That they were real simon-pure sportsmen could be seen at a glance, and yet, when the after-dinner speeches were made, the sentiments which received the most enthusiastic applause were those which DENOUNCED THE KILLING OF MAN OR BEAST. It could readily be seen that these men only used the gun when it was necessary to procure food or in self-defence. They all indorsed the use of the camera for the hunt in place of the murderous gun; as one of them remarked, “With a kodak every good shot is registered with the click of the shutter, and an album of good shots is a thing of which any man may be proud.”
With a little private zoo of captured live game you may have a living album, which attests the skill of the collector and his knowledge of woodcraft as accurately as any album of photographs.
The next chapter tells how to build a back-yard zoo, and now we must learn how to stock one. If the reader will examine the plans in the chapter mentioned, he will see that there is one compartment marked
This is the place where our new captures find temporary shelter until their regular quarters are prepared for them.
The most accessible game for boys belongs to the
These animals can be readily distinguished by their long, chisel-like front teeth. A familiar example of this family may be found in every town and city, and is known as the common rat, the Norway rat, or the brown rat.
Formerly the common rat of the United States was black, but his brown relative has about exterminated the more graceful black one. The only black rat I ever saw was a dead one, which I found one summer in an unoccupied house in the mountains of Pennsylvania. But there are plenty of beautiful little gnawers around us everywhere. There are the soft, furry, big-eyed flying-squirrels, which leave their warm nests at dusk and sail through the air from tree to tree, or romp among the branches until daylight. Just at dawn they return to their beds, to sleep away the day in their dark holes, secure from the garish sunlight.
Of course any boy with money can purchase flying-squirrels, but no boy with any pride would stoop to buy his live game, unless he is so unfortunate as to be unable to leave the densely populated city. I well remember the two boys[4] who gave me my first lessons in hunting flying-squirrels. I followed them across meadows, over hills, through the woods, down into the dank and dark swamps, until we found some old hollow cedars on the edge of the water. Here one of the lads armed himself with a small wand, and the other busied himself gathering old dry leaves and bits of moist bark to make a smudge. The boy armed with the wand probed the hollow trees until he discovered a hole from which the wand would bring forth some bits of the fine shredded inner bark of the cedar. We all know that neither the inner bark nor any other kind of bark grows in the hollow of trees, and when it is discovered there you can wager that it was put there by some animal.