46 THE WILDERNESS OF THE UPPER YUKON 



weak to travel and would shortly have died. I felt great 

 pity for him. 



Could the sportsman but know the suffering of the 

 animals he wounds but fails to get a too common expe- 

 rience would his enthusiasm diminish ? The hunter- 

 sportsman is a strange combination, possessed by the 

 fascination of hunting and killing the animals that he 

 loves for every true hunter-sportsman loves the wild 

 animals. In their wild life they fascinate him; all his 

 interest is aroused in watching them; his pulse is quick- 

 ened; his feeling for nature becomes deeper, fuller, and 

 more complete. I never knew a true hunter, be he the 

 rough pioneer or the cultured man, who did not have an 

 intense fondness for the wild animals, a strong interest in 

 studying them and protecting them, and also a desire to 

 alleviate and prevent their suffering; yet there still per- 

 sists his paradoxical love of hunting and killing them. 



The Indian finds in the fascination of the hunt a 

 gratification of those inherited instincts produced and 

 implanted in him by centuries of the struggle for exist- 

 ence. His ancestors had to hunt or starve, and in many 

 places on this continent to-day the Indian must hunt or 

 starve. He must seek food, and the excitement of the 

 chase develops a fascination for it, intensified perhaps by 

 inherited instinct. Part of this same instinct is our own 

 heritage. It may be the mainspring which prompts us 

 to set forth and suffer hardship. 



Primitive feeling for nature was saturated with the 

 supernatural and easily took the form of a reverence for 

 natural phenomena, which in turn led to the develop- 



