learning to love life in the open, the trees, the flowers, the birds and the wild animals I met.  I was as proud of my outfit as the modern hunter is of his $500 gun and expensive accompaniments.  When I went after the cows, I carried my gun, and often got a dozen or more quail at a pot shot out of some friendly covey.  If I went to plow corn, or work in the vegetable garden, the gun accompanied me, and it was sure to do deadly execution every day.

When it was too wet to plow, no matter how hard it was raining, it was just right to hunt.  Clad in a gum coat, I would take my gun and brave the elements, when a seat by the fireside would have been much more comfortable.  I loved to be out in a storm, to watch the rain, to hear the wind toss and tear the branches of the trees, to hear at first hand the fury of the storm, and watch the birds hovering in the underbrush, and the wild waterfowl seek the protection of the willows.  In such a storm great flocks of geese would scurry across the country within a few feet of the ground.  They usually went in the teeth of the gale.  At such times they constantly uttered shrill cries and appeared utterly demoralized.

If there were game laws in those days, I never knew it.  It was always open season with me.  Often my mother would tell me to shoot something besides quail, that she was tired of them.

There was a slough on the place which was full of beaver and beaver dams.  How I tried to get one of them, always without success!  They were very crafty, very alert, and at the slightest indication of danger dived under water to the doors of their houses, long before one was in gunshot of them.  Full many a weary hour have I spent, hidden in the brush, watching a nearby beaver dam in the hope of getting a shot, but always without avail.  They would appear at other dams, too far away, but never show themselves close enough to be injured.

In the winter the slough fairly swarmed with ducks of every variety.  They were disturbed but little, and they used these waters as a resting place, flying far out into the grain fields and into the open plain at night for their food.  The beautiful wood duck, now almost extinct in California, was very plentiful.  They went in flocks as widgeon do.  They would go into the tops of the oak trees and feed upon the acorns.  I killed many of them as they came out of these trees.  In flying they had a way of massing together like blackbirds, and one shot often brought down a goodly bag of them.

The slough I mentioned above was not a stagnant one.  It was fed by water from Feather River.  After winding around an island, it emptied its waters back into the river farther down stream, so that fresh water was continually entering and flowing from it.  Along its banks grew a fringe of tall cottonwood trees.  Many of them were completely enveloped with wild grapevines, which bore abundantly.  The slough was full of two or three varieties of perch, or, as we called them, sun-fish; also a white fish called chub.  These fish were all very palatable, and I caught loads of them.  In the fall, when the wild grapes were ripe, they would fall off into the water and were fed upon by the fish.  Beneath the vine-clad cottonwoods the fishing was always good.