330 THE FUR TRADE OF AMERICA 



occupy ? Modern sentiment has almost painted him as a red- 

 dyed monster, excusable, perhaps, because necessity compels the 

 hunter to slay, but after all only the most highly developed of the 

 creatures that prey. Is this true ? Arch-destroyer he may be ; 

 but it should be remembered that he is the destroyer of destroyers. 



Animals kill young and old, male and female. 



The true trapper does not kill the young ; for that would destroy 

 his next year's hunt. He does not kill the mother while she is with 

 the young. He kills the grown males which — it can be safely 

 said — have killed more of each other than man has killed in all the 

 history of trapping. Wherever regions have been hunted by the 

 pot-hunter, whether the sportsman for amusement or the settler 

 supplying his larder, game has been exterminated. This is illus- 

 trated by all the stretch of country between the Platte and the 

 Saskatchewan. Wherever regions have been hunted only by the 

 trapper, game is as plentiful as it has ever been. This is illustrated 

 by the forests of the Rockies, by the No-Man's Land south of 

 Hudson Bay and by the Arctics. Wherever the trapper has come 

 destroying grizzly and coyote and wolverine, the prong horn and 

 mountain-sheep and mountain-goat and wapiti and moose have 

 increased. 



But the trapper stands for something more than a game warden, 

 something more than the most merciful of destroyers. He destroys 

 animal life — a life which is red in tooth and claw with murder and 

 rapine and cruelty — in order that human life may be preserved, 

 may be rendered independent of the elemental powers that wage 

 war against it. 



It is a war as old as the human race, this struggle of man against 

 the elements, a struggle alike reflected in Viking song of warriors 

 conquering the sea, and in the Scandinavian myth of pursuing 

 Fenris wolf, and in the Finnish epic of the man-hero wresting secrets 

 of life-bread from the earth, and in Indian folk-lore of a Hiawatha 

 hunting beast and treacherous wind. It is a war in which the 

 trapper stands forth as a conqueror, a creature sprung of earth, 



