Page:All Over Oregon and Washington.djvu/314

308 of the Cascades); kildeer plover; golden plover; Virginia rail; English snipe; red-breasted snipe; summer duck; Canada goose; white-fronted goose; black brant;' mallard duck; canvas-back duck; blue-winged teal; brown crane; green-winged teal; and probably several birds omitted or forgotten.

In autumn, the region of the Lower Columbia is swarming with wild water-fowl. A common recreation among the Portlanders is to charter a small steamer, or in place of it a hunting-boat, to convey a party of gentlemen to the haunts of geese and ducks, among the streams and sloughs about the mouth of the Lower Wallamet, and up into Scappoose Bay. A week's sport, with good living on board their hunting craft, is thought "worth the shot," as unbending both body and mind from the year's routine of business.

When it is remembered that there is the best of sport for the angler in the creeks and rivers of the country, where choice may be made between a seventy-pound salmon at the mouth of the Columbia, and a dainty, speckled trout in almost any tributary, it must be allowed that there is amusement for all varieties of idle people, not to say healthful pastime for invalids, in Oregon and Washington.

There is also here—what can not readily be found in the Atlantic States—a class of men who have made hunting and trapping the business of half their lives; and who, while they lend their knowledge of the craft to the inexperienced hunter, entertain him with volumes of humorous and exciting personal adventure with every sort of game, from a beaver to a Black-foot Indian. The "River of the West," which chronicles much of this kind of wild life, furnishes an index merely to what the traveler may learn for himself, if