368 APPENDIX 



hound which it could have caught and killed without the 

 slightest difficulty. 



How fortunate we should be if only a sufficient num- 

 ber of big-game hunters would train themselves, as the 

 best field naturalists do, to habits of close and accurate 

 observation! It is fairly astonishing to see how often the 

 professional hunter not only the white man, but the 

 Indian is either ignorant or utterly misinformed as to 

 all the habits of the game except those which he must 

 know in order to kill it. This was eminently true of the 

 sport-loving nobles of the middle ages. They constantly 

 repeated the same baseless fables about the very animals 

 which they spent their lives in hunting. Thus, for in- 

 stance, Gaston Phoebus writes much that is sheer fan- 

 tastic nonsense about the wolf; his account of the wolf 

 does not begin to compare in interest and value with 

 that of a modern French hunter and close observer, Le 

 Couteulx. 



I wish, for example, that I could get trustworthy 

 information of any instance in which the male wolf or 

 coyote has remained with his mate and joined in the care 

 of the cubs. In the cases of breeding wolves which have 

 come to my personal knowledge, the mother has been 

 alone, and no male has had anything to do with the care 

 of the family. Some " nature writers," whose writings 

 are mere agreeable fiction, describe the father and mother 

 wolves as living together and caring jointly for the fam- 

 ily; but they also describe this arrangement as existing 

 among cougars, with which animal, as I know, it does 

 not obtain at all, the male having no share whatever in 



