FOREWORD ix 



strange ways of tribes who have survived into 

 an ahen age from an immemorial past, tribes 

 whose priests dance in honor of the serpent and 

 worship the spirits of the wolf and the bear. 

 Far and wide, all the continents are open to 

 him as they never were to any of his fore- 

 fathers; the Nile and the Paraguay are easy 

 of access, and the borderland between savagery 

 and civilization; and the veil of the past has 

 been lifted so that he can dimly see how, in time 

 immeasurably remote, his ancestors — no less 

 remote — led furtive lives among uncouth and 

 terrible beasts, whose kind has perished utterly 

 from the face of the earth. He will take books 

 with him as he journeys; for the keenest en- 

 joyment of the wilderness is reserved for him 

 who enjoys also the garnered wisdom of the 

 present and the past. He will take pleasure in 

 the companionship of the men of the open; in 

 South America, the daring and reckless horse- 

 men who guard the herds of the grazing country, 

 and the dark-skinned paddlers who guide their 

 clumsy dugouts down the dangerous equatorial 

 rivers; the white and red and half-breed hunt- 

 ers of the Rockies, and of the Canadian wood- 

 land; and in i^frica the faithful black gun- 

 bearers who have stood steadily at his elbow 

 when the Hon came on with coughing grunts, or 



