The Happy Hooligan 107 



ing sun it was. He had never, he said, seen anything 

 Hke it. As a matter of fact it happened to be a cab- 

 bage that had gone to seed; but the man, who had 

 always killed his cabbages as soon as their hides were 

 prime, did not even know they bore seed. And he 

 rather fancied himself as an amateur gardener, too. 

 It is much the same in the woods. If you kill your 

 bear just as soon as it begins to act natural, you may 

 get to be an authority on hides, but there will be a lot 

 of things that you don^t know. 



We are not here discussing the ethics of killing. 

 That is a question quite apart. Goodness knows that 

 there is little enough glory — since there is little or no 

 risk — in killing a Black Bear. To chase a timorous 

 and inoffensive animal up a tree and then to stand 

 underneath and shoot it is no very great achievement. 

 The sport is altogether in the mind of the sportsman. 

 It is a good deal like dressing up in a brown cotton 

 imitation of a fringed buckskin hunting shirt and 

 stalking the spring calf in the east pasture with an air- 

 gun. It's exciting — until you find out what it really 

 amounts to. But you have to manufacture your own 

 excitement. The point I wish to make is simply this : 

 that if you want to find out how an animal lives, you 

 must watch it live and not watch it die. When you 

 start out to study the habits of a wild animal the place 

 for your gun, if you have one, is in the rack at home. 



For one thing, if you undertake to watch a man 



