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an Indian catching trout with a troll line. We tried fishing with hooks, and although there were plenty of steel-heads paddling about in the lake, our success was poor. The Indian, however, was making a killing. He took a fish on almost every hook he lifted and his small boat was half full. Evidently he had a bait which was a bonne bouche to the fish. We tried to discover what it was, but were unable to discern; then we asked him about it and he answered with "Ugh!" He understood us, but he refused to tell.

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About the edge of this lake in the green grass there were thousands of young grouse. They were eating huckleberries and salmonberries, which grew abundantly. We gathered quantities of these fruit and indulged the luxury of berry pies. But the mosquitoes here were exceedingly severe. There had been ample source of complaint on this score at other waters we had visited, but here seemed to be their metropolis, and though we rubbed the horses with a dope" we had bought at Ashland, they were driven nearly frantic. We broke camp and went on a deer hunt. It was not a region especially inviting to this kind of sport. It was a trackless wilderness of dark and broken lava as solid as cement under your feet, punctured here and there by gaunt pines which have squeezed their juvenile way through a crevice from the soil below and as they were nurtured into trees, burst with their broad bases the pavement which confined them. It is impossible to make a trail upon this substance, for it is hard and barren; but someone traveling before us, had blazed the trees on the route to Fish lake, and we were able to keep our course, though, owing to the intensely broken character of the way, an entire day was consumed in covering the distance of seven miles.

It is dangerous territory to hunt over, too, this lava region, for when you get away from the lakes there is no water anywhere in sight. The creeks are all dry, the rains all percolate through the porous substance and are lost below. Put your ear to the ground and you may hear water running in a rapid stream beneath your feet, but it is covered by a crust as hard as flint and so thick it would be folly to attempt to pick through it. Unless you have your landmarks well fixed to locate the lakes and

your canteens large and full, you had better stay out of it.

Hunting for deer in this part of the country is pursued in a peculiar way. It is useless to move over the ground after them. You must let the deer do that while you keep still. Go to the top of some high rock, conceal yourself amongst the thick buck brush, and keep still. The silence of the vast and blighted area is so intense that you may hear even the cracking of a twig, I should say two hundred yards away. Maintain silence, and if game is moving, you will be able to locate it; then you have only to watch your chance for a shot. If you have well trained dogs, they will get to the far side of it and move it toward you. Following these tactics, Mr. Beck and Doctor Patterson both killed bucks.

Bear are plentiful in this district, and it would seem that they would be inimical to deer, but they are not. A bear would rather have vegetable than animal food, He has a sweet tooth and likes berries and the honey of wild bees. Some times he will go down to the lake and catch fish; but his especial provender is mast, and in autumn, when this begins to fall from the scrub oak trees, bruin begins to fatten. In this season they were poor and thin. Mr. Beck, strolling upward along a rise, jumped a brown bear who had been lying down, doubtless in a doze. He scurried up the rise, leaping forward in long leaps, his tail to Mr. Beck. He had not gone far when he shook up a buck, which started in a lively scamper toward the summit. Beck drew a bead on the bear, which went "catch-r-r" as the bullet took him, but he doubled the rise, dashed down on the other side, and disappeared, the buck already having hid among the pines.

The party next moved past Mount Pitt, that dried and dead old cone, from whose summit, ten thousand feet in the white air, rolled out most of the lava which now spreads over these plains. We stopped at Butte creek to catch seventy-five steel-head trout in two hours, being this time more fortunate in our choice of bait than before. Then we went up Seven Mile creek to Crater lake, a body of water at the top of a rise which lies in the basin of an old crater. The flies and mosquitos here were unendurable, so we returned to Fort Klamath, where we caught quantities of Dolly Varden

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to meet a party headed by Aleck Ireland and Mr. Toleman, two hunters of the old school, who had been upon the line between Washington and Idaho hunting elk, but had seen nothing but carriboo. They had come back to take us into a country where a party had taken out six hundred deer from January to July, carrying off only the hides, leaving the carcasses to rot where they had fallen, in the old time buffalo style.

We had already been out a month, but we were glad to go to such a place, so, adding the new outfit to our own, with their four horses and eight bear dogs, we started west across the railroad, bound along the Illinois river, ninety miles to Game lake, a little splotch of water lying twenty-five miles from the ocean.

This region was hilly, thick with pines, here and there a clearing covered with berry bushes heavy with their clusters of ripe fruit. Fairly into the country Toleman and Ireland started to find elk. They could see signs of none, so they turned their attention to deer, with the result that they killed fifteen the first day. The next day Doctor Patterson, an excellent shot and old time hunter, his brother, and Messrs. Toleman and Beck, killed nineteen does and bucks. The deer were in exceedingly fine condition, fat and plump, brimming with spirit, which threw plenty of excitement into the sport.

All hands rested a day in camp, then started in for another breezy hunt. At dusk of that day we had seventeen new deer. The party divided up into three companies; that of Mr. Beck went down along a backbone of hills into a fine country. As the photographer moved along, three fat bucks jumped at intervals ahead of his horses. Two does appeared later. Mr. Beck had five when camp was pitched that afternoon, and Mr. Toleman and Doctor Patterson had eleven, sixteen in all, to be strung up at night by the fetlocks and have their pictures taken early next morning.

On the following day the company started back to the main camp; the horses, heavily laden with deer, pulled up at dusk in the grove amongst the grand old pines where was fixed the rendezvous for the main body of the company. The party had stopped on the way to cut down a honey tree; it was an

old hollow pine which the wild bees had stored nearly full of honey. The saddlebags were filled with this, about one hundred and fifty pounds being secured, and about two gallons of beautiful strained honey going to waste in getting it out. We covered our heads with mosquito netting and were thus able to get at the sweets regardless of the insects. It was amusing to observe Herman Fick, one of the old party and a long-time mountaineer, in his work of getting this honey out of the trunk. Regardless of the presence of bees, he simply reached his long arm up the hollow and pulled out the honey by handfuls. When a bee stung his hand he would pull it out, withdraw the stinger, fling it away, and turn again to work as if nothing had occurred.

The old hunters had pursued the killing of game so long that their sense of sport in such activities had been dulled, and they did not hunt much, but stayed mostly in camp, attending to things there. They skinned the deer, spread the hides to the sun, stripped the venison and dried it. This latter was done by laying the meat upon a wire netting suspended between two stumps and building a fire under it. In this manner we dried four hundred pounds of meat, which we carried back with us to Ashland. As a result of our hunt we had also one hundred deer skins, that being the killing of the entire party, besides four bear skins, skulls, and horns.

We lived in this camp, consuming bear steaks, venison, grouse, and fish from the lake, for a month, until the cooling of the air and occasional rains told us the season was drawing to a close and we had better get out. So we set a day for a final grand hunt. This was a failure, however, for rain set in, catching our party of three detached from the main party, and we nearly died. For thirty-six hours we were huddled together under little breadths of canvas strung beneath a great pine, our bedding wet, ourselves wet to the skin and miserable. When it lighted up sufficiently to get back to the main camp, we needed no second invitation to quit the country. On our way back Doctor Patterson killed a dear browsing in a clearing among one hundred and fifty acres of huckleberry bushes.

We reached the railroad station of Ashland without serious mishap, though some

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of the passes were dangerous paths. A horse slid down the side of one and went rolling over the rocks for forty feet below. Happily he was loaded with skins, which defended him from the sharp rocks, and with much difficulty he was got out uninjured. Further on Ireland showed us where he had lost a pack mule. The animal had a habit of wandering out of the trail, and when he did his dog would snap at his heels and move him back into it again, the mule picking up his gait as he did so. It hapIt happened that this occurred just before they reached a V in the trail which lapped around a projection of the mountain. A sharp turn is necessary at the apex of the V and this the mule, owing to the inertia of his gait, was unable to make. He tried to brace

himself when he saw the edge of the precipice and the hundred and fifty feet of perpendicular rock which it overhung, but it was impossible to stop, and over he went and down the chasm he crashed, the most mashed up mass of mule the human eye ever looked upon.

After three months of hunting we pulled into Ashland. There we sold our meat for twenty cents per pound, realizing a sum which well paid the professionals for their attendance upon us, while the hides brought a dollar each. The horns could find no market, so we abandoned these, while, with a few mementoes of the season's sport, we took leave of our mountain friends and boarded the train for California.

LAST CHANCE CABIN

A LOVE STORY

BY MARGARET SHERWOOD

UPPOSE we name it," said the man, his voice breaking in the middle of a short laugh, "Last Chance Cabin."

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His wife looked beyond him to the great red cliff, seven hundred feet of perpendicular rock, on the east, then toward the broken foot-hills on the west. Her ears were full of the sound of the swift river. "I want to go in," she said.

They left their horse in the narrow road and picked their way down to the onestoried house, crouching close to the sloping river bank. Ragged weeds grew by the door and pressed against the broken windowpanes. A snake lay curled upon the sill. Inside the rough board floor was red with mud that had oozed down from higher ground. With the mud were mingled old shoes, discarded garments, and bits of plaster from the smoke-blackened walls.

"You can never stand this, Mary," said the man vehemently. "Come away. I'll

let you kill yourself for me by inches in any other place, but I draw the line at this." The woman stepped through the mud on the floor of her new home to her husband's side. She did not look at the moist red stains on her delicate feet.

"I can stay anywhere with you," she said, "and I cannot stay anywhere without you.'

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All the romantic love of a Southern girl was in her face. The steady look in her brown eyes contrasted strangely with the restless gray light in his. Only the tightening of her lips betrayed the suffering caused by smoke and dirt.

Her husband stooped and kissed her.

"But, O Harold!" she cried, not seeing the working of his face, "what will become of Langdon? I do not mind for myself, really I do not, but think of the baby in this Rocky Mountain wilderness!"

"Come here, you heir-apparent to the throne of rattle-snakes, you prince of prairie-dogs!"

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