324 Hunting Trips on the Prairie 



accounts of most of the later Arctic expeditions 

 they are portrayed as having learned wisdom, and 

 being now most anxious to keep out of the way of 

 the hunters. A number of my sporting friends have 

 killed white bears, and none of them were ever even 

 charged. And in South Africa the English sports- 

 men and Dutch Boers have taught the lion to be a 

 very different creature from what it was when the 

 first white man reached that continent. If the In- 

 dian tiger had been a native of the United States, 

 it would now be one of the most shy of beasts. Of 

 late years our estimate of the grisly's ferocity has 

 been lowered; and we no longer accept the tales of 

 uneducated hunters as being proper authority by 

 which to judge it. But we should make a parallel 

 reduction in the cases of many foreign animals and 

 their describers. Take, for example, that purely 

 melodramatic beast, the North African lion, as por- 

 trayed by Jules Gerard, who bombastically describes 

 himself as "le tueur des lions." Gerard's accounts 

 are self-evidently in large part fictitious, while if 

 true they would prove less for the bravery of the 

 lion than for the phenomenal cowardice, incapacity, 

 and bad marksmanship of the Algerian Arabs. 

 Doubtless Gerard was a great hunter ; but so is many 

 a Western plainsman, whose account of the grislies 

 he has killed would be wholly untrustworthy. Take 

 for instance the following from page 223 of "La 

 Chasse au Lion": "The inhabitants had assembled 

 one day to the number of two or three hundred with 

 the object of killing (the lion) or driving it out of 



