103 



CHAPTEB VII. 



GAME : HOW TO GET IT. 



To the sportsman the most prominent fascination of plains 

 life is the abundance and variety of game. I use the 

 term abundance in its sportsmanlike sense, meaning the 

 sufficiency. 



Leaving out the buffalo (which plainsmen scarcely 

 consider game) there is little to be had without skill and 

 knowledge. 



Nowhere on the plains that I know of can one 

 slaughter such numbers of beasts as are bagged, we are 

 told, by sportsmen in either Abyssinia, Southern Africa, 

 or India. The plains hunter must work, and he must 

 know how to work, or his bag will be of the lightest. 

 There are no villages of natives to be subsidised to drive 

 dangerous animals to where the hunter sits securely 

 ensconced in a tree ; no hundreds of peasants to make a 

 line of miles, and force the game to a battue ; no battalion 

 of keepers to drive birds to the sportsman sitting comfort- 

 ably in his box, with two or three breech-loaders and a 

 man to load them, a bottle of Eoederer and a box of cigars* 

 to keep the time from hanging heavily. On the plains it 

 is a fair fight between human sagacity and brute instinct, 

 and even with the most approved arms the odds are by no 

 means always in favour of the human. 



I have said that the buffalo is scarcely considered 

 game by the plainsman. It is for the reason that this 

 animal, less than any other, requires an exercise of that 

 skill and sagacity in which the true sportsman finds his 

 pleasure andi the reward for all his toils. 



