uiries at the hotel as to the shooting--duck or prairie chicken--in
the neighbourhood. Hiring a gun of the local gunsmith and buying a
hundred cartridges, one then secured a trap with a driver, who probably
brought his own gun and shot also (probably better than oneself), but
who certainly knew the ground. The best ground might be three or five or
ten miles out--open prairie where chicken were plentiful, or a string of
prairie lakes or "sloughs" (pronounced "sloo") with duck-passes between.
That evening one came home, hungry and happy as a hunter ought to be,
with perhaps half a dozen brace of spike-tailed grouse (the common
"chicken" of the Northwestern States) or ten or a dozen duck--mallard,
widgeon, pintail, two kinds of teal, with, it might be, a couple of
red-heads or canvas-backs,--or, not improbably, a magnificent Canada
goose as the spoils.

With the settlement of the country, the multiplication of shooters, and
the increase in the number of "gun-clubs," which have now included most
of the easily accessible duck-grounds in the country in their private
preserves, the possibilities of those delightful days are growing fewer,
but even now there are many parts of the West where the stranger can
still do as I have done many times.

Though the people had so few outdoor games, the great majority of
Americans, except the less well-to-do of the city-dwellers of the
Eastern States, have been accustomed to handle gun and rod from their
childhood. The gun may at first have been a rusty old muzzle-loader, and
the rod a "pole" cut from the bank of the stream with a live grasshopper
for bait; and there are few better weapons to teach a boy to be a keen
sportsman. The birds that he shot were game--duck or geese, turkeys,
quail, grouse, or snipe--and the fish that he caught were mostly game
fish--trout and bass. It is true that the American generally shoots
foxes; so does the Englishman when he goes to the Colonies where there
are no hounds and too many foxes, with game birds which he wishes kept
for his own shooting, and domestic chickens which he destines for his
own table. On the other hand the American does not mount a miniature
cannon in a punt and shoot waterfowl by wholesale when sitting on the
water. It is only the gunner for the market, the man who makes his
living by it, who does that, and the laws do their best to stop even
him. The American sportsman who cannot get his duck fairly on the wing
with a 12- or 16-bore