unt of the trip
nearly two years ago! But with the stress and strain of my life
at "Slabsides,"--administering the affairs of so many of the wild
creatures of the woods about me,--I have not till this blessed season
(fall of 1905) found the time to put on record an account of the most
interesting thing I saw in that wonderful land, which, of course, was
the President himself.

When I accepted his invitation I was well aware that during the
journey I should be in a storm centre most of the time, which is not
always a pleasant prospect to a man of my habits and disposition. The
President himself is a good deal of a storm,--a man of such abounding
energy and ceaseless activity that he sets everything in motion around
him wherever he goes. But I knew he would be pretty well occupied on
his way to the Park in speaking to eager throngs and in receiving
personal and political homage in the towns and cities we were to pass
through. But when all this was over, and I found myself with him in
the wilderness of the Park, with only the superintendent and a few
attendants to help take up his tremendous personal impact, how was it
likely to fare with a non-strenuous person like myself? I asked. I had
visions of snow six and seven feet deep, where traveling could be
done only upon snow-shoes, and I had never had the things on my feet
in my life. If the infernal fires beneath, that keep the pot boiling
so furiously in the Park, should melt the snows, I could see the party
tearing along on horseback at a wolf-hunt pace over a rough country;
and as I had not been on a horse's back since the President was born,
how would it be likely to fare with me then?

I had known the President several years before he became famous, and
we had had some correspondence on subjects of natural history. His
interest in such themes is always very fresh and keen, and the main
motive of his visit to the Park at this time was to see and study in
its semi-domesticated condition the great game which he had so often
hunted during his ranch days; and he was kind enough to think it would
be an additional pleasure to see it with a nature-lover like myself.
For my own part, I knew nothing about big game, but I knew there was
no man in the country with whom I should so like to see it as
Roosevelt.

Some of our newspapers reported that the President intended to hunt in
the Park. A woman in Vermont wrote me, to protest against the hunting,
and hoped I would teach the