Maera planted his first pair of banderillos sitting down on the edge of the little step-up that runs around the barrera. He snarled at the bull and as the animal charged, leaned back tight against the fence and as the horns struck on either side of him, swung forward over the brute’s head and planted the two darts in his hump. He planted the next pair, same way, so near to us we could have leaned over and touched him. Then he went out to kill the bull and, after he had made absolutely unbelievable passes with the little red cloth of the muleta, drew up his sword and as the bull charged, Maera thrust. The sword shot out of his hand and the bull caught him. He went up in the air on the horns of the bull and then came down. Young Algabeno flopped his cape in the bull’s face. The bull charged him and Maera staggered to his feet. But his wrist was sprained.
With his wrist sprained, so that every time he raised it to sight for a thrust it brought beads of sweat out on his face, Maera tried again and again to make his death thrust. He lost his sword again and again, picked it up with his left hand from the mud floor of the arena and transferred it to the right for the thrust. Finally he made it and the bull went over. The bull nearly got him twenty times. As he came in to stand up under us at the barrera side, his wrist was swollen to twice normal size. I thought of prizefighters I had seen quit because they had hurt their hands.
There was almost no pause while the mules galloped in and hitched on to the first bull and dragged him out and the second came in with a rush. The picadors took the first shock of him with their bull lances. There was the snort and charge, the shock and the mass against the sky, the wonderful defense by the picador with his lance that held off the bull, and then Rosario Olmos stepped out with his cape.
Once he flopped the cape at the bull and floated it around in an easy graceful swing. Then he tried the same swing, the classic “veronica,” and the bull caught him at the end of it. Instead of stopping at the finish, the bull charged on in. He caught Olmos squarely with his horn, hoisted him high in the air. He fell heavily and the bull was on top of him, driving his horns again and again into him. Olmos lay on the sand, his head on his arms. One of his teammates was flopping his cape madly in the bull’s face. The bull lifted his head for an instant and charged and got his man. Just one terrific toss. Then he whirled and chased a man just in back of him toward the barrera. The man was running full tilt and as he put his hand on the fence to vault it the bull had him and caught him with his horn, shooting him way up into the crowd. He rushed toward the fallen man he had tossed who was getting to his feet and all alone Algabeno met him with the cape. Once, twice, three times he made the perfect, floating, slow swing with the cape, perfectly, graceful, debonair, back on his heels, baffling the bull. And he had command of the situation. There never was such a scene at any world series game.
There are no substitute matadors allowed. Maera was finished. His wrist could not lift a sword for weeks. Olmos had been gored badly through the body. It was Algabeno’s bull. This one and the next five.
He handled them all. Did it all. Cape play easy, graceful, confident. Beautiful work with the muleta. And serious, deadly killing. Five bulls he killed, one after the other, and each one was a separate problem to be worked out with death. At the end there was nothing debonair about him. It was only a question if he would last through or if the bulls would get him. They were all very wonderful bulls.
“He is a very great kid,” said Herself. “He is only twenty.”
“I wish we knew him,” I said.
“Maybe we will some day,” she said. Then considered a moment. “He will probably be spoiled by then.”
They make twenty thousand a year.
That was just three months ago. It seems in a different century now, working in an office. It is a very long way from the sunbaked town of Pamplona, where the men race through the streets in the mornings ahead of the bulls to the morning ride to work on a Bay-Caledonia car. But it is only fourteen days by water to Spain and there is no need for a castle. There is always that room at 5 Calle de Eslava, and a son, if he is to redeem the family reputation as a bullfighter, must start very early.
Game-Shooting in Europe
The Toronto Daily Star
November 3, 1923
In a popular conception Europe is a very overcrowded, overcivilized, altogether decadent place where what shooting is done is committed by fashionably dressed languid members of the aristocracy who shoot hundreds of braces of protected grouse or woodcock driven past them by beaters, between pauses for cups of tea and snapshots by the photographers for the leading illustrated weeklies.
Hunting, to be never confused with shooting under pain of social ostracism, consists of these same popular social figures donning pink coats and remaining in an upright position on top of a horse as long as possible as near as practicable to the rear of a pack of dogs who pursue a fox across the fields and meadows of the loyal and cheering peasantry.
Not so on the continent. Hunting is the great national sport of France, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Czechoslovakia and points east. It is called hunting, “la chasse,” and it means shooting. And there is plenty to shoot. Right now you would have extreme difficulty getting inside of any local train leaving Paris in any direction on Saturday or Sunday because of the thousands of hunters, their shotguns slung over the shoulders, leaving for a weekend in the country.
There is probably more game within twenty miles of Paris, France, than within twenty miles of Toronto, Ontario. There is good deer hunting in Germany, good snipe and plover shooting in the Ruhr, good partridge and rabbit shooting in almost every department of France and dangerous big-game hunting in France, Belgium and Germany.
It is a moot question whether there is any dangerous big-game hunting in Ontario, excluding the skunk and porcupine. The hunter in the woods is in fully as much danger from the moose as though he were stationed in the members’ enclosure at the Woodbine taking potshots at the favorite. The black bear wants just one thing from the hunter, distance. Wolves, I understand, are a tender subject.
But there is scattered all over Europe a really dangerous game animal. He is the wild boar and every year incautious hunters are killed by him. Last year there were two hunters killed in France alone by wild boars. During the war when there was almost no shooting game flourished unchecked all over Europe. One of the best little flourishers of them all was the wild boar.
In some districts, like the wild Auvergne country and parts of the wooded slopes of the Côte d’Or down below Dôle, boars became so numerous that they destroyed crops and were a public menace. One farmer last winter had shot eighteen on his place in less than a year. The nineteenth was a big, chunky, viciously built fellow that the farmer saw out of his window one snowy morning. He took down the old shotgun and fired from the back door. The boar went into a thicket. The farmer followed him and the boar charged with a squealing grunt of rage and bowling the farmer over, savaged him with his tusks. A wild boar’s tusk is like a razor and about three to six inches long. It makes a ghastly wound and once a boar gets a man down it keeps driving into him in an insane rage until the man is dead. The farmer’s wife finally killed the boar.
A wild boar will weigh up to 200 pounds and ounce for ounce and pound for pound is about as fierce and vicious an animal as there is. It is also one of the very finest things to eat in the world and as “sanglier” and “marcassin,” the latter young boar, is one of the reasons that make Dijon the place that all good eaters hope to go when they die.
An American pal of mine named Krebs decided to go boar hunting. He went down to a little town in the Côte d’Or in the foothills of the blue wall of the Jura where the boars were reported to be tearing up the crops and intimidating the population.
All the hunters in the place turned out. The reputation of the little town, we can call it Cauxonne, was at stake. Speeches were made in the local café. Impassioned appeals. An American had come all the way to Cauxonne to hunt boars. Such a thing. Further, he was an American journalist. If Caux
onne revealed itself as the great boar-hunting center that every citizen assembled knew it to be, Tourists, with a capital T, would flock in from all over the world. What an opportunity! The American must get boars. It was an affair touching the honor, the future, and the prosperity, above all, brothers, the prosperity of Cauxonne. The excitement lasted until well into the night.
Krebs was wakened before daylight. The boar hunters were assembled at the café. They were waiting for him. He arrived half asleep. Inside the café were about twenty men. Bicycles were stacked outside. Hunting the boar was nothing to be undertaken on an empty stomach. They must have a small drink of some sort. Something to warm the stomach.
Krebs suggested coffee. What a joke. What a supreme and delightful joker the American. Coffee. Imagine it. Coffee before going off to hunt the sanglier. What a thing. Drôle enough, eh?
Marc. Marc was the stuff. No one ever started after the wild boar without first a little marc. Patron, the marc.
The marc was produced.
Now marc, pronounced mar as in marvelous, is one of the three most powerful drinks known. As an early-morning potion it can give vodka, douzico, absinthe, grappa, and other famous stomach destroyers two furlongs and beat them as far as Zev beat Papyrus. It is the great specialty of Burgundy and the Côte d’Or and three drops of it on the tongue of a canary will send him out in a grim, deadly, silent search for eagles.
The marc was produced. It passed from hand to hand and from hand to mouth. Cauxonne was practically already famous. They must celebrate. Had not the American all but already shot dozens, nay hundreds, of wild boars? There was no doubt of it. Cauxonne was one of the great tourist centers of France. But had not the terrific slaughter of boars soon to be accomplished destroyed one of her greatest assets? No. It was no matter. Nothing mattered. Another bottle of marc, Patron.
At nine o’clock in the morning the boar hunters mounted their fleet of bicycles and tore at a terrific clip in a northerly direction out of town. Stragglers and bent and damaged bicycles were found along the road all day. The main body of hunters slept very comfortably in a stretch of woods about four miles north of town, their heads pillowed on their bicycles. Krebs hunted hard all day and shot a large crow. He left for Paris that night, afraid that if he stayed the boar hunters would want to repeat the hunt next morning.
Germany is full of game. In tramping through the Black Forest, I have time and again seen deer, browsing on some little hillside just out of the edge of the forest, or in the evening coming down to drink at a little trout stream way back in the hills. Nearly every well-to-do German with sporting proclivities in the Schwarzwald or the mountainous, forest country of South Germany has one or two staghounds and I have a standing invitation to hunt any fall with Herr Bugler of Triberg.
There are lots of snipe, plover and woodcock all down through the Rhineland and around the Ruhr and good duck shooting along the Rhine in the spring. Last spring, coming down the river from Mayence to Cologne, we passed great rafts of ducks. The British officers in the garrison at Cologne had very good pheasant, grouse and quail shooting in the country within sight of the great cathedral towers.
Switzerland is the home of the chamois. I have never come any closer to the chamois than in the form of a gasoline strainer. He produces a very fine grade of celluloid horn, however, which is used to ornament the alpenstocks that are sold to tourists. So he cannot be regarded as extinct. But as a popular sporting animal he is about on the same plane as the wooden carved bears that are sold in Berne.
There are still chamois but they live very high and far off and are very rarely shot and only then by an expert mountaineer and climber who works with field glasses and a telescope sight. Switzerland is a good game country though. Full of rabbits, big snow hares, partridges and the giant black cock. Black cock, or capercailzie, are a sort of glorified partridge with glossy, iridescent plumage. They are larger than a big orpington chicken, terrific flyers, and live in the forests of Switzerland and nearly all central and western Europe.
Italy is probably the only country in the world where they not only shoot but eat foxes. In the fall in Milan you will see hanging outside the door of the butcher’s shop two or three deer, a long line of pheasants and quail, and one or two red foxes. Everybody who can get a license and get out hunts in Italy. The shooting is probably poorer than in any other country in Europe, because no sorts of birds seem to be protected and all day long in the hills you hear the boom of the black-powder fowling pieces and in the evening see the hunters coming into town with their game bags full of thrushes, robins, warblers, finches, woodpeckers and only an occasional game bird. Next day in the marketplace you can see long lines of songbirds of every sort hung up for sale. Even sparrows are sold.
To get a license to shoot in Italy you must have a certificate that you have never been in jail signed by the chief of police and the mayor of your hometown. This gave me some difficulty when I first applied for a shooting license. In the Abruzzi, the wild, mountainous part of Italy lying up in the country from Naples, there are still bears. There are wolves too, in the wild wastes of the Campagna, within thirty miles of Rome. It is a safe statement that there will be wolves in Italy long after they are exterminated in Ontario. For the Roman wolves have existed since long before the Christian religion first came to Rome, while less than five hundred years ago the American continent was undiscovered.
Belgium is a good shooting country and the Ardennes forest is one of the greatest wild-boar-hunting parts of Europe.
In the Pyrenees, in the south of France and north of Spain, there is perhaps the wildest country of western Europe. Every year hunters kill dozens of bears in the Pyrenees mountain fastnesses.
What is the reason for the continued existence of game in good numbers in the most highly civilized and well-settled centers of the world while in many of the United States, like Indiana, Ohio and Illinois, game is rapidly being exterminated? It is careful protection, rigidly enforced closed seasons, and the fact of government-owned forests, which are really farmed for timber rather than cut over and denuded of trees. Indiana was once a timber country. So was the Lower Peninsula of Michigan. Today there is hardly a patch of virgin timber in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Michigan deer hunters are already going north into Ontario. Ontario’s supply of game seems inexhaustible. But wait until the steady hunting, the destruction of timber and the forest fires have kept up for fifty years. See the result that has been obtained in the States by the motorcar that allows a party to hunt over a hundred miles where they used to be able to hunt over five. The prairie chicken, one of the finest game birds, has been practically wiped out. Quail have been practically exterminated in many states. The curlew has gone. The wild turkey has gone.
But France will always be a game country. For there are forests in France that were there in Caesar’s time. More important still, there are new forests in France that were not there in Napoleon’s time. Even more important, there will be new forests, a hundred years from now, where today M. Poincaré has looked on only scarred hillsides. And all the forests will be full of game.
The Frenchman likes to hunt. If the game falls off he wants to know the reason why.
The Lakes Aren’t Going Dry
The Toronto Star Weekly
November 17, 1923
Water in the lakes is low. Rocks are exposed in the St. Lawrence near Montreal that are not remembered to have appeared before.
The Canada Steamship Lines, which run steamers through the St. Lawrence rapids, say they have run no boats since the end of July and report that they must dynamite rocks at several places before their steamers resume their runs next summer.
Vessels with a capacity of 500,000 bushels of wheat have been coming through from Lake Superior 50,000 bushels short because of the low water.
All the external signs point to lower water in the lakes than ever before.
But in the basement of the Harbor Commission building on the waterfront at the foot of Bay Street there
is a little copper cylinder that slides up and down on the rising and falling water like a monkey on a stick. This copper cylinder takes no account of signs, rocks that the oldest inhabitant has never seen before, bear stories, bull reports or weather conditions. It merely measures the height of water in Toronto harbor, Lake Ontario. And it has been measuring steadily since 1854.
According to its figures, the bay, and consequently Lake Ontario, are nowhere near a low-level record.
This copper float that shifts a slide up and down a graduated scale measures the rise and fall of the water in Toronto’s harbor exactly. Zero, the starting point from which the measurements are taken, is 246 feet above the sea level at New York. It just happened to be that. Sea level has nothing to do with the measurement.
Captain Hugh Richardson, Toronto’s first harbormaster, fixed the zero point in 1854. He wanted a standard to measure the rise and fall of the water by and found a flat rock on the bottom of the bay where the Queen’s Wharf used to be. Captain Richardson dropped a weighted line to the rock and found after several measurements that the depth averaged 9 feet.
In other words, 9 feet was the average height of the water at this particular place. The water at his measuring point would rise and fall correspondingly with the deepest water in the bay. The measuring spot was not far enough out to be affected by winds or waves.
The part of the bay where Captain Hugh Richardson established the first measuring gauge is now solid land. Only a line of willows marks the outlines of the old Queen’s Wharf. When the harbor was filled in the measuring gauge was moved to the new pierhead at the foot of Bathurst Street in 1912. There zero was set at 245 feet above New York sea level. The gauge remained fixed there until 1917, when it was established in the basement of the Harbor Commission building, where it remains at present.
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