Sport -- Past, Present and Future, Part II
For four years the game in Virginia, all undisturbed, increased and multiplied at an astonishing rate. There was no shot to be had in the Confederacy, and the only way an ardent sportsmen, when home on furlough, could take a shy at the game, was to hammer out from a leaden bullet long, square blocks, and then cutting off the ends with a knife, to use a brick to roll these bits on the floor until each pellet became round enough for use. It would take a man a day, and exhaust all his patience, to make one pound of shot; and he would naturally be very chary about using his ammunition, and rarely pull a trigger except when certain of his game. In most sections of Virginia to fire a gun was a dangerous pastime, for what with raids, irruptions, incursions and forays, the people were in a state of siege, and the report of a firearm was as likely as not to be followed by a bullet from some traveling soldier, prowling bushwhacker, or passing cavalry-man, thrown just for good luck in the direction of the sound. Then, if it should happen that a raid was in progress, the shot would attract the videttes and scouts, and the luckless gunner would find himself in hostile hands; and if too old or too young for military service, he might consider himself lucky if he were allowed to depart minus his fowling-piece and dog.
In the mountains of Virginia the wild turkeys were more numerous than they ever were before, the various bivouacs furnishing them in winter with an ample supply of food, while, best of all, they were allowed to feed unmolested. The waterfowl on the Potomac kept up their ratio of increase, for except the officers of the gunboats patrolling up and down the river, none dared to fire a gun. There were hunters of men in those times scattered along the banks, as well as floating on the bosom of the blue water. The explosion of a sportsman's gun, and its smoke, might serve as an admirable target for the boat-swain of an iron-clad with a crew nearly dead with listlessness and ennui, and glad to get an excuse to blaze away at anything.
In the fall of 1865, those Virginians who loved sporting, and had the good luck to return to the homes of their youth with their arms and legs intact, had a rare and
royal time among the fur and feather, and a moderate shot would return in the evening and show such a bag as the result of the day's sport as would last the family for a week. A couple of sportsmen living about ten miles from Culpeper Court House, Virginia, killed, in one day, eighty-four rabbits and fourteen wild turkeys. If a gunner can start even half a dozen cotton-tails now in a long day's tramp he considers himself fortunate, and he won't see a wild turkey in a season's shooting. I well remember a hunt that I had in the autumn of 1865, just after the war ended. It was a perfect day in November, with the morning mists still hanging around the tree-tops. I had borrowed a double-barrel from one friend, and a good, staunch pointer named "Josh" from another. I climbed the fence of an orchard, and put the dog out in a huge field near Warrenton Junction, where portions of both armies had often encamped. Josh had not gone seventy-five yards before he came to a dead stand, and with beating heart I advanced and hied him on. As the birds rose I let fly both barrels, and -- did not touch a feather! Loading up, I again sent Josh careering over the stubble. In ten minutes he had pointed a covey, and I again emptied the gun with the same result as before. If ever a dog's face expressed contempt Josh's was surely the one. His dewlaps curled up, and he absolutely showed his teeth, whether in anger or derision I never found out. The third time I approached a covey that Josh had cornered in a big patch of briers, and two more loads were sent harmless as Macbeth's sword "cutting the intrenchant air." This was enough for that disgusted dog. He sneaked off, and I never laid my eyes on him again.
It was no great matter, the birds were so plentiful that I had merely to walk up and down the field, and I banged away most lustily. All in vain! I could not touch one. I fired with both eyes open, then with one shut, and still no partridge lingered on that account. I became superstitious and fired with both eyes shut. I doubled the charges, until I swept that meadow with leaden pellets, as a field is cleared by grape-shot. But there were no dead. At last, in my despair, I would shoot even if the bird was half a mile off. I went home that evening, after shooting away about ten pounds of shot, with one solitary partridge in my game-bag, and this bird, when I flushed him suddenly, was so scared that he flew from the edge of the field across a fence and against the trunk of a black-jack tree with such force as to knock himself silly, and before he could hustle himself away I had jumped the fence and wrung his neck.
There was apparently enough fur and feather in Virginia just after the war to supply the whole of America with small game, but in one decade the state of the case was completely altered. First came the invention of the breech-loader, which enables one to shoot all day without intermission. The game stood but little chance against these machines of perpetual destruction. But worse even than the breech-loader was the old army musket, loaded with a handful of shot, with a lately enfranchised freedman behind the big end of it. The darkey is a nocturnal prowler,
as much so as a 'coon or 'possum, and his prowls through meadow, woods and fallow cause him frequently to stumble on the wary turkey that forgets his cunning as he struts around preparatory to flying to his roost, generally a dead limb on a lofty tree. He bags many a molly cotton-tail loping down the road to get his evening drink at the branch. But it is when "our friend and brother" catches sight, in the shades of the evening, of a flock of partridges settling in some field for their night's rest, that he becomes dangerous. It is then that the old army musket is converted into a terror, and when its muzzle bears upon the whole covey squatted in a space that can be covered by a bandana handkerchief, and its contents are turned loose, every bird will be either killed or crippled.
The freedman's musket, battered and patched though it be, must look down upon the handsome, resplendent breech-loader as a great orator does upon the garrulous, loquacious youth who talks upon every subject at any time, and at any length, while he only opens his mouth to make knock-down arguments, or to utter words of great import that thrill and convince. When the reverberating roar of that old A.M. was heard, it was safe to bet that something that did not come from the barnyard would fill the shooter's iron pot that night.
A weather-beaten old darkey said to me once: "It dun cos' me nearly five cents to load that air musket, countin' powder, caps, shot and everythin', an' I ain't gwine to let er off 'less I knows I'se sartin to make by de shot."
The baybird-shooting in the summer, and the duck-shooting outside the Virginia capes, was at its zenith some fifteen years ago. Then, too, the canvas-back, that king of water-fowl, before whose name the gourmand bows in homage, still
lingered in the tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay, but now it is nearly extinct. A sportsman may gun for a whole winter in the bay and not kill half a dozen "canvas-backs," but, if a good shot over the decoys, he can count on the kind known as the "red-head" -- and if he knew how to pull out a few feathers, as does the professional pot-hunter, he could easily follow that gentleman's example and sell them at fancy figures for "canvas-backs," which in another decade will be as utterly annihilated as the dodo. Still, great is the culinary chef's art, and if he can, by the magic power of his sauces, herbs and seasonings, pass calf's head off for green turtle, and the skillpot for diamond-back terrapin stew, then nobody is hurt. His patrons enjoy it just the same, and to the average man the red-head duck tastes as well with his champagne as its incomparable relative.
Fifteen years ago -- even ten years -- many an amateur would pack his trunk with ammunition, and taking steamer for Old Point Comfort, disembark there, and after a few hours' wait at the Hygeia Hotel, proceed on his way to the eastern shore of Virginia by crossing the Chesapeake Bay. Or he would go outside the capes, and stop at Cape Charles, or Cobb's Island. Once at his objective point, he could be certain in the right season of having his fill of shooting every day at the baybirds. They were so plentiful that all along the Virginia Broadwater every oyster-bar or mud-flat would be covered with them, and all the shooter would have to do would be to make a blind out of sea-grass, place his decoys around him, and then try his hand on singles, doubles and flocks, striking them on the turn, while a hundred pair of yellow-legs, or willet, would not be considered anything out of the way. As it is now -- well, the finest shot in the country could not kill that many snipe in a week, simply because they are not there to kill. The vast flocks of robin-snipe that tarried in their migrations along the shores of the Chesapeake and the Broadwater of the Atlantic coast have entirely disappeared. The curlew still haunt their favorite places, but they have become so wary that neither blind nor decoys can lure them, except, indeed, at the earliest dawn of day, before their eyes are wide open. Half a dozen curlew, between sunrise and sunset, in the blinds, is something for a sportsman to be proud of, for no crow is keener-eyed, more suspicious, and keeps a sharper lookout than these birds. Fifteen years ago I have often killed from thirty to fifty from sun to sun, at Smith Island or Cape Charles, but now
one has to load his shell with No. 3 shot to bring down the high-circling, distrustful curlew.
The willet is still fairly plentiful. They lay their eggs and rear their young in the neighboring sea-meadows, and though preyed upon by crabs, snakes and raccoons from the time the egg is laid until the bird is able to fly, they still hold their own. They are such sociable birds that whenever a flock of snipe is fired into, one of the dead is almost certain to be a willet.
The ox-eye, another variety of the snipe family, is found in abundance on the shores and sea-meadows, and they owe their preservation, like the sandpipers, to their insignificant size. There are no birds in existence that keep so close together when on the wing as these ox-eyes. A large flock resembles a solid mass, and dire is the destruction that a double-barrel makes as it pours forth its contents of No. 8 shot at point-blank distance and strikes them on the turn. I asked old Nathan Cobb, of Cobb's Island, which is outside the Virginia capes -- a pot-hunter of half a century's experience, who has grown independent from the proceeds of his gun -- what was the greatest number of snipe he had ever killed by one discharge of his double-barrel.
"Wal," said Nathan, with his Eastern Shore drawl, "I was out gunning one spring, about thirty years ago, and had a No. 8 muzzle-loader that would hold comfortably six ounces of shot. I ran in on a solid acre of robin-snipe on the beach, and fired one load raking them as they fed, giving them the other barrel as they rose. I picked up three hundred and two."
I next asked him the greatest number of brant he had ever killed in one day over the decoys, with single shots.
"I bagged," he answered, "about ten years ago, one hundred and seventy brant, and nearly every one of them was a single shot."
I can easily believe this, for I have shot in blinds with many sportsmen, at red-head, shufflers, black duck and brant, and I never yet saw amateur, professional, or pot-hunter, whose aim was so unerring and deadly at the flying ducks as Nathan Cobb's. I do not believe this score has ever been beaten in this country.
At the present day this same story of the disappearance of the waterfowl on the Virginia coast and along the capes becomes dreary from repetition. It does not pay the sportsmen to go to Cobb's Island now. I spent three seasons there in the winter, during the "Eighties," and found that the brant were so wild that they would not stool. Then I went to Cape Charles, just outside the Capes, and, though it is a most inaccessible place, the brant would not come near the decoys.
Two winters ago, I tried Currituck Sound, and found palatial club-houses open all about that noble sheet of water. Some of these houses are so splendid in appointment that when you glance around the elegantly furnished rooms, with their damask curtains, Brussels carpets and open grates where the anthracite is piled high, it is impossible to imagine that just outside roll the dark waters of the Sound, while miles upon miles of barren sea-meadows, marshes and swamp separate the house from civilization. All of these club-houses are owned by Northern men -- rich in world's gear, of course -- men who count their incomes by thousands, where ordinary bread-winners of the professions count their earnings by tens. Think of having in the magazine of a club-house thirty thousand dollars in guns! Gordon Cumming, starting for a
ten years' game hunt in the jungles of Africa, or Stanley, setting out to fight his way through the "Dark Continent," with countless hordes of savage "Wawangi" disputing his passage, never had that amount invested in weapons -- and all to kill the wary geese and swift-flying ducks.
Even with such perfection of outfit -- with guns of every imaginable make from the 12 to the 4 bore, and trained gunners to oversee every arrangement, the clubmen were talking gloomily about the sport fast deteriorating. Pot-hunters, "duck pirates," countrymen, freedmen -- all who lived or robed along the shores of the Sound had their shy at the ducks, day in and night out, and such a fusillade was never heard since Burnside stormed and carried Roanoke Island, some miles below, in the glinting spring days of 1862. I found good enough sport on the private point of a friend who lived on a large farm by the shores of the Sound. Still the birds were thinning rapidly.
Last winter's experience with Currituck made me determine never to go to that spot again for sport. I do not think I overstate matters when I say that wildfowl-shooting on the finest grounds in the world is doomed. Gone are the vast flocks, decimated are the swans and geese that were so plentiful in certain localities even three short years ago, and indigo blue are the rich sportsmen who quaff their champagne in silence and puff moodily at their twenty-five cent cigars as they think of the meagre bags they have made, and how matters, now so bad, are always getting worse, thereby proving the old saw which saith "Nothing can be so bad that it cannot be made worse." The club men should, however, be glad that the snipe will always be with them.
For keen trading, guileless equivocation and general deviltry commend me to the "cracker" of the North Carolina Coast. He could discount the Jersey Yankee up-stairs and down-stairs. The typical specimen is slab-sided and always thin; I never met a fat one yet. Their complexion shows that they have wrestled for years with "chills," and their cheeks are as yellow as a newly-pulled gourd; they drawl in their speech, look at you with half-shut eyes, are afraid of neither man nor devil, have no hero-worship in their composition, and are as familiar with the captain of a yacht as with the roustabout. They are as keen as a brier, despite their listless, indifferent air, and to them more than any other cause is due the extermination of the wild fowl in Currituck Sound. They cleaned out the wild geese by setting steel traps on the bars. What they did not catch they frightened away.
Mr. William Palmer, the superintendent of the Palmer Island Club, states, more-over, that the number of sportsmen who come to Currituck to shoot has increased twenty-five per cent., while the natives have crowded the Sound with their blinds, and every male "cracker" who can hold a gun straight is on the watch.
It is true that there are stringent State Laws against the illegal killing of wild fowl, and also a close season. If these rules were enforced there would be first-class shooting in Currituck Sound for years to come, but the laws seem to be completely ignored; there is not even a pretense of observing them. The law makes a strong provision against a gun being fired at a duck after sunset, but there are numbers of murderous, greedy natives who have their skiffs hid in the woods and swamps in which are the huge ducking guns already referred to. Every hour during the night can be heard the sullen boom of these swivels floating across the waters, and the true sportsman, as he listens to the echoing roar, can only grind his teeth with rage, for he knows what a slaughter is going on, and how the survivors will take wing and abandon the Sound for good and all.
But the worst remains to be told. As if steel traps and big guns were not enough to destroy the wild fowl, the ingenious natives make fires on the banks of the creeks that run through the marshes, and, as the ducks float in ricks up to the illuminated waters, the ambushed assassin gets in his deadly work. Unless the sportsmen who own the club-houses on the Sound, by concerted action and vast outlay, can prosecute the offenders, then "Othello's occupation's gone."
My own idea is that these clubs are too exclusive. They should make it a point to cultivate the entente cordiale with the sportsmen of the State of North Carolina, and thus, by gaining their co-operation, they could induce the State authorities to take stringent action against the law-breakers. Unless this is done the sporting code will remain a dead letter as far as Currituck is concerned. The people shrug their shoulders when the subject is mentioned and say, "Those fancy Northern sportsmen don't want a North Carolinian to kill a North Carolina duck in North Carolina waters," and so on, and so on. Had I
the arranging and the forming of a game protective association of the club men in Currituck, I would extend a pressing and standing invitation to every member of the Legislature and every officer of the State Government to make the club-houses their own, and the Governor and his staff should be kidnapped every winter, and be made to enjoy the gilt-edge sport of the "Yankee" clubs.
Seeing in a State paper that the Light-house Board intended to abandon the Pamlico (N.C.) Light-house, I applied to the Treasury Department to turn it over to me for a "shooting box." This was done, and I hope to have some good sporting in the future.
Southward the sportsmen must make their way, and find more inaccessible spots than Currituck to establish club-houses. This being the case, the topography and charts of the regions lying south of Currituck become interesting to the handlers of the gun. Four miles across the mainland is that grand sheet of water, the Albemarle Sound, some fifteen miles wide. Though this sound cannot compare with Currituck for the number and variety of its waterfowl in past years, at the present time it is filled with the birds that have been driven by night-shooting away from Currituck to find safer quarters there. Undoubtedly there will, in the next few years, be erected many club-houses in Albemarle Sound. Some twelve miles as the crow flies across the peninsula, another sheet of water is encountered. This is the Crotan Sound, apparently of about the area of Currituck. There is an abundance of waterfowl here, and but few, if any, club-houses, which will, however, soon follow.
Ten miles southward, across a swampy, barren pine country, there appears the largest and grandest sound of all, the Pamlico. I have no data to furnish the exact size, but the steamer travels over 100 miles before it arrives at Pamlico Point light, at the spot where the Pamlico River enters the Sound. Here is the home and haunt of the swan, and, as they have been but comparatively little hunted, they furnish fine sport to those who have their own yachts and plenty of time. There are no spots at Currituck that can afford more exciting sport or show a greater abundance of all kinds of waterfowl than Pamlico Point, Porpoise Point, about five miles distant, or Brant Island, some twelve miles away. The inaccessibility of the place prevents the shore pot-hunters from disturbing the game, and the "duck murderer," with his night-shooting, has not yet put in an appearance.
The water of Pamlico Sound is neutral to the taste; sometimes fresh, again decidedly saline, but, for most of the time, it is simply brackish. This condition arises from the fact that the Neuse and Pamlico Rivers pour fresh waters into its area, while New Hatteras and Oregon inlets and Core Sound admit the salt waters of the ocean. This mixture of fresh, brackish and salt waters in a common receptacle naturally attracts every variety of water-fowl. The red-head and shuffler haunt the mingling of the fresh-water rivers with the Sound waters, while the black duck, mallard, and that king of aquatic birds, the gamest of all -- the brant, stay in the vicinity of Oregon Inlet. In my opinion, within a few years Pamlico Sound is destined to be the greatest sporting-ground in the country, and the costly and expensive club-houses at Currituck will be discounted by the new ones at Pamlico Sound.
How long will it be before the breech-loader in the hands of the natives and the swivel gun, killing in the night, will drive the wild fowl out of that extensive region is a question that none can answer. Many sportsmen who have been forced southward and still southward during the past years in quest of game hope that Pamlico Sound will furnish winter sport to last them at least the balance of their days.