continually bending and falling with their crashing weight, and presenting a scene of confusion and destruction, too strange to describe, and too dangerous to be approached by either man or beast. While the living birds are gone to their distant dinner, it is common for man and animals to gather up or devour the dead, then found in cartloads. When the roost is among the saplings, on which the pigeons alight without breaking them down, only bending them to the ground, the self-slaughter is not so great; and at night, men, with lanterns and poles, approach and beat them to death without much personal danger. But the grand mode of taking them is by setting fire to the high dead grass, leaves, and shrubs underneath, in a wide blazing circle, fired at different parts, at the same time, so as soon to meet. Then down rush the pigeons in immense numbers, and indescribable confusion, to be roasted alive, and gathered up dead next day from heaps two feet deep.
13th.—Major Hooker frequently shoots, and then cooks and eats the huge wild cats, while Mr. Birkbeck and his family eat the rattle-snake, the flesh of which, says Mr. Ingle, is fine, sweet, and white, as an eel. Pigs also eat them voraciously. {250} Armstrong, a hunting farmer, this day shot four deer, while he is too idle to inclose his corn-field, which is devoured by cattle and horses, save when a boy watches it to keep them off. This man and family then, though with plenty of land, must buy corn, and depend upon wild meat for the support of his idle family, who have either a feast or a famine. They keep several cows, but as calves are constantly with them (having no separate inclosure) and as the family eat 5lbs. of butter a day, for three days in the week, which consumes all the dairy at once, they go without during the remainder of the week. They never sell any, though it is 25 cents
