is sometimes called) was dead when it hit the dust!

By actual measurement, the tom was nine feet long overall. Jack estimated the weight at 200 pounds.

Though we hunted that same country for the next three days we found not another trace of a lion, so on the fol-lowing day the party set out toward Horse Mountain, and found so much sign that Jack decided to have our horse wrangler set up an overnight camp at Willow Creek, not far from the foot of the mountain.

Early the next morning we struck out for high land. In cutting those cards, I’d won the right to second try for Felis concolor, and with such exciting prospects ahead, I made quick work of breakfast.

Almost as soon as we left camp the sudden clamor of the hounds told that they had struck lion sign!

“Four cats have passed here!” Jack shouted, after a hasty examination. Once again we urged our horses into a full-throttle gallop. After about five miles of such travel, the guide called a halt to point out a buck mule deer which a lion had killed. Here the dogs were milling around in confusion.

Presently a pair broke away from the others, and with enthusiastic yowls brought the rest of the pack into action behind them. Full cry, the lion hounds were off again!

It wasn’t long before we were led to a huge pinon tree with many branches. Finding adequate footholds in the lower ones, a dog had actually succeeded in climbing the tree, and when we drew to a halt, this audacious hound was in the act of snapping viciously at the cat’s tail!

Stringing my fifty-pound new bow, I kept my attention on that cougar. He was getting uneasy – with that dog so close. As I reached for an arrow the cat made a swipe or two at the tree-climbing hound.

Then it was plain that my snarling target was going to get out of there – and fast! I’ve had some thrills in my day, but none of them topped the feeling I got as I pre-pared to loose a broadhead at that creeping lion. When it was almost at the end of the limb – but still moving – I took a gulp of air, held it, and let fly.

Luck was with that arrow. It pierced the animal at the point of aim – the heart – and continued on into the canyon! The cougar fell like a stone. I breathed a sigh of relief and ran over to inspect my trophy. That arrow had done a neat, thorough job.

Morning the next day found us back at the dead buck, and we’d hardly reached the spot when the wild, eager notes of the pack swelled and rolled on the morning air, telling all and sundry that the hunt was on.

The lion took us down to the bottom of the canyon and then tried one of the oldest of tricks: it doubled back on its trail and leaped to one side. Our dogs halted in confu-sion when they came to the end of the scent.

“Just watch ‘em!” said Jack. “Soon they’ll start cir-cling and pick him up.” Sure enough, they did. In re-markably fast time they were driving the cougar again at full speed – right into a tree at the canyon’s edge.

Stew dismounted and prepared his 62 pound yew bow for action. At this moment the lion turned its head to glare at the figure below. For a few seconds man and beast stared at each other, then Stew’s bow twanged, sending death to the animal with a powerful, well-placed lung shot.

“Don’t worry,” Jack assured a worried Steve that night. “There are plenty of cats left around here, and you’ll get your chance for sure.”

Jack was right, but Steve’s set-up proved to be the toughest of the lot. Not far from the dead buck the dog’s set to clamoring, and again they set a pace which drove their quarry hard.

“It’s an old lady,” said Jack, “and mister – she’s travel-ing!”

That chase was the most dangerous one I have ever ridden on. We dodged around boulders at breakneck speed, clattered up and down slopes, slipped and prayed our way down shale banks. I wondered if the old lion suspected this might be her last race.

Whether or not, she couldn’t shake those dogs. High up among the crags of Horse Mountain we climbed until


– panting and nearly exhausted – we came upon a cliff that overhung a ledge where the pack had the cougar cor-nered. There was no way she could escape them…

After looking the terrain over from above, Steve real-ized that he’d have to make a left-handed shot – some-thing he’d never tried before. With Stew holding onto this belt, Steve kneeled down, leaned over the cliff as far as he dared, and took aim.

His arrow struck the lion in the chest, cutting a main artery leading from the heart. Roaring , the cat leaped

forward and fell. We watched it roll down the slope for some 175 yards. It was quite dead when we reached it.

And so ended a grand hunt. Grizzled Jack Butler, who’d been hunting for twenty-five yards – but never be-fore with archers – said he’d never seen so many lions killed with as few shots. When he took out his next party of men with rifles, and told him that, I wonder if they believed him!

Outdoor Life – January 1947


Although I love to stroll through wood and fi eld and en-joy Nature’s beauty, nowadays when I’m on a hike I keep a wary eye peeled for wild trouble. Poison ivy! Ha! That is mild compared to the kind of wild trouble I mean.

While on one of my country excursions if I happen to see a baby wild animal huddling under a bush and trying to deceive me into thinking that it is scared of me, I silently tiptoe around the little creature, then take off like an over-due rocket. That small animal might take a liking to me and follow me home. When I think of the possibility of that hap-pening I tremble like a leaf, because I’ve had a bad case of wild trouble and don’t hanker for any more.

Now don’t get me wrong, I like young wild animals – I think they are cute and all that – but I adopted a strictly “hands-off” attitude one memorable day in June.

A farmer friend of mine came to my house some time before that day and stated that he had a pet for me.

“I knew you liked animals,” he grinned, “and besides you will be helping me out because I’ve got three of ‘em to take care of.” With that he set a baby raccoon in my lap. It was about the size of a house rat.

My farmer friend went on to explain that he had cut a tree down without knowing that it contained a raccoon’s den. The falling tree had killed the mother raccoon, but hadn’t harmed her four babies. He was going to bottle feed the three he had at home until they were big enough to forage for themselves. He fi gured I would like to have the fourth one as a pet.

You bet I would – then! My love for animals caused a thrill to shoot through me at the thought of having a pet rac-coon to lead around on a leash, to sit on my shoulder, to maybe teach tricks to.

The fi rst thing I did was give my pet a name – “Ring” because of the dark markings around his tail.

Ring and I soon became fast friends. I bottle fed him, testing the milk’s temperature each time with a thermom-eter to make sure it was warm

enough for a baby. He was cute, lovable, and a perfect gen-tleman – while he was small.

I got plenty of warnings about Ring. One old-timer shook his head sadly as if recalling unhappy past incidents. “I’ve tried raising the little pests,” he murmured, “and I’ve come to the conclusion that they’ve all got an ornery parasite growing in ‘em. I’m glad I don’t live close around here.”

“I think it’s all in the way you raise ‘em.” I defended, because my affection for my pet was growing by leaps and bounds. “You have to show a wild animal plenty of love and attention. It’s necessary to overcome the wild streak in them.”

The old-timer shook his head again. “Well, I’m still glad I don’t live in this neighborhood,” he repeated, and ambled off.

Warnings such as this peeved me. What did everyone think Ring was – some vicious beast that would devour them? Ha!

Everything went along fi ne until Ring was about half-grown, but then my troubles began. Yes, I know I should have returned him to the woods as soon as he was big enough to take care of himself, as my farmer friend did with the three he raised, but animals attach themselves to me, somehow, and its hard just to up and get rid of them. And after all I was the only mother Ring knew.

Ring’s increasingly curious nature often led him astray, and I was fi nally forced to keep him tied at night to the small house I had made for him.

Bottle-Fed Block-Buster!This pet raccoon was cute, but the neighbors didn’t appreciate his fi ne points.

By Glenn S. Larkins

I carefully tested the temperature of Ring’s milk each time I fed him

April/May 2010

Then one unforgettable night Ring got the wanderlust and broke his chain. The fi rst result of his night’s spree was a loud knock on my door early the next morning.

I opened the door, and there stood a grim-faced individ-ual who lived on the next street. “Come over and get your coon,” the neighbor growled. “Besides a lot of other trouble, he caused my wife to faint this morning when she stepped out on the back porch and saw him.”

“Why, my raccoon is tied!” I answered.“That’s what you think!” he snapped, his anger rising. “I

know your coon when I see it. And when you come over you better bring some cash because you’re going to need it.” He made it sound as if Ring had committed some terrible crime.

That’s the trouble with living in a small town. Everybody knows what everybody else owns.

After checking to make sure that Ring really had broken loose and assuring the neighbor that I would take care of ev-erything, I went with him to his house. He led me around to the back porch and pointed.

I would be a liar if I didn’t admit that porch was a sham-bles. Jars of canned fruit lay broken on the fl oor, and the general appearance of the porch was as if a hurricane had recently roared through it. Ring, smeared with fruit juice and jam from nose to tail, was sitting on a shelf scooping jelly from a glass and cramming it into his mouth with his paw. Part of the broken chain dangled from his collar. He gave me an “I-know-you-but-don’t-care” look and continued eating.

“My wife worked hard canning that stuff,” the neighbor snorted, “and it’s going to cost you. That animal is vicious. I tried to catch him, but he snapped at me.”

The neighbor’s wife came out the front door just then and hastened around to where we were standing. She had a broom in one hand, a poker in the other, and a wild look in her eyes. “Hurry up!” she yipped. “Get that – that wild beast away from here!”

“I’m sorry about all this,” was the only thing I could say, since it was apparent that reasoning was out of the question. “I’ll see that it doesn’t happen again. How much do I owe you for everything?”

“At least $10,” she an-swered, her fright disappear-ing rapidly at the mention of money.

I gave her $15 for good measure, took Ring fi rmly by the nape of the neck, and left with thoughts of how to keep my pet out of further mischief. When I reached home I put a stouter collar on him and fastened him with a stronger chain.

Everything went smoothly for a few days, and then one evening I came home to fi nd a

man waiting for me. This fellow lived a good distance from me and raised fancy pigeons. As I exchanged greetings with him I glanced quickly to the backyard and was relieved to see that Ring was safely tied in his box.

“I’m sorry,” the man said fi rmly, “but I will have to col-lect $10 from you for a valuable fan-tail pigeon that your raccoon ate up.”

After I heard the facts on this deal I couldn’t say I blamed Ring too much because it happened to be a case of yielding to temptations. Yielding to temptation comes so naturally to raccoons that I honestly believe it’s the fi rst thing their mam-mies teach them.

The whole thing started when a news photographer got the bright idea that Ring, sitting on my small brother’s shoul-der, and a pigeon (it would have to be the prized one!) sit-ting on the pigeon raiser’s son’s shoulder would make a cute picture. My brother took Ring and away they went to the pigeon raiser’s home, which was big mistake No. 1, legally speaking, I suppose.

While the two boys were posing for the picture with the two pets perched on their shoulders, the photographer thought it would make a more natural looking picture if Ring’s collar and chain were removed. Big mistake No. 2.

Finally, before snapping the picture the photographer told the boys to move closer together. Big mistake No. 3, and the one that ended in the $10 climax.

As soon as the two boys moved closer together Ring reached over from my brother’s shoulder, grabbed the fancy pigeon from the other boy’s shoulder, and lit out for home with my brother wildly chasing him. When my brother reached Ring’s box, all that was left of the pigeon was a small pile of white feathers which marked the end of the sad tale. Two sad tales because I was out ten bucks.

Strangely enough, not all of Ring’s skylarking cost me money, however. Some were not wholly his fault. The com-ical case of the whipped dog is a good example.

The man who lived across the street from me owned a little terrier that was good for killing chickens and barking all night to keep everyone awake. One day this dog came

As we drove, Ring sensed achange coming into his life

PAGE 54

April/May 2010

skittering into my yard and began a half-scared, half-curious barking at Ring. Ring was tied to his box, a fact which kept him from immediately tearing into the dog.

The dog knew that the chain would allow Ring to come only so far, so he would come closer as he barked, then when almost up to the raccoon he would jump back. He kept up these tantalizing tactics for quite a while. Finally Ring, with what I’ll say was a merry twinkle in his little black eyes, ran into his box as if he were scared to death and wanted to hide.

This ruse gave the terrier courage, and he ran right up to Ring’s box. Immediately his barks changed to wild yelps of pain. For Ring had sailed from his box like a fl ash, grabbed the dog’s nose with one paw and one of the dog’s ears with the other paw. He then sank his teeth into the dog’s cheek and hung on.

That terrier went straight up into the air. They went around and around for a while until the dog broke Ring’s holds and lit out for home as if he had connected with a bad dose of turpentine. If Ring had not been tied I believe that dog would have suffered a worse fate. Even to this day nei-ther love nor T-bones would get that dog back into my yard.

The terrier’s owner tried to make me pay the veterinary’s bill for patching up his pooch, but I called his bluff. Without a word of complaint, I would pay damages that were Ring’s fault, but I couldn’t see how this incident was his fault. I told the fellow that since Ring had been tied in his own yard it would be more like it for him to pay me for the emotional upset his dog caused my coon. I almost grinned at that one because Ring got the thrill of his life whipping that dog.

Now it may sound strange, but there was another dog in the neighborhood that Ring would play with. This dog used to come over and visit Ring about every day, and they would romp like brothers.

After a few more incidents in which Ring whipped the

daylights out of some more neighborhood dogs, I was forced reluctantly to the conclusion that I’d have to get rid of him. He was making too many enemies for himself and me both. It got so bad that nobody in the neighborhood would speak to me.

So one June afternoon I took Ring and put him in the car (he loved car rides) and we started driving for the woods a few miles from town. Maybe it was because I had a sad expression on my face and acted differently, but I know that Ring sensed a change coming into his life. As we rode along he sat quietly on the seat beside me and never tried once to open the glove compartment, or ride on the steering wheel, or search through my pockets, or any of the other things he usually did to bother me.

Now you can laugh, but this sudden change in my pet cut pretty deeply. We had had some lively times together. If I hadn’t consoled myself with the thought that Ring would probably learn to enjoy himself more in his natural haunts than in my backyard, I would have turned around and taken the little rascal home.

When we reached our destination I took off Ring’s col-lar and carried him well into the woods before putting him down.

At fi rst Ring viewed his new environment with a look of bewilderment. Then his curiosity got the best of him and he started poking his inquiring little paws into every nook and crevice until he had wandered quite a distance from me. I turned quietly, walked back to the car, and drove home.

The next morning when the knock came on the door I didn’t fi rst make sure that my wallet was in my pocket before I answered, as I had always done when I had Ring. I opened the door and there stood my next-door neighbor with a grin on his face. He was the only one that was still friendly with me. He was the only one who didn’t own anything that Ring

PAGE 55

It always took cash to settle the trouble Ring caused


could have damaged.“Better come over and get your coon,” he said, “before he

gets into more trouble.”You could have knocked me over with a feather. “My

------” I gasped. “Why, I turned Ring loose in a woods yes-terday.”

“I thought you did, too,” he answered, “but right now he is on my front porch drinking the quart of milk that the milk-man left. And by the way do you have an extra quart I could have for my breakfast?”

I gave him the milk I was going to have for my breakfast

and went over to his porch to find, sure enough, Ring. He had turned over the bottle, gnawed out the cardboard stopper so that the milk had run all over the porch, and now was lap-ping it up as if starved.

I don’t know whether it was love of me or hunger that brought Ring back. I hope, though, that it was hunger be-cause that is the thought I consoled myself with when I hand-ed my pet over to the zoo keeper that afternoon.


the tatlow PostscriptHer father’s secret lay hidden on that lofty peak. And howcould I resist when she challenged me to climb it with her?

If, about a year before I was born, a Scottish gentleman by the name of Grant had not traveled far from his native heather in quest of a bighorn ram, the events of which I now write would never have taken place. But the gentleman did set out from Scotland one day in August, 1902, and after some 7,000 miles of travel arrived at a remote trading post on the Chilcotin River at a spot now known as Hanceville, British Columbia.

After exchanging amenities with Norman Lee, the proprietor, the traveler asked, “Is there anyplace hereabouts where a body could do a spot of sheep stalking?”

Norman Lee, English by chance of birth and adventurer-explored by natural inclination, was among the fi rst of a handful of white men to set foot in the vast, unmapped Chilcotin Plateau, which stretched from the Fraser River on the east to Bella Coola on the west. Shrewdly he established his trading post within easy reach of two large Indian

communities: Aniham, a little to the north, and Stoney, a short day’s travel to the southwest. There was much profi t to be made in bartering trade goods for prime mar-ten, fi sher, lynx, and beaver hides. Profi table, that is, as long as the fur bearers lasted, which wasn’t very long.

“Sheep hunting?” repeated Lee. “Yes sir. I can outfi t you right here - grub, horses, saddles, and tents - and get you a couple of Indian trackers from the Stoney reser-vation.” He gestured vaguely to the sprawling, forested country in the south and southwest. “Indians tell me there are sheep down behind there.”

So in due time the Scotsman set out with six loaded packhorses, three saddle animals, and two Indian guides. Ten days later he was back at the trading post, a 41-inch trophy astraddle one of the pack animals. But only he

and the Indians knew exactly where he’d taken it. That is, no one else knew it until three decades later.

In the mid-1930’s the gentleman wrote me from Scot-land. His letter gave some details of the country where he’d got his ram: the spot was four camps out from the Chilcotin River on a mountain, blotched with glacial ice and snow, that faced the noonday sun. The mountain’s left eye looked down on a large body of water to the east, its right upon a still larger body of water to the west. The ram had been killed about halfway up its southern slope.

The writer asked me if I could, from these meager clues, identify the mountains and the lakes. I could, in-deed. The names are printed today on any large-scale map of interior British Columbia. The mountain is Tat-low, rising 10,500 feet above sea level. The lake to the

Grant had come halfway across the world for bighorn sheep. Now the fi nal act was at hand

west is Chilko, that to the east Teseko, or “white water.” In recent years more than one American angler has wet his fl y in the glacial waters of Chilko.

“My eldest son,” the letter went on, “is a captain in the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders, and is shortly leav-ing the army. Before settling down to civil life he wants to satisfy an ambition: to take a ram trophy like the one I got in your country in 1902. Can you help him?”

Why not? While I already had one large European party booked for a 30-day hunt that fall, it was not due until mid-September, and I had allotted the Tchaikazan watershed to the party. So if Captain Grant could be in camp on September 1, opening day of the sheep season, I was pretty sure he’d get his ram within 10 days.

The dates were arranged and the deposit paid; by opening day Captain Grant would be in camp on Yohetta

It was the dream of a lifetime come true, and it might never come true again. I impulsively reached out for my rifl e

Lake with us. Then I received another letter from the elder Grant: Could I take two young ladies in the party? Both were used to camping and would be content with a mountain goat apiece, not expecting sheep. One was Captain Grant’s younger sister, the other a Miss Kerr, a friend of the family.

I consulted my wife. She was agreeable; we had had women guests before. Thus it came about that 33 years

after the elder Grant killed his ram on Tatlow, both his son and daughter were camped out with us in full view of that same mountain.

Our base camp at Yohetta Lake was a comfortable one: thick mattresses of spruce boughs laid down in the sleeping tents; wood axed and piled for the cooking fi res; a rope stretched across a small peninsula in the lake as a corral.

Next morning, when Little Charlie, my helper, came to me for orders, I gestured toward Red Mountain, an un-dulating upheaval of volcanic rock rising to the skyline from the north marge of the lake. “Give it the old one-two, Charles,” I said. “Take a couple of blankets and a bite of grub and work every glacier for fresh ram sign. I’ll hit south toward the Tchaikazan.”

At that time of year Red Mountain usually yielded nothing but ewes, lambs, and young rams, but it was al-ways possible that Charlie would kick into a band of the old busters. A year had rolled by since we’d hunted those pastures and I wasn’t taking any chances. After Charlie departed I was sitting in my tent, sipping a last cup of cof-fee before hitting out, when in came the captain. “Any objection to my tagging along with you?” he asked.

I studied him a moment. Lean and wiry in build, about 160 pounds, the captain was around 30, and had seen military service in India. His tanned, weathered face was evidence of that fact. He’d told me that he’d done considerable big-game hunting in the broken foothills of

the Khyber Pass, and was no newcomer to the exacting business of hunting above timberline. Yet on a recon-naissance of this sort I preferred to be alone, because two men (especially when one of them was a stranger in the country) might spook any band of rams we came upon.

I glanced at the two girls, rinsing a few articles of at-tire down on the pebbled beach. Miss Kerr - dark, quiet, and slender, with an unquenchable urge to assist in any small camp chore she could manage to draw her way - was, I guessed, in her mid-20’s. The captain’s sister - he called her Bunny - was blonde and robust, and had a clear, rosy complexion; she, I guessed, was hovering around 20. It was a shrewd guess; I found out later that her 21st birthday was just six days off. She was to spend it in as strange a setting as any girl’s 21st birthday had been spent.

I nodded toward the girls and smiled at the captain. “Right this moment,” I said, “that sister of yours is just itching to go out fi shing on the lake. How about your taking the young ladies out on the raft and letting Charlie

and me scout around up above?”“That,” he agreed, “is a capital idea.”I spent that night in a bleak, fi reless camp 2,000 feet

above timberline; this was the barren region of the peaks. But despite the chill of the frosted air whipping down from the snowcaps I slept soundly and contentedly. For just as the sun was setting I’d found - along the shoreline of a pool of water fed by a glacier - the tracks of at least 16 mature rams that had been moving in one band. The tracks were two days old, but that didn’t matter; early in September, when the noonday sun is hot and the alpine weeds unfrosted, your bighorn is an indolent, peaceful fellow that does very little wandering unless spooked by gunfi re. So I had a hunch the band wasn’t very far off.

Hustling back to timberline in the morning I stopped long enough to put my glasses on Goat Bluff, four miles east of camp. I’d christened that slab of rock myself and the name was honestly come by; I have yet to put my

glassed on its precipitous, somber face without bringing at least half a dozen goats into focus. That day 13 were there.

I grinned, thinking, “Tomorrow, while the captain and I attend to sterner business, Little Charlie can take the girls after goats.”

Charlie was in camp when I dragged myself in. I cocked a questioning eye. “Well?”

“Mostly ewes and lambs,” he reported. “A few rams but nothing big enough. How about you?”

I smiled broadly. “Sixteen rams at least, Charlie - all four years old or better. Boy, it’s in the bag.”

In the bag? I wasn’t quite so sure, next day, when the captain and I lay on our bellies on the rocky slope. Now the whole situation was full of question marks. For the third time in the last half hour, as we climbed cau-tiously toward the pond where I’d seen the tracks, there had come the slither and rattle of falling stones. Some-

I stared up into the captain’s face, tanned by sun and wind. How could I tell him I preferred to be alone?


how they had been jarred loose from a rocky promontory below the high spine of the hogback we were climbing. And for the third time the captain and I had bellied down close to the ground, scanning every visible inch of the promontory above us with our binoculars.

“I don’t like it a little bit,” I whispered uneasily. “Something is moving around up there.”

“Bear?” suggested Captain Grant.“Could be, but - “ If it were a grizzly, flipping over

boulders in search of rock rabbits, there’d be a great deal more noise. If it were a mountain goat we’d surely have picked up his white coat in our glasses. And if it were sheep? That was the possibility that filled me with anxi-ety. Take a band of bighorns, bedded down among a litter of rock, white rumps turned away, and there will be times when those rams are invisible, no matter how powerful your binoculars.

Keeping our eyes fixed on the promontory, we moved catlike up the slope. Again the patter of small stones put us down on our bellies. “Captain,” I said, “I’m convinced it’s sheep.”

We spent another five minutes of throttled excitement while the glasses fruitlessly probed the rocks but to no avail; apparently there was nothing up there. My glasses were back in their case and I was about to rise when I froze. My naked eyes had spotted movement. On the high skyline, some 600 feet sheer above the promontory, a ram stood. I gulped and threw myself back onto the shale. “Bighorn!” I gasped.

A ram it was - a big ram, bedded where his sharp, probing eyes had an eagle’s view of all that lay below. “A lookout!” I breathed. The sudden movement that caught my eye had come as he shifted position in his bed. For at least three minutes Grant held his glasses steadily on the summit. Then he nodded briefly and said, “He’ll do, don’t you think?”

It’s difficult for any guide to estimate, within two or three inches, the curl of a ram’s horns. But I judged that the trophy on the skyline had around a 40-inch curve and a 15 or 16-inch base. I left the decision to Captain Grant.

“If you take him,” I said, “it lets you out for this sea-son.” Then as now, British Columbia game laws allowed only one ram to a hunter. But Captain Grant had already made up his mind.

“That gentleman up there is good enough,” he said. Smiling thinly he added, “If I can get within range.”

I had that part of it figured out. Between us and the skyline, some 250 yards from the ram’s bed, there was a chunky outcropping of rock. If we edged to the left we

could put the rock directly between us and the ram, and we could belly up behind it without being spotted.

We? The captain had other ideas. “Two men moving up are more likely to be seen or heard than one,” he said. “I’ll take the last part alone.”

That suited me. Without the trouble and tension of the final stalk I could have a grandstand seat and enjoy every second of the last act.

Again there came the rattle of stones from the prom-ontory but now I didn’t even bother to glance in that di-rection; I had eyes only for the high skyline where the lone ram was bedded. Belly-down on the shale, his big-game rifle dragging along as his side, the captain snailed toward his objective. It seemed that he’d never reach that rock. The ram’s horns were moving gently as its head swung one way and then the other. But the ram wasn’t suspicious.

The captain was 50 yards from the shielding rock when something jerked my eyes across to the promon-tory. In sharp relief among the litter of boulders stood seven bighorns, mature rams all. There it was, the solu-tion to the puzzle of the falling rocks. The sheep must have been bedded among the boulders; a lazily outthrust foot would dislodge small stones and send them rattling down toward us.

There was nothing lazy about the rams now. They stood erect and alert, their heads thrown back over their withers and their eyes glued on Grant, who was within 150 yards of them. My heart began to beat wildly and I strangled an urge to cry aloud.

Once, when I guided in the Chilko-Teseko watersheds, that country harbored hundreds of mountain sheep. On one 28-day hunt in the 1930’s I counted 128 head, and while undoubtedly I counted some twice, that’s a lot of bighorns in any man’s country. Many, of course, were ewes, lambs, and young rams, but at least 40 were bust-ers. All the big fellows had a common characteristic: the ends of their horns were dubbed, broomed - worn down. In all my time I had yet to see a ram going into the cel-ebrated “double curl.”

Until that day with Grant. One of the seven rams among the boulders had that sort of head. The curved horns weren’t broomed but turned inward, and arched up past eyes and ears to taper off in that freak but beautiful formation - the full double curl.

When I put my glasses on that head and brought it right up to my eyes I gulped. I suppose any guide worth his salt has dreams of someday putting a hunter within range of a record head; I had, certainly. And there it was,

April/May 2010

a couple of hundred yards away. A head that would cer-tainly go 45 inches and possibly two or three more. I impulsively reached for my rifl e.

Yet I was helpless; if I risked a shout or a gesture to attract Grant’s attention I’d instantly spook all seven rams and put them into the rocks on the high skyline. Then, of course, the watcher would come up from his bed and join them in wild fl ight.

So I lay there, glued to the shale, staring across at the fi ne ram as a fear-paralyzed rabbit stares at a stoat. There was nothing I could do but stubbornly fend off a powerful urge to take a shot at that trophy myself.

A single shot from Grant’s rifl e rang down the curtain - mercifully, it seemed to me. Before its echo bounced back from the cliffs the seven rams had leaped into ac-

tion, with only their bobbing, white-aproned backsides showing their course - across the promontory into the labyrinth of rock above.

Releasing my breath I raised my eyes to the skyline. The captain had made a perfect hit; the ram was mortally wounded and rolling over and over down the slope toward a small thicket of juniper on the val-ley fl oor. I moved over to where Grant stood, fl ushed with pride, his hand outstretched for my congratu-latory grasp. Somehow I managed a lame smile and said, “Good work, Captain.”

He tossed me a bewildered look. “You don’t seem very enthusiastic,” he remarked. “What’s the trouble?”

So I told him of the ram with the double curl. He wasn’t disturbed or disappointed. He hadn’t seen it him-self and perhaps he didn’t believe me; I’ll never know about that part of it.

Anyway, I’d discharged by obli-gation to him and I should have felt happy. His head went 41½ inches around the outer horn curve, with a base of 16¼. But the horns were badly broomed, and somehow I felt cheated.

Needless to say, Captain Grant and his sister, bunny, were anxious

to see the spot where their father had taken his bighorn a generation earlier. So we climbed to the top of Red Mountain to get a photograph of Tatlow’s face.

On the top of Red, the three of us stood looking at Tatlow’s face, 15 miles away. Our lunches were inside us and we felt lazy and contented. “I wonder,” mused Captain Grant, “just where up there Dad got his ram.”

“Wherever it was,” I said, “I’ve a hunch he was in full view of the ridge that yours came from.”

Now Bunny got into the conversation. “I,” she said resolutely, “would like to climb Tatlow.”

Grant glanced at me and I stared at the ground. “And,” added Bunny, “perhaps try for a ram!”

“Bunny!” said her brother reprovingly. This, defi nite-

PAGE 65


ly, was not part of our arrangement.“Why not?” she fl ared. And then coaxingly, “Tomor-

row is my 21st birthday. Could I?”Well, why not? The elder Grant, at home in Scot-

land, would be doubly in debt to Tatlow if it furnished his daughter’s gift on her 21st birthday.

“All right, young lady,” I said, “we’ll try it. You, me, and the captain. By packing light - just pup tents, sleep-ing bags, and enough chow for three days - we can be below Tatlow tomorrow night. And at the fi rst crack of dawn on your birthday we’ll see what the mountain can give you.”

On schedule, Bunny and I moved up Tatlow, timber-line already below us. The captain had elected to remain in the tiny camp I’d set up in a brush-dotted meadow a thousand feet below timber. “She stands a better chance with you alone,” he’d reasoned, and of course he was right.

There was no bright sun to cheer our spirits and warm the blood; the chill stab of the wind was straight out of the north. The rock rabbits had stayed in their dens, and the ptarmi-gan were winging for shelter.

In a wide, creek-cut basin below the peak we found tracks. I uncased my glasses and surveyed the entire basin. Bunny stood beside me, toss-ing a rebellious lock of hair out of her eyes and toying with the bolt of a heavy sporting rifl e. I’d offered to carry it for her but she set me in my place with, “You don’t have to carry my brother’s gun, do you?” I fol-lowed the tracks along the creek with my glasses. “Nine rams,” I mused. “They were here in the bottom last night but moved higher at dawn. I’ve a hunch they’re hitting into the mountain - hunting up shelter.”

There is a vast difference between hunting rams on a bright, balmy day and on one when the storm clouds are communing. The drive of the wind makes the bighorns nervous, and the mere, beat of a ptarmigan’s wings, sounding down from the ridges, is likely to stampede a whole band.

I turned to Bunny. “I think we’ll try to follow the creek bed clean to the top of the basin. If we don’t see their tracks crossing the creek we’ll know they’re head-ing right into the mountain.”

I had good reason for that strategy. If the storm broke - as I knew it would before much time passed - things would be bad enough even in the shelter of the creek cut. But out on the exposed hogback they’d be brutal. It would be no place for a girl - even one with the determi-nation of a man.

As we drew nearer the great bulk of Tatlow, the roar of the creek became louder. Finally it turned into a glacial torrent cascading down off a perpendicular slab of rock that we had to detour around. Out of the shelter of the

I remembered the letter . . . “A large lake to the left, a larger one to the right”

April/May 2010

cut the wind smote us with fury. Turning to Bunny I sug-gested, “Shall we go back and try again tomorrow?”

“No,” she said determinedly. “Today is my birthday.”I scoured the whole area with my binoculars but could

not pick up any tracks. It seemed that the rams had van-ished into the somber cloud around Tatlow’s waist. With difficulty we moved higher, our breath coming in sobbing gasps.

In front of us, and 700 feet above us, a low ridge led away from the basin and ran like a crumbling, misshapen wall up the slope of the mountain. I was fiddling with my glasses, preparatory to examining the ridge, when bunny emitted a low cry and threw herself to the ground. “A sheep!” she whispered. “I saw one.”

Stretched alongside her I anxiously frisked the wall. A ram had come up from its far side and revealed himself. His was far from record head, but he was a suitable gift for a young lady.

Now that I knew where to look I had no trouble in picking up the tracks again - nine individual patterns zig-zagging along the ridge, then melting aimlessly over its top.

“The rest are beyond the ridge,” I whispered. “Most likely they’re bedded there, out of the worst of the storm. That lookout hasn’t spotted us yet.”

For what seemed an eternity the bighorn stared across the valley. Then, as if satisfied that all was well, he dropped his nose and knelt to his bed, out of our sight. “Now!” I said steadily, coming upright.

Bunny tested her safety and nodded. We eased for-ward. Now a third of the stalk was behind us - now a half. Still forward - only a short distance to go.

“Down!” Bunny said suddenly. Then, “Look there, across the creek.”

I did. Another lady was entering the act. The female of the species! From the dawn of time they’ve been butt-ing in where they’re not wanted, often causing the best of plans to go hopelessly agley. Now it was an old ewe - so very old that she’d probably been driven from the bands to live in solitude. She stood there above the creek, as motionless as if she’d been carved from the stone she rested on. And she was a scant quarter mile away.

“If that ewe stampedes,” I gritted, “the rams will be gone half a mile before we get up the wall.”

We could only lie there, huddled against the ground, while Tatlow’s frigid breath whipped us with hail. Bun-ny’s lips were blue with cold and I could only think, “Young lady, this is a strange way to spend a 21st birth-day.” To her I whispered, “I think we’d better quit and

get down to timber and a fire.”She just tossed her head; I don’t think she knew what

“quit” meant.In another hour the light would be waning. If the rams

were still bedded behind the ridge, and I believed they were, they wouldn’t stay there forever.

And then the old ewe seemed to come to life. With slow, methodical precision she raised a hind foot to an ear and began to scratch. That taken care of, she tossed a disdainful glance at us and gracefully started to climb. Soon the white blob of her hindquarters was barely vis-ible on the horizon.

Without hint or suggestion from me Bunny got to her feet. She blew into her cupped hands, flexed her fingers, and looked expectantly at me.

I nodded. “Now!” I said.They were there when we reached the crest of the

ridge, those rams, but 150 yards away and moving fast, cropping a mouthful of weeds here, another there, almost on the run. There was no exceptional head among them but I hastily sorted out one that I thought would go 39 or 40 inches and pointed it out to Bunny. “He’ll do,” I said.

There was anxiety within me as she brought the heavy rifle up against her shoulder - fear that she’d get buck fever. For two or three seconds the rifle barrel wavered and wobbled. Then suddenly the barrel was still, and her finger bounced off the shot.

As its echo came back from Tatlow’s slope, nine rams were breaking, stampeding for the heights. Bunny moaned in anguish: “I’ve missed!”

But my eyes had been on the ram as she fired and I’d seen the telltale flinch of its body, the quick droop of its tail. “Not by a sight you didn’t! Look! He’s stumbling! He’s down!”

Both of us raced to where he lay, and stood there star-ing at him. After a while I put the tape on his horns: a 39½-inch curve, a 15½ base. Then I stepped back and glanced thoughtfully at Tatlow’s spire. To the east I could look down on Teseko, and in the west Chilko’s blue water lay under my eyes.

I turned and said, “You and the captain have been won-dering just where the spot was that your father dropped his ram 33 years ago. I have no way of being sure, of course, but I have a deep hunch we’re standing almost on it!”

From Outdoor Life, October, 1953

PAGE 67

Suddenly the big coon was on top of me, jaws snapping. Will and Dick ran up

O

It was one of those blustery days in Ketchikan, Alaska, where I had been recuperating from the rigors of my Chinese mission, and I stepped into the shelter of the school superintendent’s offi ce. On his desk, I was startled to see a copy of a popular national magazine opened to a full-page picture of myself. It was one of those Who’s Who articles that were then popular, written under the name Betty Ross.

Since I couldn’t recall having met a person by that name, I picked up the magazine to see what it was all about. One of the facts that my unknown biographer stressed in pathetic terms was that, as a boy, I had to furnish meat for the family larder. She said that on numerous occasions, “little Harry brought in as many as two rabbits, though the gun he used was none too good.”

Gun? I could not suppress a chuckle. Every time my brothers and I found a rabbit in its bed, they let me try to kill it with a rock. I carried one stone in my pocket for three years, and seldom missed a rabbit. It was my lucky throwing piece. My mother said it was a geode, a slick round stone lined inside with crystals or with a mineral of some sort. One Thanksgiving day my geode killed eight rabbits without a miss. No wonder I laughed. The magazine story pitied me for having to kill two rabbits in one day with a sorry gun.

I have already told in OUTDOOR LIFE about adventures with tigers in China and bears in Alaska, but the memories of those days in Tennessee, when my brother Will and I hunted raccoons with dogwood cudgels, or with bare hands, remain as exciting as anything that ever happened in later life. I recall our long hunt for Jim Hoyle’s phantom coon as vividly as any of the stalks for tigers during my China days.

I was fi ve years old in 1881, when my family moved to Athens, in east Tennessee. The wooded hills around the little Tennessee town and the range of mountains beyond - always a source of inspiration in my life - grew more inviting as I became older. They were veritable laboratories for nature study, full of hidden nooks and mys-terious valleys where Will and I hunted day and night. They gave me a strong, alert body and a quick eye - both of which served me well during those years I spent as a missionary in China.

It was in the wooded wilds just outside Athens that I met an old Indian herb gatherer. He taught me many things about the hills. He may have been attracted to me because he sensed I had a little Indian blood in my veins. Sometimes he held me for hours in rapt attention, telling me about medicinal herbs, the wild fl owers and the ways of the wilderness creatures as only an Indian could know them. He really set the stage for the most unforgettable episode of those young days - our hunt for Jim Hoyle’s phantom coon.

Will and I had already gained the reputation of knowing the woods as well as anyone in that part of the state. Our congressman, who lived in Athens, once said, “There is not a bird or other living thing that passes through McMinn County, but those two Caldwell boys can tell you when and where it entered and when and where it passed over the line on the way out of the county.”

Will and I started at an early age to trap for muskrats, mink, and raccoons, and this trapping continued right up to our college days. Since it was necessary for us to help ourselves fi nancially, we ran trap lines every month in the year with the letter R in it. Being in school, we had to run them before daylight every morning. We learned

by HARRY CALDWELL He shot tigers in China and brown bears in Alaska, but life held no greater thrills than his boyhood hunts for a legendary coon.

April/May 2010

how to conceal our traps perfectly, not only from animal eyes, but to keep them from being stolen by human rogues. To make this camouflage perfect, I always carried along mink and raccoon feet, and made tracks with them in the earth covering the traps.

Even in those days, it required a lot of trapping to buy a pair of brogan shoes, since we were getting from 8 cents to 16 cents for a muskrat pelt, 60 cents to 90 cents for a mink, and less for the other skins. But we worked hard at our trapping, and on Friday and Saturday nights we hunted opossums and raccoons. That was how we became acquainted with the phantom.

There was one big raccoon that defied both professional hunters and their dogs. This animal was reported to lunge from the topmost branches of trees, bowling over men and dogs. A colored hunter named Jim Hoyle declared this animal was a phantom brute that couldn’t be taken dead or alive. When pressed too hard by the hounds, the phantom would lead the race to a stream and chal-lenge the dogs in the water. One of his tricks was to ride the head of one dog under while he fought the others. Hoyle had a number of hounds drowned by the ring-tailed spook. The phantom became a legend among night hunters.

Will and I decided we’d take this coon by one method or another. We con-centrated first on trapping him, although we knew that attempt was limited because we had to make our sets where they wouldn’t catch a hunter’s dogs. The only places we could set the steel traps were under log jams or in other spots where the hounds would not go. But it was in one of these log heaps that we first found definite proof the coon was no phantom at all, but real flesh and blood.

One morning we found in a trap a cottontail rabbit which had been killed and partially eaten by the time we got there. Tracks showed the marauder had been a ring-tail of tremendous size. Using the remainder of the rabbit as bait, we reset the trap. The following morning the logs were practically torn away by the trapped animal’s struggles. One toe was still in the trap. From that day on it was easy to identify the raccoon we had set out to take. And we were always on the lookout for him. Like the morning just before sunup when we found Jim Hoyle’s hounds barking feebly at the foot of a huge chestnut tree on our farm.

“If Jim’s abandoned him,” Will exulted, “he’s legally ours.”We knew it might be the jumbo coon. We went to work on the tree with our

axes and chopped until noon before it began to sway. As it crashed to earth, a large ring-tail lunged from the top and landed far down the hill in an open field. With our dogwood cudgels, we headed the animal off and cornered it in a marble quarry. It turned ferociously to fight, but was no match for two boys armed with clubs. We should have been elated at having taken such a magnificent speci-men, but were disappointed instead when we found four perfect feet.

We paid dearly for that coon. Father made us work the huge chestnut into rails. Before we were through, we had enough split poles to fence in a gentle-man’s farm.

We scouted the range for tracks with a missing toe, and examined every tree that our Indian herb gatherer had taught us was large enough to be a den tree. We found a yellow poplar that had all the bark markings of a coon apartment. It wasn’t on our property, but we decided to cut it anyway.

The next Saturday we worked all day with axes and a crosscut saw, but it was almost dark before the tree began to “talk.” Since we had no dogs and had to depend solely on our dogwood clubs, we decided to wait until Monday morning, when it was light enough to finish the job. Will was certain that no coon would cross the deep girdle we had put around the trunk.

We spent a nervous Sunday, and returned to the job early on Monday, tak-ing brother Ernest along to help. The massive poplar still stood on its slender pedestal. Will and I took our stands with the clubs and gave Ernest the ax. After a few blows the giant slowly began to topple.

True to character, the coon left the tree in mid-air. I could see that it was an animal of unusual size. It landed downhill in a little swale and I leapt after it. I ran it up the opposite slope, where it took refuge under a fallen tree. I maneuvered for an attack and the animal charged me, growling, rearing on its hind feet, and slashing at me with its teeth. My first blow was deflected by an overhanging branch, but it struck the animal anyway, knocking it off its feet. My

next blow finished it.Down the hill, Will had cornered and killed a second coon. We laid our tro-

phies on the stump of the fallen poplar and examined them. Both had perfect feet. While we were looking down at our kill, another masked tenant streaked out of the treetop. We ran that one down too, and added it to our bag. Like the others it was a handsome boar, with all its toes.

The very next Friday night we went with Jim Hoyle and his dogs. While we were busy filling a tow sack with opossums, his dogs surprised a coon near the creek. Away they went in a sight race that climaxed in the limbs of a massive chestnut. We could see him outlined on a topmost branch.

“And he ain’t no fledgling, either,” Jim Hoyle declared.Jim volunteered to climb the chestnut and shake him out. I was walking

back and forth, trying to keep the animal between me and the moonlit sky, when Will suddenly yelled.

“Look out!”I jumped aside just in time to keep the furry thunderbolt from belting me

flat, and as it struck the ground, leapt on it, holding its neck against the earth with my foot. The dogs poured over us, almost upsetting me, until Will waded in and ended the fight with his club. Our quarry was a huge ring-tail, but still not the one that now seemed to fill all our thoughts, asleep and awake.

It was while we were on the trail of the phantom coon that Will and I ran into one of those freak experiences which increased our reputation as hunters. We were crossing the lower end of the farm one afternoon when we saw a group of scolding crows gathered on a bald knob in the sedge field. Stealthily bellying up a gully, we crawled close enough to see what all the fuss was about. In the center of the milling crows sat a large red fox, snapping at every black aviator that power-dived too near.

“Let’s surround and rush him,” Will suggested. “Wait here until I give the call of a bobwhite on the other side of the knoll and then go after him. I’ll head him off.”

As I lay flat against the ground, waiting for the signal to attack, I unearthed a rock. When Will gave the low whistle of a quail, I was on my feet, running up the hill like a rabbit. The crows rose in a cawing black cloud. For a moment the fox sat on his haunches as though bewildered. Then he saw me and darted down a cow path that wound along the other side of the knoll. I heaved my rock and, as luck would have it, bounced it off his head with just enough force to addle him. Will, racing toward us, was on him in an instant, fighting for a foothold. I joined the battle, grabbing both hind feet of the red predator. Will pinned down his throat and forefeet.

On our way home, we met Joe Burke, a famous fox hunter in the county, who was out with his dogs after the same fox. He shook his head in amazement.

“When two barefooted youngsters beat me and my dogs at this game,” he said, “I reckon it’s time to take up some other sport.”

Jim Hoyle was still spinning some unbelievable yarns about his phantom coon. Will and I knew there was nothing supernatural about the animal, except

PAGE 70

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that he was a very sagacious individual which had put the hex on man and dog. But that only whetted our appetite for the chase, and we spent every spare hour on his trail.

It was a Friday night when Will, Dick Gettys, and I went into Cleig’s Hollow, with three of Dick’s top coon dogs. About an hour after dark, they jumped a coon on the creek. It was a sight race from the first excited yelp. I ran ahead of the others in the dark, but with some degree of caution. I didn’t want to repeat the time I had crashed over a cliff and gone headfirst into the icy waters of the creek.

Back and forth the race went, out of the hollow and in again, getting so close to town that some of our neighbors heard it. We spread out to keep the race in the hills that bordered Cleig’s Hollow, where the granddaddy ring-tail usually got away. The big animal changed his course and swam the creek toward the open country on the other side.

The dogs were tired and the water could. They milled about, refusing to plunge into the creek. Will picked up one of the hounds and flung it into the middle of the stream. It swam back to us and showered us with ice water. After the second dog had turned back, Will tried to corner Frank, our most reliable old hound. Frank knew what was coming, so he dodged my brother’s arms and splashed in. When he opened on the trail on the other side, the rest of the pack followed.

The raccoon circled and came back to the creek and once more I ran to in-tercept him. I found him swimming the stream to our side, and as he scrambled up the bank, I tried to hit him with my club. But he swerved out of the way and dodged into the tangle that crowded the backwater of Turtle Pond.

My sudden appearance out of the night and my near miss with the club must have startled the masked sage of Cleig’s Hollow, for instead of losing himself in the tangled morass as he usually did, he climbed a massive poplar tree just at the edge. The dogs milled around the base of the poplar, baying frantically. We circled the tree, trying to see him in the moonlight, but the only bulky lump in

the top branches was the old nest of a red-tailed hawk. Will worked around until he got the nest between him and the moon. Then he stood perfectly still while I walked to the other side and began stomping in the brittle branches of a dead treetop. Will, watching closely, saw two ears and then a head rise slowly between him and the moon.

We took turns swinging the ax. The tree was on Dick Gettys’ land, and he as-sumed the responsibility for cutting it. When the tall trunk began to creak, Dick took two of the dogs out of the way and I pulled the other hound to the opposite side, out of danger of the falling limbs. The strategy was that when the tree fell, Dick and I would cover both sides of the crown, and Will would run up the trunk to keep the animal from escaping by that route.

Just as the tree crashed, the raccoon jumped out on my side. But this time he didn’t try to get away. He came at me, growling ferociously. The brush was so thick that I could not properly swing my club. I used my foot instead, bowling the animal over, and jumped on it.

Exactly what happened in the next few minutes I was never quite certain, but I found the big raccoon on top of me. I was holding its forefeet in my right hand and its throat in a deathlike grip with my left.

Will dived to the rescue, and while we floundered with the phantom and the pack of dogs, Dick leaped in also. He forced a stick between the jaws of the snapping, snarling animal, and tied it with a strand of rope.

It was past midnight when we returned home, proudly carrying the phan-tom raccoon that Jim Hoyle and many other night hunters around our town had tried for years to kill. And I imagine that today, in Athens, Tenn., there are still old men who will remember Jim Hoyle’s phantom coon, that Dick and my brother and I took alive, more than half a century ago.

From Outdoor Life, October, 1953

PAGE 71

April/May 2010

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