of killing them by dynamite.  I trust that the scarcity of provisions in the camp will serve as my excuse to sportsmen for the method I employed.  We used a stick of dynamite six inches long, and it raised a column of water twenty feet in the air, while the detonation sounded like a salute, rolling from peak to peak for miles around.  In two hours three of us gathered 195 fish from a single pool.  Most of them were big suckers; but we had also thirty-five large Gila trout.  All were fat and of delicate flavour, and lasted us quite a long time.

Never have I been at any place where deer were so plentiful.  Almost at every turn one of them might be seen, sometimes standing as if studying your method of approach.  I sent out five men to go shooting in the northwesterly direction from the camp, and after a day and a half they returned with ten deer.  At one time we had fifteen hanging in the kitchen.

One morning our best marksman, a Mexican named Figueroa, brought in three specimens of that superb bird, campephilus imperialis, the largest woodpecker in the world.  This splendid member of the feathered tribe is two feet long; its plumage is white and black, and the male is ornamented with a gorgeous scarlet crest, which seemed especially brilliant against the winter snow.  The birds go in pairs and are not very shy, but are difficult to kill and have to be shot with rifle.  One of their peculiarities is that they feed on one tree for as long as a fortnight at a time, at last causing the decayed tree to fall.  The birds are exceedingly rare in the museums.  They are only found in the Sierra Madre.  On my journeys I saw them as far south as the southernmost point which the Sierra Madre del Norte reaches in the State of Jalisco, above the Rio de Santiago.  I frequently observed them also in the eastern part of the range.

Here, too, a great many specimens of the rare Mexican titmouse and some beautiful varieties of the duck tribe were procured.

A few days after our arrival at the Rancheria de los Apaches, Professor Libbey left our camp, returning to the United States by way of Casas Grandes.  After bidding him good-bye, I made an excursion of a week’s duration to the north of our camp, to look for possible antiquities, especially a casa blanca, of which I had heard considerable from the people in Nacori.

The woods, considering that it was midwinter, were quite lively with birds.  Everywhere I saw bluejays; crested titmice, too, were plentiful, as well as crossbeaks.  A large yellowish squirrel also attracted my attention.  It was of the same kind as that recently found by our expedition.  The country was hilly and full of small canons, and well watered by springs.  Outcroppings of solidified volcanic ash looked in the distance like white patches in the landscape.  We searched diligently for some twenty-five miles to the north of the main camp, and also toward the east and west, but no trace of former habitation was found except trincheras and house ruins such as we had seen before.  Near one of the group of houses I saw three metates in an excellent state of preservation.