The daily morning journal and courier., 1902-07-31

to grow fat on the mast Of the forest and then to hunt him both for sport and food.
 The home of the American wild hog begins in the southern Appalachian mountains and extends westward to what is known as the Delta" the name locally applied to the low bottom lands of the Mississippi from Memphis to the gulf. One finds them in the for ests and mountains of North and South Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee. Georgia and in the Iowland forests of Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana.
 It was in the mountain region that the hog first became wild. Settlers | moved into the southern mountains from nearly all of the Atlantic set dement's.
 There were two essentials in the dO- mestic economy of the mountaineer. These were pigs and corn. The former were killed and salted, to be eaten in the hot months. They made meat and fat and butter. With pork and corn meal family could live out it's natural life. So pig raising prospered in the | mountains. Sometimes the animals were penned up, but more often they were allowed to run wild and gather the mast which in autumn covered the ground about mountain forests. Grad ually they began to grow fearful of the pen and of man, and little by little the brOods which were born in the forests ran wild during the summer months became harder to round up when killing time came.
 Now and then one especially wild would escape and never be caught. Pigs of this sort would naturally be the wild est, and their fear of man would be | contributed with double force to their offspring with each generation. They multiplied rapidly. And what a change came over the pig as it dropped away | from the ways of its cultured ances- tors and became once more a savage. 1 Its short hair became long and coarse Mountain climbing is a great reducer of obesity and affected the pig as the stout man hoped to be affected by "anti-fat" His ribs became visible and he was long, lean and lank, like a mountaineer or a clay-eating "cracker.' .' Running develops long legs and the pig wohse ancestors had possessed legs which barely served to carry it around the narrow limits of the pen, stood as high as hound and ran like a fright | ened deer
 There has been no organized "pig sticking" among the sportsmen of the south as yet. Men from number of l aristocratic southern clubs who go into the mountains for few weeks of hunt | ing in the fall stalk the animals and shoot them. The young pig of three or 1 four months growth, when fatted n mast, has none of the strong taste that will come to it later on, so the hunting dinner in the mountains is considered a feast if there is such a pig to be brought on roasted as any colored cook knows how to roast pig.
 | More and more each year this sort of appreciation of the pig increases. and the time is not far distant when the southern hunters will find some way to have sport with this sort of game which will be comparable with that fur nished by the wild hog of Europe Per- haps the pig killin' of eastern Ten- nessee may point out the way. Four neighbors are in the click that manages lthis pick stickin'." Chief among them is Dan Goforth, hunter who has more bears to his credit than the average sportsman has squirrels. It is his duty to bring the animals to bay and kill or capture, as Is desired. The others attend to the dressing of the killed and transportation and fattening of the captured, and all share equally in the profits.-Little Rock Gazette