To the Gulf of Cortez
About a year ago, my brother, who is a very sagacious physician, advised me to take the fresh liver of a mountain sheep for certain nervous symptoms which were troublesome. None of the local druggists could fill the prescription, and so it was decided that I should seek the materials in person. With me went my friend J. B., the pearl of companions, and we began the campaign by outfitting at San Diego, with a view to exploring the resources of the sister republic in the peninsula of Lower California. Lower California is very different from Southern California. The latter is—well, a paradise, or something of that kind, if you believe the inhabitants, of whom I am an humble fraction. The former is what you may please to think.
At San Diego we got a man, a wagon, four mules and the needed provisions and kitchen—all hired at reasonable rates, except the provisions and kitchen, which we bought. Then we tried to get a decent map, but were foiled. The Mexican explorer will find the maps of that country a source of curious interest. Many of them are large and elaborately mounted on cloth, spreading to a great distance when unfolded. The political divisions are marked with a tropical profusion of bright colors, which is very fit. A similar sense of fitness and beauty leads the designer to insert mountain ranges, rivers and towns where they best please the eye, and I have had occasion to consult a map which showed purely ideal rivers flowing across a region where nature had put the divide of the highest range in the State.
My furniture contained a hundred cartridges, a belt I always carry, given by a friend, with a bear's head on the buckle (a belt which has held, before I got it, more fatal bullets than any other west of the Rockies), and my usual rifle. J. B. prepared himself in a similar way, except the belt.
Starting south from San Diego, we crossed the line at Tia Juana, and spent an unhappy day waiting on the custom house officials. They, however, did their duty in a courteous manner, and we, with a bundle of stamped papers, went on. The only duties we paid were those levied on our provisions. The team and wagon were entered free under a prospector's license for thirty days, and an obliging stableman signed the necessary bond.
The main difficulty in traveling in Lower California lies in the fact that you can get no feed for your animals. From Tia Juana east to Tecate, where you find half a dozen hovels, there is hardly a house and not a spear of grass for thirty miles. At Tecate there is a little nibbling. Thence south for twenty-five miles we went to the Agua Hechicera, or witching water; thence east twenty-five miles more to Juarez, always without grass; thence south to the ranch house of the Hansen ranch, at El Rayo, twenty-five miles more. There, at last, was a little grass, but after passing that point we camped at Agua Blanca, and were again without grass for thirty miles to the Trinidad Valley, which once had a little grass, now eaten clean. Fortunately we were able to buy hay at Tia Juana, and took some grain. Fortunately, also, we found some corn for sale at Juarez. So, with constant graining, a little hay and a supply of grass, either absent or contemptible, we managed to pull the stock through.
Besides our four hired mules there was another, belonging to our man, Oscar, which we towed behind to pack later. The animal was small in size, but pulled back from 200 pounds to a ton at every step. Its sex was female, but its name was Lazarus, for the overwhelming necessity of naming animals of the ass tribe either Lazarus or Balaam tramples on all distinctions of mere sex. We started, prepared for a possible, though improbable, season of rain; but we did not count on extreme cold, yet the first night out the water in our bucket froze, and almost every night it froze from a mere skin to several inches thick. To give an idea of the country, I will transcribe from a brief diary a few descriptions. Starting from Tia Juana, we drove or packed for nearly 200 miles in a southeasterly direction, until we finally sighted the Gulf and the mountains of Sonora in the distance. At first our road lay through low mountains, in valleys abounding in cholla cactus. From Tecate southward, the country was rolling and clotted with brushwood, until you reach Juarez. Juarez is an abandoned, or almost abandoned, placer camp. Here, amid the countless pits of the miners, the piñons begin, and then, after a short distance, the pine barrens stretch for forty miles. Beyond again you pass into hills of low brush, and plains covered with sage and buckweed, until finally you cross a divide into the broad basin of the Trinidad Valley. This is a depression some twenty miles long and perhaps five miles wide on the average, with a hot spring and a house at the southwestern end, walled on the southeast by the grim frowning rampart of the San Pedro Martir range, and on the other sides by mountains of lesser height, but equal desolation.
We had intended at first to strike for the Cocopah range, near the mouth of the Colorado River, and there do our hunting. Several reasons induced us to change our plan and make for the Hansen ranch, where deer were said to be plenty and sheep not distant; so we turned from Tecate southward, made one dry camp and one camp near Juarez, and on the fifth day of our journeying reached a long meadow, called the Bajio Largo, on the Hansen ranch. We turned from the road and followed the narrow park-like opening for four miles, camping in high pines, with water near, and enough remnants of grass to amuse the animals. This region of pine barrens occurs at quite an elevation, and the nights were cold. The granite core of the country crops out all along in low broken hills, the intervening mesas consisting of granite sand and gravel, and bearing beside the pines a good deal of brush. Thickets of manzanita twisted their blood-colored trunks over the ground, and the tawny stems of the red-shank covered the country for miles. The red-shank is a lovely shrub, growing about six or eight feet high, with broom-like foliage of a yellowish green, possessing great fragrance. If you simply smell the uncrushed shoots, they give a faint perfume, somewhat suggestive of violets; and if you crush the leaves you get a more pungent odor, sweet and a little smoky. Also, the gnarled roots of the red-shank make an excellent cooking fire, if you can wait a few hours to have them burn to coals. All things considered, the pine barren country is very attractive, and if there were grass, water and game, it would be a fine place for a hunter.
From our camp at Bajio Largo, J. B. and I went hunting for deer, which were said to be plentiful. We hunted from early morning till noon, seeing only one little fellow, about the size of a jack rabbit, scuttle off in the brush. Then we decided to go home. This, however, turned out to be a large business. The lofty trees prevented our getting any extended view, and the stony gulches resembled each other to an annoying degree. At last even the water seemed to flow the wrong way. So we gave up the attempt to identify landmarks, and, following our sense of direction and taking our course from the sun, we finally came again to the long meadow, and, traveling down that, we came to camp. Here we violated all rules by shooting at a mark—our excuse was that we had decided to leave the vicinity without further hunting; and, at all events, we spoiled a sardine box, to Oscar's great admiration.
In order to get a fair day's journey out of a fair day, we had to rise at 4 or 5 o'clock. Oscar once or twice borrowed my watch to wake by, but the result was only that I had to borrow J. B.'s watch to wake Oscar by; so I afterwards retained the timepiece, and got up early enough to start Oscar well on his duties.
The question of fresh meat had now become important. We left Bajio Largo and drove to Hansen's Laguna, a shallow pond over a mile long, much haunted by ducks. Here we made a bad mistake, driving six or eight miles into the mountains, only to reach nowhere and be forced to retrace our steps. Night, however, found us at El Rayo, the Hansen ranch house, and, as it turned out, the real base of our hunting campaign. The Hansen ranch is an extensive tract, named after an old Swede, who brought a few cattle into the country years ago. The cattle multiplied exceedingly, to the number, indeed, of several thousand, and can be seen at long range by the passer-by. They are very wild and gaunt at present, and will prance off among the rocks at a surprising rate before a man can get within 200 yards of them. Ex-Governor Ryerson now owns these cattle, and his major-domo, Don Manuel Murillo, a fine gray-haired veteran, learning that I had known the Governor, gave me much friendly advice, and sent his son to guide us well on the road to the Trinidad Valley and the sheep land. He also provided us with potatoes and fresh meat, so that we lived fatly thenceforth.
Our track lay past an abandoned saw-mill, built by the International Company. Thence we were to go to Agua Blanca, the last water to be had on the road; for the next thirty miles are dry. The saw-mill was built to supply timber to the mining town of Alamo, some twenty-five miles south. The camp is now in an expiring state and needs no timber, but is said to shelter some rough and violent men. The road from the mill was deep in sand, and our pace was slow. The darkness was coming cold and fast when we finally drove on to the water and halted to camp.
Two men were there before us, with a saddle-horse each, and no other apparent equipment. When we arrived, the men were watering their animals, and at once turned their backs, so as not to be recognized. Then they retired to the brush. We supped and staked out the mules, and then sent Oscar to look up our neighbors. Oscar went and shouted, but got no answer, and could find no men. We thought that our mules were in some danger, and J. B., who is a yachtsman, proposed to keep anchor watch. So Oscar remained awake till midnight, when he awoke me and retired freezing, saying that he had seen the enemy prowling around. I took my gun and visited the mules in rotation till 2:30. Then J. B. awoke, chattering with cold, but determined, and kept faithful guard until 5, when we began our day with a water-bucket frozen solid.
All our property remained safe, and a distant fire twinkling in the brush showed that our neighbors were still there. After breakfast Oscar again sought the hostile camp, and finally found a scared and innocent Frenchman, who cried out, on recognizing his visitor:
"Holy Mary! I took you for American robbers from the line, and I have lain awake all night, watching my horses."
From Agua Blanca we drove across the Santa Catarina ranch, for the most part plain and mesa, covered with greasewood and buckbrush. This latter shrub looks much like sage, except that its leaves are of a yellow-green instead of a blue-green. It is said to furnish the chief nutrition for stock on several great ranches. Certainly there was no visible grass, but buckbrush can hardly be fattening. Toward night, we crossed the pass into the Trinidad Valley and drove down a grade not steep only, but sidelong, where the wagons both went tobogganing down and slid rapidly toward the gulch. The mules held well, however, and before dark we were camped near the hot spring at the house of Alvarez.
Our friend, Don Manuel Murillo, had recommended us both to Alvarez and to his sister, Señora Paula, but both of these were absent. Don Manuel had also urged us to get the Indian Anastasio for a guide.
"For heaven's sake," he said, "don't venture without a guide. You may perish from thirst, as others have done before you."
We tried at first to hire burros and let our mules rest, but the Indian who owned the burros stated that his terms were "one burro, one day, one dollar"—an impudent attempt at robbery, which we resented.
We interviewed Anastasio, however, who said he would start at any moment; and, leaving Oscar to guard the wagon, we packed two mules, saddled two more for J. B. and myself, and, giving Anastasio the tow-rope of a pack-mule, we started after him. Anastasio was the most interesting figure of the trip, and I must be pardoned if I go into some detail about him. He spoke some Spanish and understood a good deal. When he did not understand, he never stated that fact, but either assumed a stony look or answered at cross-purposes; so that we did not get to know a great deal about each other for some time.
He had, too, a lingering remnant of the distrust of horses and mules that his ancestors must have felt in Spanish times, and when his pack-mule got a stone in her hoof, he observed it with anxiety from a distance, but could not summon resolution to meddle with so serious a matter.
Moreover his measure of distance was primitive. I would ask, for instance, how many miles it was to our next stop. He might say three miles for an all-day journey of six times that length, or he might tell you that we were nine miles from a spot which we reached in half an hour.
I then substituted leagues for miles, thinking that the Mexican usage would be more familiar to him; but at last Anastasio said, rather impatiently, that all this business of leagues and miles was rather confusing and outside of his experience. We would reach the next water shortly before sunset, and that was all the calculation he was accustomed to, and quite close enough.
Aside from his knowledge of Spanish, Anastasio was indeed a fine representative of the best of the stone age, and as we journeyed on, one got an excellent idea of the life of the savage here in early times. About 3 o'clock in the afternoon, we reached the only water spot on the trail. Anastasio parted some withered reeds, and, looking earnestly, said, "Dry." A short distance further up, he repeated the word, and yet again, till, at his fourth attempt, he said, "Very little," and we camped. By scraping away the mud and grass, we got a small gravelly hole, and dipped out the slowly seeping water, a cup at a time. We thus managed to give each of the mules a little in a pan, and to get a canteen full for cooking.
Then I noticed Anastasio gathering wood, which I thought at first was for general use, but I found it was a private pile, to be used, so to speak, for bedding. Anastasio did not take the ax to secure his wood, but smashed off mesquite branches with a rock or pulled out some old root. He quite despised piñon and juniper logs, saying they gave no heat—meaning, probably, that they burned out too soon.
We turned in soon after supper, and the night was cold. Anastasio said he feared snow. The reason for his fear was soon evident. My bed was about twenty feet from Anastasio's, and during the night I would turn and watch him. He carried but one small blanket of about the texture of a gunny sack. He lighted a long smouldering fire, stripped himself naked, except a breech-clout, and, with his back to the coals and his front protected by his gauzy blanket, he slept until the cold roused him, when he put on more wood and slept again. I offered him four pairs of warm horse blankets to sleep in, but that was not the thing. He said that he needed to have the fire strike him in the small of the back, and that he slept in that way always. So throughout the night, in my wakeful moments, I saw the light reflected from his mahogany person. Evidently snow or cold rain would be disastrous to people who need a fire all night; for, with no covering against the cold and with fires extinguished by storm, they might easily freeze to death.
We were packed and marching at 7:30 next morning, and to those who know the inwardness of packing in winter, that statement means a good deal. It means, for instance, that J. B. got up, at my summons, long before dawn and cooked a splendid breakfast, and that the mules were caught and grained and saddled, and the packs made and lashed, by the earliest sun.
J. B. was a wonder. He seemed to enjoy giving his fellow mortals the best breakfasts and suppers—for we never had any midday meals—that our supplies could furnish. Always rising at the first call, in the dark, sometimes with an accompaniment of snow or rain, he managed the commissariat to perfection.
I in my humble way packed and saddled and did other necessary work, and Anastasio regarded us with benevolent curiosity, though always ready to get wood or water or mules when we asked him to do so.
We were now approaching the true desert. This term is not restricted to the broad level sand wastes along the Gulf, but includes the arid and waterless mountains adjacent, and this must be borne in mind when the Mexicans tell you that sheep are to be found in the desert.
We passed the last of the brushy hills, and, crossing a small divide, came over slopes of volcanic cinders to a little water spot with dwarf willows and grass. This was our hunting camp. The country through which our route had lain heretofore was altogether granitic, though one could see hills apparently of stratified material in the distance. Toward the desert, we met beds of conglomerate and trachyte, and mountains covered with slide-rock, ringing flint-like clinkers from some great volcanic furnace. But doubtless some accurate and industrious German has described all this, in a work on the geology of the peninsula, and to that valuable treatise I will refer you for further facts.
The vegetation had somewhat changed. There were more cactuses, particularly the fleshy kind called venaga, though I noticed with surprise the absence of the great fruit-bearing cactuses, the saguarro and pitaya, all along our route. The Spanish daggers were very numerous, as were also mescal plants, both of these forming veritable thickets in places.
The venaga cactus is similar to the bisnaga, found in other parts of Mexico, except in the disposition and curvature of the thorns. They are stumpy plants, growing from a foot to three feet or so in height, and a foot or more in diameter, like a thickset post. Those of us who delighted in Mayne Reid's "Boy Hunters" will remember how the adventurous young men saved themselves from dying of thirst by laying open these succulent cactuses with their long hunting knives and drinking the abundant juices. I have often and faithfully tried to perform the same feat, out of reverence for my heroes, but failed to find anything juicier than, say, a raw turnip—by no means satisfying as a drink. The venagas are found on the mountains where sheep haunt, with their hard prickly rinds broken and the interior hollowed out, and Anastasio said that the sheep do this by knocking holes in the cactus with their horns and then eating the inside.
This cactus country makes the third variety of wilderness encountered in the peninsula. There are four:
first, and best, the pine barrens; second, the brushy hills and plains, covered with sage, greasewood and buckweed; third, this spike-bearing volcanic region; and fourth, the appalling desolation of the acknowledged desert.
The moment we had unloaded and watered our animals, Anastasio and I set out to look for deer. Anastasio wore the spotted and tattered remnant of a frock-coat, once green, given him by an Englishman, of whom I shall say more later. He had guarachis, or sandals, on his feet, bare legs, a breech-clout, and on his head a reddish bandanna handkerchief in the last stages of decay; and as he peered over some rock, glaring long and earnestly in search of game, he reminded one of those lean and wolfish Apaches that Remington draws in a way so dramatic and so full of grim significance.
Anastasio was fifty-one years old and had no upper incisors, but the way he flung his gaunt leathern shanks over those mountains of volcanic clinkers, armed with the poisoned bayonets of myriads of mescal, cactus and Spanish dagger, was astonishing.
I told him that I was not racing and that he would scare the game. In fact, he did start one little fellow, but he said he always saw the game first, and for this day I was quite powerless to hold him in; so I decided to return to camp before dark. This disgusted Anastasio greatly. "In this way we shall never kill," said he. "We are going to suffer from hunger." I assured him that we had plentiful supplies, but he had come for meat. Unbounded meat had been the chief incentive for his trip, and hungry he was determined to be.
The next day J. B. set out early with the red man. I arranged camp, and two or three hours later took what I supposed was a different direction, but soon encountered the pair returning. J. B. had a painful knee, and Anastasio had started his racing tactics and kept them up until J. B. was quite lame.
The Indian reported that he had seen sheep. J. B. had used the glass without finding them, and then Anastasio had captured it and looked through the wrong end, nodding and saying he could count five, very big. This, I am sorry to say, was false and affected on Anastasio's part, and J. B. was skeptical about the sheep altogether; but I knew how hard it was to find distant game, when you don't know exactly how it should appear. To reach the supposed sheep, the mountain must be climbed and the crest turned, for the wind permitted no other course. J. B. did not feel up to the task, and I directed him to camp. Anastasio and I climbed for about four hours, and reached a position whence his sheep would be visible. He was now discontented because J. B. had not lent him his gun. No request had been made for the gun, to be sure, but I confess that a request would have met with my earnest opposition in any event. Evidently Anastasio's expectations of fresh meat were now so dim as to cast serious shadows on my skill as a hunter; but, resigning himself to the inevitable, he crawled to the summit of the ridge for a view. He stared long and said he could make out one ewe lying down under a juniper. I tried the glass. He was right. His unaided sight seemed about equal in definition to my field-glass. On this occasion he declined to use the glass, even with some appearance of disgust. We could get no nearer unseen, and, though the distance was very great, I decided to risk a shot.
I fired, in fact, two or three shots at the ewe, alarming her greatly, when from beneath a cliff which lay below us a band streamed out. Two big rams started off to the right. Anastasio and I ran down a bit, and I tried a long shot at the leading ram. The distance was great, and the run had pumped me a little. I missed. The second ram was still larger. He stopped a moment at 150 yards and I dropped him. Anastasio grunted satisfaction. I swung to the left, where the rest of the band was journeying, sighted at the shoulder of a young ram and fired. The ball passed through my intended victim, dropping him, and entered the eye of a yearling ram who stood behind, thus killing two rams at one shot—a most unusual accident.
ROCKY MOUNTAIN AND POLO'S SHEEP, DRAWN TO SAME SCALE.
The rest of the band were now quite distant, and, though I fired several shots, at Anastasio's desire—he said he wanted a fat ewe—none took effect.
I cleaned the sheep and skinned out the big head. Anastasio took one small ram entire on his back, supporting it by a rope passed over the top of his head, and started down with it, while I followed after with the big horns. It was 1 o'clock. The head might have weighed thirty-five pounds fresh. It grew to weigh 1,500 pounds before dark. Stumbling down through the slide-rock, with legs full of venomous prickers, I passed below camp without noticing it, and was well on the other side, when I thought I had gone about far enough, and shouted. J. B.'s voice answered across a small hill, and I discovered that he had never reached camp at all, but had found a water spot, and wisely decided not to leave it without good reason.
I scouted a bit to the west, but found unfamiliar country, and, as the sun had set, we were seemingly about to stay by that water all night, when I turned around and saw a pale column of smoke rising above the crest of the ridge against the evening sky.
At once we marched around the ridge, and, as we rose over the divide, we saw the whole hillside flaming with signal fires. Our dear old Anastasio had become alarmed and set fire to fifteen or twenty dead mescals in different places to guide us home. God bless a good Indian!
With vast content we prepared and ate a luxurious supper. Anastasio, however, fearing that he might be hungry in the night, impaled all the ribs of one side of the ram on a pole and planted it in a slanting position over the fire. Thus he was enabled to put in his time during his wakeful moments, and face the prospect of a remote breakfast without discouragement.
The next day, I spent the morning in washing, resting, and cutting spikes out of my legs. Anastasio packed in the second small ram, and ate ribs and slept. Then, in the afternoon, we got the rest of the big fellow down. Anastasio, to make his load lighter, smashed off the shanks with a stone, although he carried a knife in his belt—a striking trick of heredity.
And then we talked. "The Trinidad Valley is not my country," said Anastasio; "this is my country. Yonder, under that red rock on the mountain side, about five miles away, there is a spring in the gulch on the edge of the desert. I was born there, and lived there twenty years with my father's family. Here where your camp is"—about twenty feet square of slide-rock level enough to stand on—"we sowed crops. We scraped a hole between the stones with our hands, put in squash seeds, watered them by carrying water from the spring in our hands and raised several hills."
So he went on, not in so connected a way, but showing, bit by bit, his manner of life. His tribe, which he called the Kil-ee-ou, must have been very restricted in numbers at best. His territory was a few leagues of desert, or almost desert, mountains, every yard of which he knew by heart, while just over the ridge dwelt the Cocopahs, his mortal enemies. Sometimes a score of men armed with bows would start a tribal hunt for deer, though the sheep were beyond their means of attack. Sometimes they journeyed a few leagues to the Gulf to eat mussels. We could see the great blue sheet and the leagues of salt incrustations glimmering white on the hither side, and at one spot on the horizon the blue peak of some Sonora mountain rose out of the seeming ocean.
But a few deer and mussels and a half dozen hills of squashes could not fill the abyss of the Indian appetite. The stand-by was roasted mescal. These plants grow in great numbers in the country adjoining the desert, and at every season there are some just right for roasting. The Indians selected these and cooked them for two or three days in a hole in the ground, by a process called tatema, similar in principle to a clam-bake. This roasting converts the starchy leaves and heart into a sugary mass, so that the resulting food is something like a sweet fibrous beet. The Indian's life really lay in gathering and roasting mescal. And when a storm prevented the necessary fires, the tribe passed days, often many days, without food.
So much for Anastasio's early life. A year ago, he told us, he went hunting with two Americans. One of them came from under the earth, where there were six months of night, and had passed two seas and been a month on the train. We supposed, from this, that Anastasio had served as guide to an Englishman, whose home he described at the Antipodes. The six months of night were, perhaps, represented by the London fogs, and, if he passed a month on the train, he must have come by the Southern Pacific. The Englishman had presented Anastasio with the very undesirable gaberdine I have before described. Anastasio said that the Englishman shot quail in the head every time with his rifle, but on meeting a band of eleven sheep he fired nine shots without hitting. Anastasio said he trembled, but I incline to think that the Indian had run him out of breath. Finally the Englishman secured two ewes and a lamb, after three weeks of hunting.
Look at my fortune! A single day on the mountain, and three rams to show for it; one with horns that are an abiding splendor—sixteen inches around the base and forty-two inches on the outer sweep.
I thought at first that the horns made more than one complete spiral, but, on leveling them carefully, I saw that the entire curve would not be complete without the points, which were smashed off. In this connection it is only fair to consider that I carried my lucky bear's head belt, and invariably sacrificed to the Sun, as several ragged garments, hung on spikes and branches, may still testify.
The weather threatened storm. J. B.'s leg would not permit him to hunt. Anastasio was full of meat, eating roasted ribs night and day, beside his regular meals, and we decided to retreat.
I noticed that the sheep hides had little of the under wool that the Northern sheep have in December, nor were the animals fat, though the flesh was sweet and tender, and the livers had their desired medicinal effect.
Anastasio said it was customary to hunt in summer, when the sheep were fat, and were compelled to resort to the water holes. Aside from the meanness of taking advantage of the animals' necessities, the summer is a bad season for hunting, both because the flesh is rank and spoils quickly, and the heat and insects are intolerable.
We packed our mules in a gentle rain, and Anastasio made a great bundle of rejected meat for his own use. To get rope, he slightly roasted the leaves of the Spanish dagger, tore the hot spikes in shreds with his tough fingers and knotted the fragments into a strong, pliable cord.
In two days we were again in the Trinidad Valley, and in two days more—one of them passed in facing a cold, driving storm, of great violence—we had reached our old friend, Don Manuel Murillo, at El Rayo. Here we lay over a day to rest the animals, and Don Manuel again played the part of a good angel in letting us have some hay.
I tried a shot at a duck on a little pond. The shot was a costly success. The duck died, but I had to wade for his remains through many yards of frozen mud and dirty water. The duck, though lean, was tender. My last hunt was for deer at El Rayo, with a boy of Don Manuel's for guide. Toward noon I saw two deer and shot them. I do not at present know just how to class them. The tail is that of the ordinary mule-deer, or blacktail, of Colorado and Montana, but there is no white patch on the rump.
The most of the deer in Lower, as well as in Southern, California have little white on their rumps, as in these specimens, but the upper surface of the tail is generally dark. The majority of the animals also are smaller than the typical mule-deer of our Northern States, but whether the differences between the two are great enough and constant enough to form a defined variety, some more competent naturalist must decide. Pending authoritative decision, I will submit, as a working theory of a purely amateur kind, this suggestion: that the Mexicans are right in saying that the northern zone of their country contains two varieties of deer—one a large animal, called "buro," identical with our Northern mule-deer; the other called "venado," a mule-deer too, but only a cousin of the "buro," much smaller, and with the white parts of the mask, throat, rump and tail either absent or much diminished in extent.
Our journey home was accomplished in the worst weather. Snow, cold rain, gales of surprising fury, made life a struggle; but we jumped at every chance for progress, and finally crossed the line twenty-five days after we had left it—tired, ragged, dirty, but with our mules alive and our hearts contented.
Our experience of the peninsula indicated that there were few inhabitants of any kind, brute or human. We saw hardly a dozen rabbits on the trip. There were some quail and many ducks, but the latter were visitors only. Deer were very scarce, and there were but a few half-wild cattle visible.
As for human beings, there was not an inhabited house on our road from Alvarez Place, in the Trinidad Valley, to El Rayo, a distance of fifty-five miles; nor from El Rayo to Juarez, twenty-five miles more. Indeed, except for the few hovels at Tecate, the houses for the rest of the way were hardly more numerous. And yet we had a strong impression that the country had nearly all the population it could support. Given a moderately dry year, and the part of Lower California which we visited can be thought fit only for bogus land companies and goose-egg mines; or, yes, it might be an ideal spot for a health resort or a penal colony.
George H. Gould.
A Canadian Moose Hunt
In October, 1893, I made an extended trip with my brother into the country around the head waters of the Ottawa. Our original plan, to push northward toward the "Height of Land" after caribou, was frustrated by high winds, which made travel on the large lakes slow and dangerous. The crossing of a ten-mile lake, which could be accomplished in a morning if calm, would consume several days with a high wind blowing, necessitating a tedious coasting on the windward shore. After much delay from this cause and from heavy rains, which made hunting difficult in the extreme, we at length abandoned the hope of caribou on this trip, and turned southward from Birch Lake into Lake Kwingwishe—the Indian name for meat bird. This was about the northern limit of moose, although a few are found beyond it.
Our repeated failures to see this great deer would not form interesting reading, although, if recorded, they would, no doubt, bring to the mind of many a moose hunter memories of times when the hunt was hard and the result—a blank. It is my purpose in this article to merely sketch one or two instances of this sort, which, in contrast to days of unrewarded watching, were red-lettered with excitement. I only give the episodes because too often we relate our victories alone, and missed shots and barren tramps are consigned to ill-merited oblivion, however real they were.
A MOOSE OF THE UPPER OTTAWA.
After hunting the country around Lake Kwingwishe, we at length camped on a small pond near the east shore. Here we watched and called every night and morning; then we visited neighboring swamps and ponds, carrying a canoe through the forest by compass. It was always the same—wet and hungry, tired out with tramping through tamarack swamps, we would call half the night, sometimes startled with false alarms from hoot owl or loon, and then lie down in a rain-soaked tent without a fire, for smoke always scares a moose. The first streaks of dawn came, and again we were up and anxiously watching the shore for the appearance of the monster we were after. There were his tracks a few hours old but we could never catch him making them. It was too early in the season to trail them down, as the bulls were traveling continuously in impenetrable swamps, and our best chance was to run across them on the waterways.
One morning, on a pond we had named "Little Trout Pond," because it looked as though it should have trout in it, but did not; we awoke, after some specially exhausting and disappointing "back pond" expeditions, and found Chabot, one of our two Indian guides, gone. Late in the afternoon he returned. He had been seeing the country, and had found a swamp about three miles off full of fresh tracks, "so big moose," and he described tracks such as must have belonged to the Irish elk. Soon after sunrise on the following day we were there. Cold lunch, no dinner and lots of beautiful fresh tracks, one the largest I ever saw.
We watched motionless all day, saw the sun cross the zenith and sink out of sight, saw the twilight fade away and the moon come up. About midnight we went back to camp, through the woods. Night travel in a forest that you can scarcely get through in the daytime is beyond description.
"So good swamp," said Chabot sadly that night as he crawled into his tent.
The next day we pitched a rough camp on a hogback between two barren plains, about five miles from our main camp. It rained hard as soon as we got the tent up, and we watched a runway at the foot of the hill until dark and then turned in.
The next morning it rained so heavily that we lay in our tent, four of us, until about 11 A. M., when it slacked up a little. My diary says, "No fire and little breakfast." Before this "little breakfast" was finished we heard a moose call close by. Seizing our rifles, we started with Chabot to stalk him. The brevity of a diary is sometimes eloquent. Mine says, "Walked from 12 M. to 4.30 P. M. through the bush. Didn't hear that moose again."
The latter hour found us back in camp to get breakfast, when our other guide, Jocko, who had gone to the main camp for food, came back in great excitement, having found some fresh signs close at hand. Breakfast was dropped and again we started. We got back just after dark from that trip and ate—for the first time that day—some cold partridge and pork.
This was a fair sample of our hunting day, but did not equal the following one. It rained all that night, and the tent, not having been properly stretched, leaked. We were awakened by the crackling of a fire the guides had made. It was direct disobedience of orders, and contrary to the most elementary rules of moose hunting; but, cold and faint for want of food, we yielded to the innate perversity of the Indian. We made a wild-eyed, starved group, warming our fingers around the little blaze as it snapped up through the still, wet morning air. The teapot was just beginning to boil, the pork was just sizzling, when we sprang to our feet. A crash of antlers, as though two bulls were fighting, sounded not a hundred yards away. The noise was perfectly clear, having a metallic ring to it, and was caused by moose horns striking a hard substance.
Again. Without a word, we seized our rifles, and left our breakfast and fire, and I never saw that spot afterward. Again came the sound, still distinct, but further off, this time like a birch canoe dragged through alders. The animal had been on the runway which crossed at the foot of the hill we were camped on when he scented the fresh-lit fire. Well, to make a long story short, we followed that trail three weary hours of running and creeping through frightful swamps and thickets, hearing every few minutes the sound just ahead of us, but with never a sight of the game. His huge tracks, which we crossed now and again, showed he was not even trotting. Nearly exhausted, we kept following the sound directly, and so cutting across and gaining on him. Once he seemed just ahead, and we expected to see him each second; but we had to pay for the luxury of that fire, as for other good things in life, so we never saw a hair of him. When, at last, completely used up, we burst out on a lake and saw the muddy tracks and the water still "riled up" where he had crossed, Jocko swore he heard him crash up the opposite bank; but we were at the end of our strength and could go no further. A man must eat sometimes, even on a moose hunt.
Now comes the really tragical part of this episode; our canoe was not twenty feet from where this perverse animal had entered the water, and we were on the little pond where our permanent camp stood. Still we felt encouraged, for, as Chabot said that night, "Hear him now, see him pretty soon." But not for many days.
One more sample to encourage would-be moose hunters, and then we will kill a moose just to show how easy it is. Two nights after the above adventure we changed our camp and the weather at the same time. It was clear now, but it grew very cold, and made night work in the canoe a horror.
It was my brother's turn to call, and I was just dropping off to sleep in my tent, within a few feet of the lake shore, when from the other side of the water, about a quarter of a mile distant, a bull moose called. On the cold, still air it rang out like a trumpet—a long call, very different from the call made by Indian hunters. Jocko, who was with me in camp, was frantic with excitement, especially as my brother, who must have heard it, did not answer. Again the call sounded. The bull must be on the shore. I thought he might swim over. Then came the answering call, close at hand, of a cow. Jocko laughed and whispered, "Chabot call him." Then there was silence for a few minutes, followed by a final bellow, evidently further off. The mock cow bawled and screamed and bleated frantically, but no sound came back. My brother and his man kept it up until late that night, and then came to the camp almost frozen. That incident ruined my faith in calling, for every condition of wind and weather was perfect, and Chabot's calling apparently most enticing.
After this and similar episodes, we left the Kwingwishe country, after hunting it carefully as far north as Sassanega Lake. We passed Sair's Lake and the Bois Franc, and finally reached the Little Beauchene. Near the last lake my brother killed a young bull moose, whose meat was the first fresh food, except partridge, we had had for over three weeks. It was delicious, and we felt the change of diet at once in increased strength and energy. For continuous use moose meat is much superior to other venison, as it is of a rich flavor which does not readily pall on the taste. The myth about moose muffle being such a hunters' delicacy has never allured me to actually eat it, but I suppose a starving man might, after consuming his boots, manage to swallow it.
There were many fresh signs in the neighborhood of the Little Beauchene Lake, but some lumbermen had arrived a few days before us and had scared the game away. This starting the quarry is the real difficulty in moose hunting; for, when once disturbed, the bull leaves with all his kith and kin, so the only chance in these regions is to find him immediately on arrival in a new district and before he comes across your tracks.
Still working slowly southward, we hunted more back ponds, until at last my turn came on the twenty-seventh hunting day. Let no man say that moose hunting is a picnic.
We had camped on a little strip of land, between a pond and a long narrow swamp, about 4 o'clock on a beautiful afternoon. Leaving my brother and Jocko to eat dinner in comfort, I started to the head of the swamp. The water was so low that we could barely force the light canoe through the lily-pads. Old moose signs were plenty. A family of moose had evidently been there all summer, but until we reached the upper end we saw no fresh tracks. The sluggish stream we were on drained a shallow lake, and, after a few hard plunges, our canoe floated clear of the mud into the silent waters of a circular pond. It was a basin about a half mile across, surrounded by low hardwood hills, and so shallow that a moose, I think, could have waded across the deepest part. The shores were marked up with some very large tracks, but fresh signs had long since ceased to excite in me anything more than a passing interest. We made the tour of the lake slowly and quietly. Nothing was in sight except four wood ducks. This was "last chance" pond, and if I got no moose here, we must return to Mattawa for another outfit, which I had about made up my mind to do. The night settled still and cold—oh, so cold!—and the stars came out with wonderful distinctness.
What was that?
Chabot had started up, listened, and a second later was driving the birch across the lake noiselessly. As we neared the shore, it was inky black—a mammoth would not have been visible ten yards away. Twigs breaking at long intervals told that something was on shore just in cover of the bushes. We waited some time and at last I whispered to Chabot, "Muckwa?" (bear).
"Not muckwa—cow," answered the guide.
As he spoke, the short call of a bull floated out on the cold air from the side of the pond that we had just left. I think Chabot was right about the cow being in the bushes, but he may have been mistaken—one's hearing becomes unnaturally sensitive after a few weeks' continuous straining to catch and distinguish the most distant sounds. But there was no mistake about that bull's call. He was well back from the shore on the hillside. The wind was wrong, and, although he grunted at intervals for an hour, he paid no attention to Chabot's most seductive pleadings. We imitated with paddles the splashings of a cow walking in the shallow water, but this and other devices had no effect. When at last even my Indian could no longer bear the bitter cold of the wind which had sprung up, we started for camp. Long past midnight we crawled into our blankets, and I dropped asleep cursing the day I had first gone after moose.
We were on that pond again before daylight. Not a sound to be heard, not a living thing to be seen, when the sun rose. We took our stand on a small point opposite the outlet and watched. I sat on a fallen tree motionless, hour after hour. Chabot dozed beside me. Those four ducks played and fed within thirty feet, and a muskrat worked at house-building a few yards away. The silence was intense. There was not a breath of wind. I knew my brother was doing the same thing on a neighboring pond, and I fell to thinking whether there was some special Nemesis about this hunt, or it was the fault of the guides. I glanced at the outlet in front of me, about a half mile distant.
There was a moose, stalking with the utmost deliberation along the edge of the woods and then into the shallow water.
Chabot was roused by a hasty shake, and a second later the canoe was flying across the lake. As we crossed, I inspected the moose closely. He was walking slowly, nibbling the long reed-like grass that stuck up from the water. His neck seemed very stiff, and he swung his legs from his hips and shoulders. The hump was extremely conspicuous, perhaps because his head was carried low to get at the grass. He was a young bull, nearly full grown, and with small antlers. He looked occasionally at the canoe, now fast nearing him; but we had the advantage of the wind, and the sun was going down behind us. It was just 5 o'clock. He walked, now out toward us, now back to shore, as though about to bolt for the bush, but working slowly toward the north, where we afterwards found a much-used runway, leading to the marsh my brother was watching, two miles away. I opened fire about fifty yards off, when the moose was standing in about a foot of water, looking suspiciously at us. The shot was too high, but struck him in the shoulder. He started in a lumbering gallop along the shore. I fired again. This turned him into the woods at an old lumber road. We heard the twigs snap sharply for a minute, and then a heavy crash and silence. I thought we had lost him, but Chabot declared that he was down. I sprang ashore the moment the canoe grounded, and dashed in on his trail, which was perfectly clear on the soft moss. Looking ahead through the open woods for the animal, which I thought had turned, I almost fell over his prostrate body.
His head rested against a small windfall, which he had tried to clear—an effort which appeared to have cost him his life. Moss hung from some small spruce trees close by, which had been kicked up in the death struggle. The shoulder shot had been the fatal one, but he had been hard hit in the side too.
He was not full grown, and measured only 5 feet 6-1/2 inches in height, and 8 feet 3-1/4 inches in length, from the nose to root of tail. His girth at the shoulder was 5 feet 11-1/4 inches. His nose showed none of the Jewish characteristics which taxidermists are fond of giving their mounted moose heads. The forehead and shoulders were brownish instead of black, like the rest of the body. The hindlegs were wholly white, as were the forelegs below the knee. I am inclined to think he was a ranger moose, but could not tell with certainty, as his horns were too undeveloped. The velvet was still hanging in places, but very dry. This was unusual, as it was the 10th of October.
Ordering Chabot to dress the moose, I went back to the canoe, having decided to watch until dark, although there seemed no possibility of seeing another moose after the firing. My lazy guide, instead of obeying my order, merely cut the skin, with the result that all the meat spoiled—probably just what he wanted, fearing he would have to portage it out of the bush. We returned to our point and dozed again. At a quarter of 7 it was getting dark fast, and in the north a black, ugly-looking cloud was gathering. We might as well go back to camp if it was going to blow and rain, so I told Chabot to shove off and to give one last toot of his horn, just for luck.
The air was still as death with the dread of the impending storm. Chabot took up the coiled birch, and the echoes rang out with a short grunting call, which so much resembles a man chopping wood. Before they died away, there came from behind us, just to our right, the unmistakable answering grunt of a bull moose. He was probably on his way to the lake, and our call merely hastened him and brought him out into the open before it was too dark to shoot. He was very near and came steadily forward, stopping now and then to listen. We could hear him plainly as his horns broke the twigs at every step—once or twice he lashed the bushes with them. He repeated his grunts, ungh! ungh! every few steps. He was so evidently reckless that, to take no chance, I allowed Chabot to answer only once—with the short call. I say short call, in distinction to the long modulated call which is used to good purpose in Maine and New Brunswick, but which I have never known to succeed in this part of Canada. The moose paused for a moment in the alders that formed a close thicket at the water's edge, and I feared he had seen or scented us; then suddenly and noiselessly he stepped out from a cove a short hundred yards away. He had taken less than ten minutes from the first call to his appearance.
At the first alarm we had pushed off and were floating quietly just by the shore. The water was so shallow that the birch made, to my ears at least, a frightful scraping as it pushed over the dead sticks that lay in the water, and the wind was unfavorable. I never shall forget the appearance that bull made as he stepped fiercely and proudly out, with his head up, swinging a splendid set of antlers as lightly as straws. He did not see us, but strode about ten yards into the shallow lake, where the water scarcely covered his hoofs, and, first glancing away for a second, turned like a flash and faced us full, looking down on us in surprised disgust. He was greatly excited and the mane on his hump was erect, increasing his natural height, and there was nothing timid or deer-like in his appearance. I have seen in the arena a bull step out from the darkened stall into the glare of sunlight, and gaze for a moment at the picadors with a sort of indignant surprise; so this great bull moose looked.
We gazed motionless at each other, I knowing that it was one of the grandest and rarest sights on the American continent, and he thinking, no doubt, what a disgraceful imitation of a cow the motionless canoe made. Chabot's breath was coming hard behind me, and I felt the birch bark quiver.
As I raised my rifle, I realized that it had suddenly grown very dark under this western bank, and the bull precisely resembled in color the background, and, large as he was, made a very poor mark. The tall grass, which I had looked over in watching him, now sticking up in front of the sights, bothered me. I fired at the root of his neck, and the rifle gave a suppressed roar in the heavy air and the smoke hung like a pall. The bull ran straight forward, hesitated as though about to charge, then turned and made wonderful speed along the lake shore. The moment I could see him I fired again. In the dim twilight he was almost out of sight. When the smoke cleared he was gone.
Neither of us moved. It was too frightful to miss such an immense creature at that range. We heard him crash up the hillside and then stop a short distance back in the wood. Then I knew he either was down or had turned, unless he had found an open lumber road, where his horns would make no sound; for a moose can go in the most mysterious manner when he chooses to be quiet—but there was nothing quiet about this bull.
Chabot declared that he had heard him cough, but I did not believe it. I pointed to the spot where he had entered the bush, and a moment later the canoe grated on the beach. There were the huge tracks with the hoofs wide spread, and the trail entering an old lumber road.
All this took less time to happen than to read, and yet it was now dark, so quickly had night fallen. By straining my eyes I saw it was 7 o'clock—just two hours after the first bull was killed. Chabot wanted to go back to camp, which was the proper thing to do, especially as I had now just one cartridge left. I had only taken a handful with me that morning.
We entered the forest foot by foot, Chabot following the trail where I could scarcely see to step. A few yards in and the track turned from the old road into the thick bush, and we knew the moose was near. A little further, and we scarcely moved—stepping like cats from tree to tree, expecting every second to hear an angry grunt and have the bull emerge from the impenetrable veil of night that hung around us.
At last we came to a windfall, and we were for some time at a loss to find whether he had gone across or around it. In lighting a match with extreme caution, the light fell on a tall moose wood stem about as large as one's finger. Four feet from the ground it was dripping with bright red blood. The coughing Chabot had heard was now, we thought, explained, and the game hard hit. We decided to go back to camp; for, as my guide put it very clearly, the wounded bull would either fight or run. I wasn't anxious for the first alternative in the dark and tangled wood, with one cartridge; and the second meant a long chase on the morrow. If we left him until the morning, he would be either dead or too stiff from his wound to go far.
So back we went to camp, amply repaid by the events of two hours for weeks of hardship and exposure. Just at daylight the next morning, as we were leaving camp, prepared to take and keep the trail of that bull if it led to Hudson Bay, my brother appeared with Jocko. He had had no breakfast, and had come a long distance through a frightful bush in order to be in at the death, as he had heard the firing, and shrewdly suspected that in the dusk a wounded moose was the result.
"From the tracks at my lake," said he, as he strode up to the fire, "there are two bull moose around here—a large and a small one; which did you get?"
"Both," replied Chabot.
We took the trail at the water's edge, and found it smeared with blood. The bull could not have gone far. A short walk brought us to the windfall where we had turned back the night before, and which had seemed so deep in the woods.
A hundred yards beyond it lay the bull on his right side. The second shot had struck him in the center of the left ham and ranged through him. The meat was spoiled, as was the hide—that is, the hair came out so badly that it was not worth while to prepare it; but the neck and scalp were perfect, except a bad scar on the forehead, received in fighting.
He was a grand sight as he lay dead in that silent autumn forest—for I never can get over the impression that somehow or other the moose is a survival of a long past order of nature, a fit comrade for the mammoth and the cave bear. He was short and thickset, with immense chest power—probably a swamp moose. The neck was short and stout, and he had a Jewish cast of nose. No bell—merely the common dewlap. He measured at the shoulder 6 feet 6 inches; 9 feet 8-1/2 inches from nose to tip of tail; girth at shoulders, 6 feet 2-1/2 inches. We skinned and decapitated the moose, one after the other. The meat of both was completely spoiled, and it seemed wicked to leave those two huge carcasses to the bears and wolves; but there was no help for it, so we started for Mattawa. I doubt if we could have carried out any of the meat if we had tried, for we had to throw away everything not absolutely necessary on the long portages that followed. At last we reached Rosiceau's, on Snake Lake, and, with the welcome the old man gave us, felt quite at home once more. Then passing by the scenes of a former hunt, we reached Fort Eddy, an old Hudson Bay post, and then the Ottawa River. We ran the Cave rapids, and at sundown on a beautiful day the town of Mattawa swung in sight, and the hunt was over.
The country we had traversed contained little except bears and moose. We saw a few caribou tracks, and brought home with us a curious caribou antler, which we found in the woods.
The fur animals have, within the last five years, been exterminated, and the very few beaver that survive have abandoned their old habits, and live in holes in the banks of the larger streams. We found traces of one of these bank beaver, but he was probably traveling and we could not catch him. A few mink were shot, but the country is completely stripped of everything else of value. If the present law, prohibiting the trapping of otter and beaver, can be enforced, perhaps the land may be restocked, but it will take years. It is fit for nothing except fur and timber, and, with efficient game wardens, could be made to produce a large return from these sources. Partridges and loons abounded, but ducks were seldom seen.
The lakes form a complete system of communication by means of easy portages, but there are no streams that contain trout and no springs to supply drinking water. This lack of fresh water caused us considerable suffering, as the lake water is supposed to be dangerous, and a pail of spring water, which we got at the start, was carried for days over portages as our most precious baggage. We did not see a sign of a brook trout during the entire trip, and I do not believe that there were any in the waters we traversed. There may have been lake trout, but our trolling produced only pike and pickerel.
This absence of small game and fish makes the country very uninteresting, and the long monotony between most exciting events is the greatest drawback to hunting on the Upper Ottawa.
Madison Grant.
A Hunting Trip in India
Early in 1881 I landed at Bombay, intending to get as many varieties of big game shooting as possible during the course of the year. I was well armed with introductions, including many from the Department of State, and during my stay in India was treated by the English military officers, civil officials, planters and merchants with a hearty hospitality which I cordially appreciated. Thanks to this hospitality, and to the readiness with which all to whom I was introduced fell into my plans, I was able to get a rather unusually varied quantity of sport.
My first trip was in March, after tigers. On the 1st of March I started from Hyderabad with Colonels Fraser and Watson, and traveled by palanquin that day and night, and most of the next day, striking the foot of the Gāt at a place called Rungapore, and then going on over a great plain, beyond which we camped. The scenery was magnificent, and we heard much news of the devastation of tigers among the large herds of miserable-looking cattle belonging to the poor villagers roundabout. The thermometer went up to 96 degrees in the shade during the day, but the nights were lovely and cool. Thanks to Colonel Fraser, we were fitted out as comfortably as we could be, and the luxury of the camp life offered the strongest possible contrast to my experiences in roughing it on the buffalo range in northwestern Texas.
For the first two days we accomplished nothing, though several of the cattle we had put out for baits were killed, and though we started and beat the jungles with our elephants whenever we received khubber, or news. Our camp equipage included twenty elephants, forty camels and bullocks, thirty horses for the troopers, and fifty baggage horses. We had seventeen private servants, twenty-six police, fifty-two bearers, and an indefinite number of attendants for the elephants and camels, and of camp followers. An Indian of high position, Sir Salar Jung, was along also; so our total retinue comprised 350 men, in addition to which we employed each day of beaters 150 or 200 more.
On March 5th, one of the shikaris brought word that he had seen and heard a tigress and two cubs at a nullah about six miles away. Immediately we started up the valley, Col. Fraser, Col. Watson and myself, each on his own elephant. The jungle was on fire and the first beat was not successful, for we had to fight the fire, and in the excitement the brute got off. However, some of the watchers saw her, and marked her down in another small ravine. Through this we again beat, the excitement being at fever heat. I was, of course, new to the work, and the strangeness of the scene, the cries of the beaters and watchers, the occasional explosion of native fireworks, together with the quantity of other game that we saw, impressed me much. In this ravine I was favored by good luck. The tigress broke right in front of me, and I hit her with a ball from a No. 12 smooth-bore. She sickened at once and crawled back into the jungle. In we went on the elephants, tracking her up. She made no attempt to charge, and I finished her off with another barrel of the smooth-bore and two express bullets. The crowd of natives ran up, abusing the tigress and praising me, while the two colonels drank my health. We then padded the tigress and rode back to camp, having been gone from half past 9 in the morning till 7 in the evening. This tigress weighed, when we brought her in, 280 pounds; her living weight must have been much more.
Next day we again got news of a tigress, with one cub, but we failed to find her. The following day, for a change, I tried still-hunting through the woods. There was not much game, but what we did see was far from shy, and the shooting was easy. The camp was on a terrace, and from it we went up a range of hills to the stalking ground. It was a stony country and the trees were scrubby. I shot two cheetul, or spotted deer, and also two of the little jungle cocks. The next day again was a blank, but on the 9th we got another tiger. Thanks to the courtesy of my friends, I was given the first shot, again hitting it with one barrel of the smooth-bore. The heat was very great on this day. It was not possible to touch the gun barrels without a glove, and the thirst was awful. In the evening the cool bath was a luxury indeed. By moonlight the camp was very fine. The next morning I was off at daybreak, snipe shooting around a big tank, seven miles away. On my return I found that my companions had gone out for a beat, and so, after a hurried breakfast, I jumped on my horse and rode after them. That afternoon we beat two ravines and got a tiger. This was the last tiger that we killed. The weather was getting very warm, and, though we stayed a week longer out, we failed to get on terms with Mr. Stripes again. However, I shot three sambur stags. Two of them were weighed in camp, their weight being, respectively, 450 and 438 pounds.
It was now getting hot, and I determined to start northward for my summer's hunting in the Himalayas and Cashmere, although it was rather early to try to get through the mountains. I left Lahore on April 6th for the Pir Pinjal. My transportation consisted of eight pack ponies and three native single-horse carts. I was shown every courtesy by Mr. McKay, a member of the Forest Department, at Gujarat. I intended to make a hunt for gorals and bears in the mountains around the Pir Pinjal before striking through to Cashmere. The goral is a little mountain antelope, much like the chamois, only with straight horns. The bear in the region in which I was hunting was the black bear, which is very much like our own black bear. Further on in the Himalayas is found the red or snow bear, which is a good deal like the great brown bear of Europe, or a small and inoffensive grizzly. After leaving Gujarat, I traveled for several days before coming to my hunting ground proper, although on the way I killed some peacocks, partridges, and finally some very handsome pheasants of different kinds. The country offered the greatest possible contrast to that in which I had been hunting tigers. Everything was green and lovely, and the scenery was magnificent beyond description—the huge steep mountains rising ahead of me, while the streams were crystal-clear, noisy torrents. The roads were very rough, and the wild flowers formed great carpets everywhere.
On the 16th of April I began my shooting, having by this time left my heavy baggage behind, and having with me only what the coolies could carry. I had two shikaris, four servants and twelve coolies, besides myself. On April 16th I killed my first goral. I had hunted in vain all day, but about 5 o'clock one of the shikaris advised my starting out again and climbing around the neighboring cliffs. I did this for two and one-half hours, and then got a close shot and killed the little beast. This was my first trial of grass-shoes, and my first experience in climbing over the stupendous mountain masses; for stupendous they were, though they were only the foothills of the Himalayas proper. Without grass-shoes it is impossible to climb on these smooth, grassy slopes; but I found that they hurt my feet a great deal. The next day I again went off with my two shikaris over the mountains. Each of them carried a gun. I had all I could do to take care of myself without one, for a mis-step would have meant a fall of a thousand or two feet. In the morning we saw five gorals and I got one. At 10 I stopped and a coolie came up with a lunch, and I lay reading, sleeping and idly watching the grand mountains until the afternoon, when we began again to examine the nullahs for game, being all the time much amused by the monkeys. At 4 we started again, and in a jagged mass of precipices I got another goral. The next day I repeated my experience, and had one of the characteristic bits of bad luck, offset by good luck, that come to every hunter—missing a beautiful shot at fifty yards, and then, by a fluke, killing a goral at 300 yards. The animal, however, fell over 1,000 feet and was ruined. I myself had a slip this day and went down about fifty feet. The following day I again went off to climb, and the first ascent was so steep that at the top I was completely blown, and missed a beautiful shot at a goral at fifty yards. I then arranged a beat, but nothing came from it, and the morning was a blank. In the afternoon I gave up beating and tried still-hunting again. It was hard work, but I was very successful, and killed two gorals and a bear.
At this time I was passed by two English officers, also going in to shoot—one of them, Captain S. D. Turnbull, a very jolly fellow and a good sportsman, with whom I got on excellent terms; the other, a Captain C., was a very bad walker and a poor shot, and was also a disagreeable companion, as he would persist in trying to hang around my hunting grounds, thus forcing me continually to shift.
On April 21st I tried driving for gorals, and got four, and on the next two days I got three gorals and two bears. So far I had had great luck and great sport. The work was putting me in fine trim, except my feet, which were getting very sore. It was very hard work going after the gorals. The bears offered easier stalking, and, like our American black bear but unlike our grizzly, they didn't show fight. The climbing was awful work. The stones and grass-shoes combined bruised and skinned the soles of my feet, so that I could not get relief without putting them in clarified butter and then keeping them up in the air. Accordingly I tried resting for a day, and meant to rest the following day too; but could not forbear taking a four hours' stroll along the banks of the brawling, snow-fed river, and was rewarded by shooting a surow—a queer, squatty, black antelope, about the size of a Rocky Mountain white goat and with similar horns. The next day I rested again, hoping my feet would get better. Instead they got worse, and I made up my mind that, as they were so bad, I might as well get some hunting anyhow, so off I tramped on the 27th for another all-day jog. It would be difficult to describe the pain that my feet gave me all day long. However, it was a real sporting day. I suffered the tortures of the damned, but I got two gorals and one tahr—a big species of goat with rather small horns—and then hobbled back to camp. Next day I stayed quietly in camp, and then started back to the camp where I had left my heavy baggage. On the way I picked up another black bear. My feet were in a frightful condition, but I had had a fortnight's excellent sport.
I then went on to Cashmere, and on May 6th reached Siringur. The scenery was beautiful beyond description, and the whole life of the natives very attractive to look at. However, something did not agree with me, for I was very sick and had to go to bed for several days. There were one or two American friends there, and these and the Englishmen, to whom I had letters of introduction, treated me with extreme courtesy. As soon as I got well, I started off for the real mountains, hoping especially to get ibex and markhoor. The ibex is almost exactly the same as the European animal of that name. The markhoor is a magnificent goat, with long whitish hair and great spiral horns. They also have in these Cashmere valleys a big stag called the barramigh, which is a good deal like our wapiti, only not half so large. On May 21st I started off, first by boat, but I was bothered from the beginning by chills and fever. I was weak, and glad I didn't have to march. At first, all I did in shooting was to have my coolies beat some brush patches near camp. Out of one of them they started a little musk-deer, which I shot. Soon I began to get very much better and we took up our march. I was going toward Astor, but encountered much snow, as it was still early in the season for these high mountains. I saw some grand barramigh, but their horns were, of course, only just growing, and I didn't molest them.
Very soon I got into a country where the red bears literally swarmed. From May 26th to June 5th, during which time I was traveling and hunting all the time, I shot no less than sixteen, together with two musk-deer, but saw nothing else. The marching was very hard, and some of the passes dangerous. I met a British officer, Lieutenant Carey, on the 30th, who treated me very well indeed. The scenery was very beautiful, although rather bleak. I did not pick up strength as much as I had hoped. On June 3d I christened my camp Camp Good Luck, because of the phenomenal success I had with the bears. That morning we left by 4 to cross the river before the snow had melted. The thermometer would go down to 30 degrees, even in the valleys, at night, so that everything would freeze, and then would go up to 110 in the day, and when the snow melted the streams would come down in a perfect torrent. Not two miles beyond the river I saw three bears on the side of a hill, a she and two two-year-old cubs. My shikari made a splendid stalk and brought me within forty yards, and I got all three with a shot apiece. The delight of my camp followers was amusing. I then left the tents, and, taking only my blankets and a lunch basket with me, started off again. At midday I slept, and at 2 o'clock started up the nullah, seeing a number of bears. One of them I got within fifty yards, and two others, right and left, at 100 yards. The skinning took a long time, and the stream which I had to cross was up with the evening flood, so that I didn't get back to camp until 10 o'clock. I had shot unusually well, I had been happy and was all tired out, and it is needless to say how I slept.
Soon after this I began to suffer from fever, and I had to work very hard indeed, as I was now on the ibex ground. For several days, though I saw ibex, I was unable to get near them. Finally, on June 9th, I got my first one, a young buck with small horns. I had to hunt way up the mountain, even beyond bush vegetation, and the hot sun at midday was awful. Nevertheless, by very hard climbing, I managed on this day to get within shot first of a herd of nine females, which I did not touch, and then of the young buck, which I killed. On June 13th, by another heart-breaking climb, very high up, I got a second small buck. I did not get back to camp that night till half past 9—tired out, feet badly cut with the stones and bruised all over; but in spite of the fever I enjoyed every day—the scenery was so grand and the life so exhilarating. Four days afterwards came a red-letter day. I started early in the morning, clambering up among the high mountains. Until noon I saw nothing; then several flocks of ibex came in sight, one of them of eleven big bucks. I had to wait four hours to get into a position to stalk; then by quick work and awful climbing I came within close range and killed three. It was half past 10 in the evening before I got back to camp, very nearly done up, but exultant over my good luck.
The traveling now became very severe and I had a great deal of difficulty even with the coolies, and though I hunted hard I got little game until July 8th. I had been shifting, trying to get on markhoor ground, and on this day I killed my first markhoor. The shikaris and I left the coolies to go around the path while we went over the mountain, a five hours' climb, keeping a sharp lookout for game. Just at the beginning of the ascent we saw three fine-looking markhoor grazing in a nullah, and after a stalk of about a mile, during which time it began to rain, the beasts went into a jungle on the steep side of the mountain. Through this we still-hunted and I got a shot through the bushes at 100 yards. By good luck I hit and great was the rejoicing. Five days later I got two ibex, which at a distance we had mistaken for markhoor. Then I was attacked by a terrible dysentery and was within an ace of dying. For a fortnight I was unable to leave camp, excepting when I was carried slowly along by the coolies in the effort to get me out of the mountains. On August 1st I shot a second markhoor. We were journeying at the time. In the very rough places I had to walk, though awfully weak; elsewhere the coolies carried me. The markhoor was just below us, round a turn in the Indus Valley. I was in advance with one of the shikaris and got a quiet shot, and more by good luck than anything else—for I was very weak—I killed. I now began gradually to pick up strength, and when near Astor I got a urial, a kind of wild sheep.
I had no other experience of note till I got back to Siringur, where I stayed to recuperate, and at the end of August went off once more into the foothills, this time after barramigh. In a week's work I killed three, but again became sick, and had to give up and come in.
I forthwith returned to India, the hot weather being by this time pretty well over. As I was very anxious to kill an elephant, I went down to Ceylon, reaching that island the end of October and going out to Kandy. I met a number of Englishmen, who were very kind to me, as were some Eurasian gentlemen. On November 16th I left Minerva for a regular hunt. It was very interesting shooting through the tropical jungle and I had good luck. There were plenty of elephants, but at first I didn't get any, though I shot five spotted deer and a boar. Finally, however, I got two of the big brutes I was mainly after. One of them, which I killed on the 20th of the month, was said to be a rogue that had killed two villagers and done at intervals a good deal of damage to the crops. An old native tracker had guaranteed to show me this elephant. He kept his word. For three or four miles we had a very exciting track, and then came on him standing in the jungle, occasionally flapping his ears, and crept up to within thirty yards. I think he was asleep and I got a perfectly good shot, but, extraordinary to say, I missed. However, when he ran I went after him, and, getting very close, I shot him in the hip, so injuring his leg that he could not get away. He could still get round after us, and we passed a most lively half-hour, he trumpeting and charging incessantly, until, after expending a great quantity of cartridges, I finally put a bullet behind his eye, and down he went.
Soon after this I went back to Kandy, and early in December left India for good.
Elliott Roosevelt.
HOW OUR OUTFIT WAS CARRIED.