Hunt

A sharp November night thinned out into a grey November dawn over rocky Utah. The broad reaches of Great Salt Lake caught up pale sunrise colors. On desolate Antelope Island in the Southeastern corner of the lake the buffalo* herd slowly bestirred itself to test the morning air. Like shaggy brown mounds they looked in the dim light, lurching up lazily from sleep: here three cows and their calves in a grassy pocket gulch; here, in the broader valley, a scattered group of yearlings and dry cows; there, proudly alone, a burly young bull; there, ponderous and patriarchal, respectfully attended by his consorts, an old herd leader with a hump like a hillock, beard to the ground and the gleam of fretful age in his small red eyes.

It was not generations ago, this scene, but one of the mornings of last week. The buffalo, some of the last in the world, were restive because the day before, to their retreat on the rugged northern end of Antelope Island, had come a smell that they had seldom known but instinctively feared--men and horses.

The day broadened, bringing with it more of the terrifying odors; a snort of alarm, figures of men and horses galloping from concealment, the crack of rifles, carnage. As survivors of the herd thundered off into fastnesses of their island (18 miles long, five wide), they could not know the worst: that this was no casual foray by human meat-hunters, but slaughter by up-to-date sportsmen, with intent to decimate. Not hunger but commercialism had precipitated the onslaught. The buffalo of Antelope Island were doomed, all but about 50 of them, to make way for more manageable and profitable cattle.

It is two score years since the late John E. Dooley, then owner of Antelope Island, contrived to take there a small band of buffalo. How he managed this feat no one living seems to know. It baffled one A. H. Leonard who bought the buffalo herd last April with the idea of selling the animals to zoos. Not only were the creatures too wild to catch, but the five-mile stretch of water between island and mainland was too shallow for barges, too deep for motor trucks. If John E. Dooley swam and waded his small herd out to the island, that was a feat in itself. Rounding up the Dooley herd's 300 descendants and making them swim back would be impossible.

So after offering the animals to the Government, which might have preserved them by buying the Island for a national park but did not, owing to Congressional apathy, Mr. Leonard announced a buffalo hunt. First to arrive was none other than the international president of all the Kiwanis Clubs, Ralph A. Amerman of Scranton, Pa., with his brother Edward and a third big game hunter, J. O. Beebe of Omaha. Mounted on tough cayuses, guided by William Powell, astute Indian, attended by four cowboys, the four sportsmen were to hunt until each had made one kill in true pioneer fashion (shooting from the saddle). Then Guide Powell was to take other parties out. A hunt with 50 participating was planned.

Meantime, the New York World and other newspapers tried, by featuring the hunts in large headlines, to spur some humane or public-spirited person of wealth to preserve the finest-herd of wild buffalo left in the country. Since the hunts were first announced some months ago, Governor Dern of Utah had received protests from Governor Fuller of Massachusetts, Mayor Nichols of Boston, the American Humane Society; but could only reply, "Antelope Island and the buffalo herd are privately owned."

The rapid multiplication of the Antelope Island buffalo herd from a few head in 1885 to 300 this year, surprised conservationists. The explanation was found more in the good food supply than the lack of molestation. Food supply is a far greater factor in conserving game than are refinements upon the already adequate protective legislation.* Contrary to popular belief, the migratory game birds of the U. S. are not diminishing but increasing, according to the U. S. Biological Survey. This fact lately led Editor Clark Adams of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, himself a keen hunter, to pen an article for the American Game Association entitled "The Hunted Hunter." Excerpts:

"Let us take the case of national bag limits on migratory birds. There is a nation-wide fight for reductions in these . . . the biggest flight of wild ducks through the Mississippi Valley that we had seen in autumn for 20 years. This year we again had a deluge of ducks. . . .

"After the ducks passed us last year and went to the South they encountered a shortage of food and water on their Winter range which reduced them to starvation. Thousands of them starved in Arkansas and Louisiana and it was likely that more ducks died in the South from this cause than the hunters in the valley had killed when they went through. . . . We did not need lower bag limits. We needed more water and more food. Yet all through that distressing situation we were bombarded with associational propaganda in which it was made to seem that unless we shot fewer wild ducks there would be none left. . . .

"The State of North Dakota outlaws bird dogs. Imagine the bird hunter deprived of his dog! . . . What was a people's sport, in which all the people, irrespective of fortune, participated, tends to become the sport of the rich."

*Properly "bison," but "buffalo" is more popular.

*In the Antelope Island herd: 300 head. In all Federal reservations put together: 1,100 head.

*The Migratory Bird Refuge and Marshland bill which will come before Congress in its impending session provides for Federal purchase of sanctuary feeding as well as breeding grounds.