RUN DOWN AND PHOTOGRAPHED-THE NEW WAY OF HUNTING

since the railway left hundreds of isolated proprietors without patronage.

Some of those old proprietors hung on. They weathered the railway, they weathered the temptations of fire, they survived the prohibition fights in their home towns. Some of them were so soured that they hardly so much as stepped to the door to look at the first flat-shoed, dusty, and pounding automobile to drive up to their front porches. More and more the automobiles began to arrive. Hotels which had depended exclusively on local and logger patronage were obliged to substitute real butter for manufacured fats, and they had to have a table with a white cloth to suit dusty and begoggled patrons who arrived from nowhere in particular. An old hotel proprietor was surprised to find in his mail letters from hunters, fishermen, and patrons of thirty years before, asking for their old rooms, and asking how is the fishing in The Creek!

The hotels along the railway lost patronage, but the scattered backwoods hotels on the old inwood thoroughfares began to pick up. The people who used automobiles did not follow railway routes into the woods. They could not follow the new railway because there were no highways along it anywhere.

The good roads movement in the Adirondacks received a tremendous impulse. The hotel-keepers, the storekeepers, the loggers in the deep woods, controlled the local politics. In the old days they fought projects to put roads into the woods, because they cost money, and the owners of private preserves didn't want them. Now the owners of private preserves wanted roads, hotel-keepers wanted roads, and the summer visitors wanted roads. The path-masters who had been pocketing about seventy-five per cent of the funds raised for road work were tried for larceny or at least indicted, and they had to show something for the money they received. Pressure was brought to bear on the State authorities, and while thousands of square miles of farmland districts, while hundreds of villages and even many cities waited for good roads for their purposes, the few roads in the Big Woods were being tuned up to the music of drills, axes, dynamite, and whistling and hissing steam road rollers.

So now the Adirondacks have well started upon the new era of universal development. Good macadam roads are projected to cut the mountains in all directions. One loops out of Gloversville to Utica; another sweeps from Utica into Fulton Chain; northward from Fulton Chain swing two or three projects into Big Moose and Raquette; from Raquette to Utowana, from Utowana down into Warren County, from Utowana into Indian Lake, from Saranac Lake to Saranac Inn, from Lake Placid into Keene Valley, from Keene Valley around into Indian Lake, and up and down and in all directions the arms of the highways are reaching mile after mile, so that the inmost depths of the mountains, the remotest gloom of the dark swamps,

and the last refuge of the deer and bear are just off the path of the automobile of to-day

or to-morrow.

Now all these developments are summer developments. They refer to the woods as they are used in the vacation months of the year, as they are called. In May and early June is the best fishing; the crowd comes in late June and departs in early September; in the later autumn arrive the hundreds, the thousands of hunters. From the end of the hunting season through December to middle May the woods used to be deserted. Here and there the loggers would be hauling their summer cut to the stream banks for the spring drives, but hundreds of square miles of the woods would be left to the few trappers and an occasional camp watcher.

The past winter, as never before in the history of the Adirondacks, the woods have been alive with pleasure-seekers.

Trains

leave the metropolis with extra cars and extra sections to carry people to woods hotelds an woods camps, to the great week-ends of the private preserves. Thousands upon thousands of snowshoers, ski-runners, and sleigh

riders have been in the cold depths of the woods where the trapper on his rounds felt free to enter the cold camps and skin the furs that he caught by the little stoves used by the summer visitors.

The war, of course, has turned the crowd back into the Adirondacks. The hotels are opening to this new phenomenon in the wintry woods. The companies which formerly closed their Adirondack resorts and opened their Florida places for the winter now find themselves confronted by the necessity of providing for a winter season in the Adirondacks.

Full development of the Adirondacks has been reached in only two particulars. The hunting and the fishing have been exploited to their utmost. Restrictions upon the hunting grow more and more severe, and fishing for trout has to be kept up by the introduction of millions of semi-domestic fish into the streams and lakes which are most visited.

The deer hunting, which was for many years the staple attraction of the woods. has now fallen far down in the list. It has been

crowded down and down until there is a growing sentiment against any deer hunting at all. So many are being killed that where formerly a hunter was allowed to kill all he wanted, he must now restrict himself to two deer with horns. Even hunters are saying that one is enough, and that one either buck or doe, because of the fact that so many bucks have been killed as to leave few in the woods. The women, seeing deer from the automobiles during the summer, are making the men ashamed of themselves for seeking the death of such beautiful creatures, and little children are telling their fathers:

"Now, papa, don't you kill that deer we fed up there by the lake!"

A hundred years ago some one foresaw the need of an Adirondack preserve, and in 1877 Dr. Franklin B. Hough definitely laid the project before the public in his great Report upon Forestry. In 1884 the first effective law was passed to that end. In 1896 the Constitutional provision further protected the public's interests. In 1908, or thereabouts, the enforcement of the laws overtook the violations. In the past ten years the development of the automobile and the improvement of the public highways have given the public the means of transportation to their playground.

For a hundred years the question of preserving the forests and timber supply has been agitated in New York, amid the slurs of the loggers. They have been permitted to devastate a vast and splendid wilderness

from the high hills of the State, but there still remains some virgin forest in the Adirondack mountains. Logging companies have made such inroads on the green timber on the evergreen trees-and they are so rapidly entering upon the hardwood stand that the State at last sees the necessity of preserving the headwaters of the State's greatest streams. This past winter a plan was proposed to bond the State for $10,000,000 to supply funds for the purchase at compulsory sale of the Adirondack preserve lands which are now being cut over under ruthlessly destructive methods, to the great harm of the mountains, streams, and the playground.

The result of all the contributing conditions is that the most accessible of the country's great playgrounds is coming into its own. £ome people who remember the undisturbed, the silent, the lonely depths of the Big Woods of a few years ago must regret the passing of the wild, but they cannot mourn the fact that thousands and hundreds of thousands of people have had the way made smooth for them to come into intimate contact with the green timber, with the deep valleys, and with all the other inspiring features which not even picnicking and sporadic wantonness can now greatly affect.

It is an interesting fact to contemplate that five million people could camp at one time in the Adirondacks and each camper have nearly an acre of land to himself!

66

M

ISERY," it is said, "acquaints a

man with strange company," and it was misery-or at least hunger, loneliness, and privation-which led to my acquaintance with the East Caucasian raider, cattle-lifter, and homicide who called himself Akhmet Avarski.

I had undertaken to make an exploration of the wild, mountainous, and at that time little-known territory of Daghestan, and was trying to reach it by crossing the marshy steppes which border the river Terek between the Dariel Pass and the Caspian Sea. The trip, however, proved to be much more difficult than I had anticipated. The only means of transportation were springless one-horse telegas; the unfenced and unimproved steppe roads were soft and muddy from recent rains; there were few villages and no inns along the route, and for a period of five days I had to live on a few pounds of black rye bread, with an occasional tumbler of smoky tea, and to sleep at night on the ground or in the half-open wattled shed of a dukhan or roadside grog-shop. As the season was late October, this kind of life involved a good deal of hardship, and when, toward the end of the week, I found myself approaching the foothills of the Andiski Khrebet, the high lateral range which forms the boundary of Daghestan on the west, I began to look forward with eager anticipation to horseback travel in the mountains, which would certainly be more interesting, and probably more comfortable, than telega life on a muddy, monotonous, and almost interminable plain. But the last day of my steppe experience was the worst. The horse that fell to my lot on that particular morning was so weak from sickness or starvation that he could hardly be forced to move at all, and after riding behind him at a slow, plodding walk for three or four hours I abandoned the whole outfit and started ahead on foot for the fortified post of Veden, leaving the driver to follow with the blanket and saddle-bags, which made up my scanty equipment.

As I ascended by a winding road into the rounded, forest-clad foothills I lost sight of

the dreary steppe which borders the river Terek, and began to feel the stimulation of the mountain air; but aerial stimulation, at best, is an unsatisfactory substitute for solid food, and long before I reached the fortified post of Veden, which was my proximate destination, I had eaten my last pound of black rye bread and was becoming weak from hunger and fatigue. Two or three miles from Veden I came to a Cossack picket's shelter a high mast with ladder-like crossbars, on the top of which there was a small platform inclosed in wattled bushes. In this crow's-nest, watching the road, sat an armed sentinel in Cossack uniform, who hailed me in Russian and ordered me to stop.

"Who are you?" he demanded.
"A traveler," I replied.
"What kind of a traveler ?"
"Amerikanets."

"Where are you going?"

"Into Daghestan."

"Are you armed?"

"My pistol was stolen from me," I explained, and since then I've had only a pocket-knife. Why weapons? Is the road dangerous?"

"At night, yes," he said.

"My orders are to stop every man after sunset unless he is armed and can take care of himself. But it isn't quite dark yet, and if you walk fast you can reach the post in an hour. You may go."

Reflecting upon the possibilities suggested. by this encounter, I quickened my steps. An hour and a half later, after an uphill walk of sixteen miles, toward the end of which I was again halted by an armed sentry, I entered the fortified post of Veden, where I found a place to sleep and a rather scanty supper of black bread, goat's-milk cheese, and tea.

Monday morning, equipped with an open order for horses and an escort from the commandant of the post, and attended by a semicivilized mountaineer in the Russian service, who carried a small arsenal of antique silver

mounted weapons, including dagger, saber, rifle, and two pistols, I started on horseback for the Andiski Khrebet. Early in the afternoon, after a ride of three or four hours across a high plateau and through a narrow, rocky, and very wild gorge, we came squarely up against the mighty and almost precipitous mountain wall which separates Chechnia from Daghestan. The steep western slope of the titanic ridge was treeless, and up it, like a whitish snake, ran a tortuous bridle-path, which climbed in seventeen zigzags to the snow-powdered summit, eight thousand feet above the level of the Caspian Sea. At the base of this great range stood a small collection of flat-roofed, clay-colored adobe houses known to the Chechenses as the aoul of Khorochoi, where my escort had instructions to turn me over to the starshina or head man of the settlement, and then return himself with the two horses to Veden. The head man and his wife both happened to be away from home; and in a low, dark room hung around with ancient weapons and huge circular trays of copper or bronze1 I was turned over to the starshina's daughter, a timid little girl about seven years of age. As she could not speak Russian, she was unable to talk with me, and, frightened by the strange dress and appearance of the first foreigner perhaps that she had ever seen, she extended to me a sort of symbolical hospitality by laying down a cushion for a seat on the bare clay floor, and then fled. Tiring of solitude in the gloomy room, and longing for something to eat, I went out of doors, wondering what I should do next. In that wild and unfrequented part of the Caucasus, without horse, guide, interpreter, or food, I had, naturally enough perhaps, a feeling of helplessness and perplexity; but there is always a way out of the most discouraging situation, and when, in an exploration of my environment, I found between the village and the mountain a little encampment of Cossack tents, I felt almost at home again.

"What are you doing here, boys?" I inquired of two sunburned Cossacks in white tunics and high-top boots who were washing dishes beside a low-spirited fire.

"Building a road, your High Nobility," they replied, with a friendly grin. "Up the Andiski?"

It is a noteworthy fact, perhaps, that one of these round bronze trays bore a half effaced inscription in Latin. Whether it was brought to the Caucasus by the Roman army of Pompey the Great or by medieval Italian colonists I could only conjecture.

“Just that.”

"Where is your commanding officer ?"

66

'Captain Cherkassof? He's over there in the whitewashed sakla by the big rock," pointing in the direction of the village. "Where is God taking you?"

66

"Into Daghestan," I replied. My escort left me here alone, and I've got to look up horses and an interpreter for a trip across the range."

"Ta-a-ak! [So!] Then you must see the captain. He is the engineer and this is his road."

Five minutes later I was introducing myself to Captain Cherkassof and explaining to him my difficulties and needs.

"Of course you'll stay with me to-night," he said, with cordial Russian hospitality. "You're simply a godsend! I haven't seen an educated man in three months. I can't offer you much," indicating with a sweeping gesture two camp beds, two high-pommeled saddles on blocks, three home-made chairs, and a bare pine table," but you're more than welcome to what there is. I've got two cots, plenty to eat, and something to drink."

to

Ey! Mahmoud!" shouted the captain a smooth-faced young mountaineer of a blond Scandinavian type who was doing something with a theodolite a short distance from the house. "Stop taking sight at that cow! You can't get an angle from a base line and a wandering cow. Come in here, set up the samovar, bring all you've got to eat, and then make over your bed and clear out your things. This gentleman is going to spend the night with me.

He's my assistant," explained the captain to me. "He's a mountain boy, and I'm trying to teach him the elements of surveying."

In the course of half an hour my blanket and saddle-bags were brought from the house of the starshina, and I sat down at the bare pine table to the most satisfying meal I had had in a week-cold boiled mutton, eggs, bread and butter, honey, delicious purple grapes, and red Caucasian wine. My host, Captain Cherkassof, who had been isolated. in this wild corner of the Caucasus for six months, was even more hungry for news and companionship than I was for food; so we talked science, literature, art, Russian affairs, world politics, and the state of the eastern