"More and more followed. Sometimes they came singly, and then in twos and threes. I kept busy and attended to each bird as quickly as possible. Whenever there was a lull in the flight I went out in the boat and picked up the dead, leaving the wounded to take chances with any gunner lucky enough to catch them in open and smooth water. A bird handy in the air is worth two wounded ones in the water. Twice I took six dead birds out of the water for seven shots, and both guns empty.
"The ball thus opened, the birds commenced to move in all directions. Until the morning's flight was over I was kept busy pumping lead, first with the 10, then with the automatic, reloading, picking up the dead, etc."
And the reader will observe that the harmless, innocent, inoffensive automatic shot gun, that "don't matter if you enforce the bag limit," figures prominently in both stories and both photographs.
A Story of Two Pump Guns and Geese: —It comes from Aberdeen, S.D. (Sand Lake), in the spring of 1911. Mr. J.J. Humphrey tells it, in Outdoor Life magazine for July, 1911.
"Smith and I were about a hundred yards from them [the flock of Canada geese], when Murphy scared them. They rose in a dense mass and came directly between Smith and me. We were about gunshot distance apart, and they were not over thirty feet in the air when we opened up on them with our pump guns and No. 5 shot. When the smoke cleared away and we had rounded up the cripples we found we had twenty-one geese. I have heard of bigger killings out in this country, but never positively knew of them."
So then: those two gunners averaged 10-1/2 wild geese per pump gun out of one flock! And yet there are wise and reflective sportsmen who say, "What difference does the kind of gun make so long as you live up to the law?"
I think that the pump and automatic guns make about 75 per-cent of difference, against the game; that is all!
The number of shot-guns now in use in the United States is almost beyond belief. About six years ago a gentleman interested in the manufacture of such weapons informed me, and his statement has never been disputed, that every year about 500,000 new shot-guns were sold in the United States. The number of shot cartridges annually produced by our four great cartridge companies has been reliably estimated as follows:
| Winchester Arms Co | 300,000,000 |
| Union Metallic Cartridge Co | 250,000,000 |
| Peters Cartridge Co | 150,000,000 |
| Western Cartridge Co | 75,000,000 |
| _____________ | |
| 775,000,000 |
We must stop all the holes in the barrel, or eventually lose all the water. No group of bird-slaughterers is entitled to immunity. We will not "limit the bag, and enforce the laws," while we permit the makers and users of autoloading and pump guns to kill at will, as they demand.