Part 23

The ideal way for an archer to travel is to carry on his shoulders a knapsack containing a light sleeping bag and enough food to last him a week. With me this means coffee, tea, sugar, canned milk, dried fruit, rice, cornmeal, flour and baking powder mixture, a little bacon, butter, and seasoning. This will weigh less than ten pounds. With other minor appurtenances in the ditty bag, including an arrow-repairing kit, one's burden is less than twenty pounds, an easy load.

If you have a dog, make him carry his own dry meal in little saddle-bags on his back, as Dan Beard suggests. Then, with two dozen arrows in your quiver, and your bow, the open trail lies ahead. There is always meat to be had for the shooting. The camp fire and your dog are companions at night, and at dawn all the world rolls out before you as you go. It is a happy life!

When Ishi started to shoot with me, one bowman after another appeared on the scene to join us. Among the first came Will Compton, a man of mature years and many experiences. Brought up on the plains, he learned to shoot the bow with the Sioux Indians. As a boy of fourteen he shot his first deer with an arrow. From that time on, deer, elk, antelope, birds of all sorts, and even buffalo fell before this primitive weapon. He later hunted with the gun until the very ease of killing turned him against it. So when he came to us, he was a seasoned archer. Upon a visit to a Japanese archery gallery in the Panama-Pacific Exposition he met for the first time Arthur Young, also an expert hunter with the gun. A friendship sprang up between them, and Compton taught Young to shoot the bow.

Compton had worked in the shop of Barnes, the bowmaker of Forest Grove, Oregon, and later he went into the Cascade Mountains and cut yew staves with an idea of selling them to the English bowyers. The Great War of 1914 prevented this, and so we had an unlimited supply of yew wood for use.

We three gravitated together and shot with Ishi until his last sickness and departure. Then our serious work began. We found it not only a delightful way of hunting, but a trio makes success more certain in the field.

In California there is an abundance of game; small animals exist everywhere and there is no better training than to stalk the wary ground squirrel or the alert cottontail. These every archer should school himself to hit before he ventures after larger beasts.

Infinite patience and practice are needed to make a hunter. He must earn his right to take life by the painful effort of constant shooting.

We shot together, and many are the bags of game we filled. We discovered in the humble ground squirrel a delectable morsel more palatable than chicken; re-discovered it, we may say, because the Indian knew it first. In killing these little pests we take to the open fields, approach a burrow by creeping up a gully or dip in the land, rise up and shoot at such distances as we can. I recall one day when Young and I got twenty-four squirrels with the bow. Upon another occasion Young by himself secured seventeen in one morning; the last five were killed with five successive arrows, the last squirrel being forty-two paces away.

Rabbits are best hunted in company. Here the startled rodent skips briskly off, down his accustomed run, only to meet another archer standing motionless, ready with his arrow.

It seems legitimate with this rudimentary weapon to shoot animals on the stand, or set, a sporting permit not granted to the devotee of the shotgun, who has a hundred chances to our one.

We found from the very first that the arrow was more humane than the gun. Counting all hunters, for every animal brought home with the gun, whether duck, quail, or deer, at least two are hit and die in pain in the brush.

Just to illustrate this, Mr. Young reported to me the results of his shooting with a small rifle at ground squirrels. So expert is he that to hit a squirrel in any spot but the head is quite unusual. In one day's shooting between himself and his young son, they hit thirty-six animals, sixteen of these escaped and disappeared down their burrows, there to die later of their wounds.

With the arrow it is different. Not only is the destructive power as great as a small bullet, but the shaft holds the animal so that it cannot escape. Practically none are lost in our hunts. A strange phenomenon is seen in larger animals; they are easier to kill with an arrow than small ones. A shot in either the chest or abdominal cavity of a deer is invariably fatal in a few minutes; while a rabbit may carry an arrow off until the obstructing undergrowth checks his flight. It seems that their vital areas and blood vessels being smaller, are less readily injured by the missile. A bullet can crash into the brain of an animal, tear out a mass of tissue and generally shatter his structure, but cause little bleeding. An arrow wound is clean-cut and the hemorrhage is tremendous, but if not immediately fatal, it heals readily and does little harm. The pain is no greater with the arrow than with the bullet.

Our hunting of squirrel and rabbits was merely preparatory to the taking of larger game; but even on our more pretentious expeditions, we fill the vacant hours with lesser shooting and fill the camp kettle with sweet tidbits.

Many a quail, partridge, sage hen, or grouse has flown from the heather into our bag transfixed by a feathered shaft. Both Compton and Young have shot ducks and geese, some on the wing. But we cannot compete with the experiences of Maurice Thompson who, shooting ninety-eight arrows, landed sixteen ducks on the wing.

Some amusing incidents have occurred in bird shooting. We consider the bluejay a legitimate mark any day; he is a rascal of the deepest dye, so we always shoot at him. Compton once tried one of his long shots at a jay on the ground nearly eighty yards off. His line was good, but his shot fell short. The arrow skidded and struck the bird in the tail just as he left the ground for flight. The two rose together and sailed off into space, like an aeroplane, with a preposterously long rudder, the arrow out behind. They slowly wheeled in a circle a hundred yards in diameter when the bird, nearing the archer, fell exhausted at his feet. Compton picked up the jay, drew the arrow from the shallow skin wound above his tail, and tossed him in the air. He disappeared with a volley of expletives.

With an arrow it is also possible to shoot fish. Many wise old trout, incurious and contented, deep in the shadowed pool, have been coaxed to the frying pan through the archer's skill. Well I recall once, how shooting fish not only brought us meat, but changed our luck. Young and I were on a bear hunt. It had been a long, weary and unsuccessful quest of the elusive beast. Bears seemed to have become extinct, so we took to shooting trout in a quiet little meadow stream. Having buried an arrow in the far bank, with a short run and a leap Young cleared the brook and landed on the greensward beyond. The succulent turf slipped beneath his feet and, like an acrobat, the archer turned a back somersault into the cold mountain water. Bow, clattering arrows, camera, field glasses and man, all sank beneath the limpid surface. With a shout of laughter he clambered to the bank, his faithful bow still in his hand, his quiver empty of arrows, but full of water. After a hasty salvage of all damaged goods, we journeyed along, no worse for the wetting. But immediately we began to see bear signs and ultimately got our bruin. Young later said that if he had known the change of luck that went with a good ducking, he would have tried it sooner.

We have often been asked if we do not poison our arrow points. Most people seem to have the idea that an arrow is too impotent to cause death; they conceive it a refined sort of torture and have no conception of its destructive nature.

It is true that we thought at first of putting poison on our arrows intended for lions, and we did coat some broad-heads with mucilage and powdered strychnine, but we never used them. My physiologic experiments with curare, the South American arrow poison, aconitin, the Japanese Ainu poison, and buffogen, the Central American poison, had convinced me that strychnine was more deadly. It would not harm the meat in the dilution obtained in the blood, and it was cheap and effective.

Buffogen is obtained by the natives by taking the tropical toad, Buffo Nigra, enclosing it in a segment of bamboo, heating this over a slow fire and gathering the exuded juice of the dessicated batrachian. It is a very powerful substance, having an action similar to that of adrenalin and strychnine.

Salamandrine, an extract obtained from the macerated skin of the common red water-dog, is also violently toxic.

But we had a disgust for these things. We soon learned, moreover, that our arrows were sufficient without these adjuncts, and we deemed it unsportsmanlike to consider them. Therefore, we abandoned the idea.

Ishi knew of the employment of these killing substances, but he did not use them. In his tribe they made a poison by teasing a rattlesnake and having it strike a piece of deer's liver. This was later buried in the ground until it rotted, and the arrow points were smeared with this revolting material. It was a combination of crotalin venom and ptomaine poisons, a very deadly mess.

We much prefer the bright, clean knife-blade of our broad-heads to any other missile.

The principles involved in seeking game with the bow and arrow are those of the still hunt, only more refined.

An archer's striking distance extends from ten to one hundred yards. For small animals it lies between ten and forty; for large game from forty to eighty or a hundred. The distance at which most small game flush varies with the country in which they live, the nature of their enemies, and the prevalence of hunters. Quail and rabbits usually will permit a man to approach them within twenty or thirty yards. This they have learned is a safe distance for a fox or wildcat who must hurl himself at them. It is quite a fair distance for any man with any weapon, particularly the bow.

Most small game, especially rabbits, have sufficient curiosity to stand after their first startled retreat. Beneath a bush or clump of weeds they squat and watch on the qui vive. The arrow may find them there when it strikes, but often the very flash of its departure and the quick movement of the hand send the little beastie flying to his cover. Here two sportsmen working together succeed better; one attracts the rabbit's attention, the other shoots the shot.

The marmot or woodchuck, is an impudent and cautious animal and he is a difficult mark for a bowman's aim. But nothing has more comic situations than an afternoon spent in a ground-hog village. After an incontinent scuttle to his burrow, an old warrior backs into his hole, then brazenly lifts his head and fastens his glittering eye upon you. The contest of quickness then begins; the archer and the marmot play shoot and dodge until one after the other all the arrows are exhausted or a hit is registered. The ground-hog never quits. I can recall one strenuous noon hour in an outcropping of rock where, between shattered arrows, precipitous chasing of transfixed old warriors, defiant whistlers on all sides, we piled up nearly a dozen victims.