THE WILDERNESS HUNTER.* THE author of Ranch 14fs and the
Hunting Trail has the gift which few great hunters possess,—the art of describing the hunter's life on the great plains, in the giant timber of the western mountain ranges, and the broken country of the foot hills, with the sights and sounds and the smaller creatures that the true sportsman associates so fondly with his absorbing labours and soon-forgotten hardships. In The Wilderness Hunter, Mr. Roosevelt relates his adventures, more particularly those immediately concerned with the game, in hunting the buffalo, the great deer, the antelope, the grizzly-bear, and those most difficult of all trophies to obtain, the mountain and white goats. The surroundings of the hunter's life count for much with some men, and to them the hunting of the bear in the foot hills in autumn or winter, the hunting of the elk in forests, the hunting of the antelope in the open prairie, or the chase of the blacktail dear in the giant forests of the western ranges, is quaffing the cup of hunting life in great draughts of pleasure. To men of con- stitutional nerve and great physical endurance, to taste of such an existence spoils them for the trammels of a civilised existence. How well we know them,—a house is a prison to them, the monotony of a quiet existence frets away their mighty hearts, as the canker eats some vigorous tree; such men are as truly wild as their quarry, and bear a strong resemblance to the great carnivore in their habits. We suppose the chase of the grizzly-bear must rank as the noblest sport of all, because he is the most dangerous quarry. His tenacity of life is extra. ordinary, and such that he is capable of sustaining a charge at his assailant which the most terrible wounds fail to stop. He does not often charge, but when he does, a repeating-rifle does not always save the hunter. The number of men killed by bears is larger than many suppose, and few people in the West have not seen men who carry with them fearful scars or some crippled member as a reminder of the grizzly-bear. His paw has much the same crushing power as the paw of the lion and the tiger, and his claws inflict perhaps the most deadly injuries of all. One of the writers in the second book before us, having killed a bear with three bullets, found on skinning it four other rifle-balls and the fragment of a fifth embedded in the neck and the muscles of the foreleg. So that if the bear is easy to hit he is hard to kill. The risk of bear-hunting, according to many hunters, Mr. Roosevelt among the number, has been exaggerated ; bear- stories like fish-stories having a certain notoriety. There is this to be said however ; a hunter may happen upon a bear when he is least prepared for it, when he is hunting deer and goat, and as one bullet rarely stops a bear, if the beast means to charge, the hunter has not much to hope for. We cannot compare the grizzly to the tiger ; one man can hunt a grizzly if he is the right sort, but no man, unless mad, thinks of " (1.) The Wilderness Hunter an Account of the Big Game of tho United States, end tits Chas:: with Horse, Hound, and Rifle. By Theodore Roosevelt. With Illustrations. London : G. 1'. Prate:ma's Sous —12 American Big Game Hunting ; the Bonk of the Boone and Crockett Club. Edited by Theodore noose. volt and George Bird Grinnell, with Illustrations, Edinburgh: David Douglas. hunting a tiger alone ; one great difference being that the bear being usually found in the open, is seen first, whereas the tiger living, in the jungle, would probably see its hunter first. At close quarters the bear is a formidable foe, but he is clumsy and may be dodged ; it is not so with the ferocious spring of the tiger. The late Sir Samuel Baker wrote a letter a few days before his death saying that he had lost three friends from this cause during the last year, that is to say, from the inability to stop the rush of a tiger.
The big-horn and the white-goat are noble quarry for the hunter, for they live on the mountains, and their chase demands a dogged climber, trained wind and muscles, and in the case of the big-horn all the craft of the hunter. Mr. Roosevelt declares the white-goat to be the most stupid of all game animals. It seems indeed, that the mountain game have one weak point, according to a writer in the " Boone and Crockett Club Book,"—they do not seem to realise that danger can come from above. But there can be little doubt that the American game requiring the hardest hunting, are the mountain goat and sheep. The chase of them is uniformly hard and difficult. The great deer vary much in the hunter's estimation; at times the moose will tax the hunter's skill and endurance, for it is a powerful beast, and has an acute sense of smell. Again, the caribou is somewhat duller and more easily approached, but he lives in a difficult country and roams far. His first caribou, Mr Roosevelt tells us, was killed in the Selkirks, and he speaks enthusiastically of the magnificent scenery of the forest ranges, much of which was untravelled even by the Kootenai Indians. The wapiti, or round-horned elk, the stateliest and noblest game on the American continent, is not difficult to kill, for his country is one that suits the hunter—be has not to be hunted in thick forest like the moose—and his bugle-calls of challenge guide the hunter.
Moreover, elk-venison is very good, hence the herds of elk have been rapidly thinned. The moose is bunted a good deal in the East, in Maine and Nova Scotia, as well as in the West. But in the North-east he is sometimes hunted in a scarcely sportsmanlike manner,—by means of torches from canoes. There may be considerable excitement in shooting a moose in the water, but it no more deserves to be called sport than the killing of rats in a pit by a fox-terrier. Hunting the moose in deep snow is also a one-sided affair, generally, as Mr. Roosevelt justly observes, mere butchery. In late winter, when thaws crust the snow, the moose exhausts itself in efforts to get away, and is soon run to a stand- still. When the snows are light and powdery, the moose travels great distances, even with a crust strong enough to bear a man on snowshoes. The chase of a moose under such circumstances may last for days, and demands unusual endurance and skill in snowshoeing or the use of the Norwegian " ski." But the ordinary settler is no sportsman, and would prefer the easiest method of killing game ; so hunting moose on snow is forbidden where any respect for game or common-sense obtains. The settler, indeed, must have a sharp eye kept on him ; his views on the subject of close time would scarcely do credit to an Indian. (The settler in British Columbia, for instance, shoots grouse without regard to any laws, natural or otherwise.) Now, the o Ixibou is in a very different position as regards hunting in the snow ; he can carry his weight over a crust that will not bear the heavy moose, and can even travel in loose snow too deep for the long logs of the moose. A snowshoe- runner, then, can only catch a caribou under altogether exceptionable circumstances of snowfall and thaw, according to Mr. Roosevelt. Our author places elk-hunting perhaps higher than moose-hunting is put by many, chiefly from its associations :— " To me," he says, "still-hunting elk in the mountains, when they are calling, is one of the most attractive of sports, not only because of the size and stately beauty of the quarry and the grand nature of the trophy, but because of the magnificence of the scenery, and the stirring, manly, exciting nature of the chase itself. It yields more vigorous enjoyment than does lurking stealthily through the grand but gloomy monotony of the marshy woodlands where dwell the moose. The climbing among the steep forest-clad and glade-strewn mountains is just difficult enough to thoroughly teat soundness in wind and limb, while without the heart-breaking fatigue of white goat hunting. The actual grapple with an angry grizzly is, of course, far more full
of strong eager pleasure As regards strenuous, vigorous work and pleasurable excitement the chase of the bighorn alone stands higher."
The early hunters never used lAouRds tg pursue their quarry, but of late years packs of hounds have hunted the prong- bucks on the open prairie, and also the timber-wolves. The most exciting sport is the hunting of the prong-horn with greyhounds, though this deer is tempting game to the sports- man who "fancies himself" with the rifle. The chase with hounds is an exhilarating sport, and now that the greyhound has been so much improved, it—or perhaps in some eases a cross-bred greyhound—takes the place of the hound that Scottish Kings loved so dearly. Mr. Roosevelt uses the terms " greyhound" and " deerhound" as if they were synonymous, at least as if one was as good as the other ; though, had the deerhound as much care taken in breeding it as its lesser and speedier rival, no dog could touch it for bunting purposes. Many a wildly exciting ride Mr. Roosevelt has had with a scratch pack after antelope, blacktail, whitetail, foxes, jack-rabbits, and coyotes. Coyote-hunting, a young gentleman nearly related to us declared, was an exhilarating sport if you were well-mounted. The plains are, of course, the true home for these coursings, and Mr. Roosevelt mentions in particular the country between the Little Missouri and the Knife and Heart rivers. Some greyhounds are afraid to lay hold, but after hunting with dogs of sterner stuff, they gain courage, that is to say if they have any pluck at all to begin with. The Wilderness Hunter, as we must call Mr. Roosevelt, was present when several antelopes were killed, but he says they generally get away. In his opinion, the antelope is the fleetest quarry coursed, and he puts forward the experience of a great Kentucky sportsman, Colonel Roger Williams, as undisputable evidence. This sportsman with his pack could always overtake antelope, if a good start had been obtained; but his horses and hounds were of the best. Colonel Williams believes the thoroughbred can outran any animal breathing ; he by himself, on rare occasions, has run down antelopes after desperate riding, which resulted once in the death of his horse. Some South African sportsmen might dispute the claim of the antelope to rank with the quagga for speed.
The commonest game in America thirty years ago was the buffalo ; but so furious was the onslaught made by dollar- hunting Americans on the countless herds that literally blackened the prairies, that the solitary herd which can lay claim to the title of wild owes its existence to the protection of the Yellowstone Park. That great reservation is perfectly adapted to be the home of all the wild fauna of the States, and will eventually be the last foothold of the several species. Let us hope that the good feeling of the nation and the influence of the Boone and Crockett Club will never allow that reservation to be broken up. The natural wonders of the great Park will plead for its preservation more than any such sentimental weakness as the harbouring of nearly extinct species of animals ; for a, reservation for wild beasts could hardly expect a better fate than that of a solemnly ratified reservation for the hated Indian.
"The Book of the Boone and Crockett Club" contains articles on most of the subjects treated by Mr. Roosevelt, and two or three of them record the last days of the buffalo herds, Mr. Grinnell's account of the Indian methods of entrapping buffalo being particularly interesting. The objects of the Club—the promotion of sport and preservation of the big game—are worthy ones, and we heartily recommend the volume, with its rather unequal contents, to the reader. As to Mr. Roosevelt, we can only say that no man seems to have more brilliantly combined the functions of the bunter and the writer ; it is a real pleasure to read and roam with him in the wilderness.
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