A BIG CATCH IN THE BIG NET
Photograph shows the west wing of the big net. Note that the trap-doors are down on each side and we are driving a bunch into the catching-pen, which is a little corner at the end, only twelve feet square, with a trap-door to keep them in there. The trap-door can be seen hanging above, ready to fall.

That fall, 1922, about 300 geese came back, but there was not much water as the spring was very low. Yet on December 5th I caught fifty-three, and on Saturday, April 21st, 1923, I caught two hundred and seven. Some catch! “Let man have dominion over all.” Now I have caught three hundred and twenty-one in one year.

While watching these last two hundred and seven gradually working their way under the net, my field-glasses showed eleven standing on the bank with bright aluminum tags on, but not a goose in the two hundred and seven had been tagged before. In other words, I have never caught a goose twice in the same net. “Silly old goose!”

Mind you, it is a job to tag two hundred and seven wild geese! And I had only one hundred and twenty tags made. When we got these all on, Dr. Sloan wiped the perspiration off his face with his goosey hands and said, “Jack, let’s let the rest of the bunch go without any religion.”

It will be plainly seen that we haven’t had time to hear from many of the three hundred and twenty-one that were caught during the last year or so; but out of the one hundred and nine that I caught between 1915 and 1921, sixty-two have been reported killed, and forty-nine of the tags are back in my possession, thirty-six reported at Hudson Bay; one from Hamilton Inlet, Labrador; fourteen from North Carolina; two from Maryland; one from New Jersey; four from Virginia; one from Illinois; one from Indiana; and one from the Ottawa River, thirty miles north of Montreal, Quebec.

CHAPTER XXX.
Game Protection.

This, a sportsmen’s problem, may appear to you as being entirely out of place in a book like this; yet I want you to read, for I feel fully qualified to discuss this matter in a conscientious, fair and square, look-you-in-the-face manner, as I have the itching of my own trigger-finger fairly well harnessed, and have no desire to shoot any bird other than the cannibals; but on the other hand my boy, Ted, who is twenty-three years of age, and for whom I would willingly lie down and give up the ghost if it were actually necessary, likes to shoot, and I sometimes think he is as crazy for a gun as I once was, but that seems impossible.

Nearly twenty years ago I organized the South Essex County Game Protective Association, which, by the way, now has advanced into the hands of some of the best and most self-sacrificing sportsmen this earth can produce. And let me say right here that they have stood, and are still standing, right behind me, backing me up in every just undertaking. If every county had an association of the same material the question would all be solved, for when these men asked our Dominion Government to proclaim a bird sanctuary around Jack Miner’s home, in less than three months no shooting was allowed within a mile of my house, and the game warden came and declared it a Crown Lands’ Bird Sanctuary.

To be sure, I have tasted the insults one experiences when he changes from a pull-down to a builder. An insulting doctor once said to me, as he stood in the safety zone and shook his fists at my red face, “Jack, you are just like old Uncle Joe; when he used to dance he wanted everybody to dance, but when he got religion he wanted everybody to pray.”