Tired and happy we dined. Until retiring time, we lived again the sport of the day. When we sought our beds, sleep came quickly, and I do not think any of us turned over until it was time to get up. We had packed our belongings, taken on gasoline and breakfasted, and started homeward a little after 7 o'clock.
We visited another section of the country known to one of our party, and fell in with some mountain pigeons, and in a couple of hours managed to kill sixty-eight of them. Talk about shooting! Oh, Mama! How those pigeons could fly! And pack away lead! No bird I ever saw could equal them in that particular.
Even at close range, a well-centered bird would, when hard hit, pull himself together as his feathers flew in the breeze, and sail away out into some mountain side, quite out of reach of the hunter, undoubtedly to die and furnish food for the buzzards or coyotes. We had to take awful chances as to distance in order to kill any of them.
While looking for a dead pigeon that fell off towards the bottom of a wooded bluff in some thick bunches of chapparal, I heard the quick boof! boof! of the hoofs of a bounding deer. I did not see that animal. An instant later, in rounding a heavy growth of bushes, I saw a magnificent buck grazing on the tender growth. He stood just the fraction of a second with the young twig of the bush in his mouth, looking at me with his great luminous eyes, and then he made a jump or two out of sight. Strange that these two animals had not fled at the sound of our guns.
A game warden hailed us and insisted on seeing all our hunting licenses and on counting our ducks. This privilege, under the law, we could have denied him, but we were a little proud of the birds we had, and as we were well within the number we could have killed, we made no objection to his doing so.
As a result of its speedy run the day before, the runabout had for some little time been running on a rim. We left its occupants, who disdained our help, putting on a new tire. After a beautiful run we again reached the Newport place, where we lunched. The car did not appear. We hated to go away and leave them, as we thought they might be in difficulty. We telephoned to Temecula and found they had passed that point. About two hours after our arrival they came whirling in. They had had more tire trouble. They took a hasty lunch, and we all started together.
We made the home run without incident. Spread out in one body our game made a most imposing appearance. Besides the 118 ducks there were 50 jacksnipe and 68 fine large wild pigeons.
Such days make us regret that we are growing old. They rejuvenate us —make us boys again.
Boyhood Days in Early California
My boyhood days, from the time I was five until I was fifteen years of age, were spent on a ranch in Yuba County, California. We were located on the east side of Feather River, about five miles above Marysville. The ranch consisted of several hundred acres of high land, which, at its western terminus, fell away about one hundred feet to the river bottom. There were a couple of hundred acres of this river bottom land which was arable. It was exceedingly rich and productive. Still west of this land was a well-wooded pasture, separated from the cultivated lands by a good board fence. The river bounded this pasture on the north and west.