re an
absolute dead letter. Fancy the 125 wardens of New York enforcing the
bag-limit laws on 150,000 gunners! It is this horrible condition that is
enabling the licensed army of destruction to get in its deadly work on
the game, all over the world. In America, the over-liberality of the
laws are to blame for two-thirds of the carnival of slaughter, and the
successful evasions of the law are responsible for the other third.

[Illustration: TWO GUNNERS OF KANSAS CITY
Who Believe in Killing all That the Law Allows. They are not so Much to
Blame as the System That Permits Such Slaughter. (Note the Pump Guns)]

[Illustration: WHY THE SANDHILL CRANE IS BECOMING EXTINCT
Nineteen of Them Killed as "Game" by Three Gunners. Note the Machine Gun.]

The only remedy for the present extermination of game according to law
that so rapidly and so furiously is proceeding all over the United
States, Canada, Alaska, and Africa, is ten-year close seasons on all the
species threatened with extinction, and immensely reduced open seasons
and bag limits on all the others.

Will the people who still have wild game take heed now, and clamp down
the brakes, hard and fast before it is too late, or will they have their
game exterminated?

Shall we have five-year close seasons, or close seasons of 500 years? We
must take our choice.

Shall we hand down to our children a gameless continent, with all the
shame that such a calamity will entail?

We have _got_ to answer these questions like men, or they will soon be
answered for us by the extermination of the wild life. For twenty-five
years we have been smarting under the disgrace of the extermination of
our bison millions. Let us not repeat the dose through the destruction
of other species.

* * * * *

CHAPTER VII

THE GUERRILLAS OF DESTRUCTION

We have now to deal with THE GUERRILLAS OF DESTRUCTION.

In warfare, a _guerrilla, or bushwhacker_, is an armed man who
recognizes none of the rules of civilized warfare, and very often has no
commander. In France he is called a "franc-tireur," or free-shooter. The
guerrilla goes out to live on the country, to skulk, to war on the weak,
and never attack save from ambush, or when the odds clearly are on his
side. His military status is barely one remove from that of the spy.

The meat-shooters who harry the game and other wild life in order to use
it as a staple food supply; the Italians, negroes and others w