cent to them and they wheeled
round and trotted away. Yet the head hunter from the city, who usually
stands off at long range and fires at the first sight of game, will
argue that killing is the greatest sport; when in truth it requires
greater courage and greater skill to approach, unarmed, so close to
game that one may touch it with a fish pole, and the reward is a much
greater and a more satisfactory thrill than the head hunter ever gets
from lying off at long range with a high-powered rifle and utterly
destroying life. Furthermore, think of how much better one can study
natural history by observing live animals in action, rather than
motionless ones in death! An artist, in his effort to render a perfect
portrait of a human being, never murders his sitter, as the so-called
"sportsman-naturalist" does. It seems to me that if sportsmen were
more active, more skilful, and more courageous, they would give up
slaughtering animals and birds for the sake of the unbounded pleasure
and adventure of observing wild game at closer quarters; but in truth,
long experience has taught me that the average hunter from the city is
something of a coward--never daring to walk alone in the forest without
his trusty, life-destroying machines.

But if those same hunters would only take a little more interest in
nature, pluck up a little more courage, and remember that the wild
animals of the northern forest are less vicious--when unmolested--than
are many of the tame animals of civilization, how much more sane they
would be. Remember, it is much safer to approach the great bulls of
the forest than it is to approach the smaller bulls of the farmers'
fields. Likewise, when tramping along the rural road one runs a much
greater chance of being bitten by the farmer's dog, than one does, when
travelling through the forest, of being bitten by a wolf. Then, too,
it is just the same of men, for the men of the cities are much more
quarrelsome, dishonest, and evil-minded than are those of the
wilderness, and that, no doubt, accounts for the endless slandering of
the wilderness dwellers by fiction writers who live in towns, for those
authors--never having lived in the wilderness--form their judgment of
life, either as they have experienced it in cities or as they imagine
it to be in the wilderness.

THE OUTLAW AND NEW YORKER

Now, in order to confirm my statement, I shall go to the very extreme
and quote what Al Jennings, the notorious outl