A T ovem5er — Professional Braconnier s. 2 9 



be more favorable to it if preservation of any serious 

 kind could be resorted to ; but under present circum- 

 stances, when it is impossible to protect it efficiently, it 

 would be impossible also to purchase game without the 

 assistance of the braconnier. The land-owners do not 

 sell, they have only enough for their own tables ; the 

 sportsmen who live in towns, and consider themselves 

 rewarded if, after a day's march, they return home with 

 a single partridge, are not skilful enough to do more 

 than procure themselves a luxury from time to time : so 

 there is clearly a sort of need for the true professional 

 braconnier, who is to ordinary sportsmen what the artist 

 is to the amateur, and can get game in quantity enough 

 to supply the market regularly, though often at high 

 prices. The skill of these men is often wonderful, but 

 no one becomes a braconnier who has not a strong 

 natural aptitude for the chase, with all those animal 

 instincts and physical powers which are necessary to an 

 incessant warfare against the cunning and swiftness of 

 the brute. These instincts and powers gain greatly 

 both in delicacy and strength by incessant use, and after 

 ten or fifteen years of a life in the woods such a man 

 as Jean Bouleau becomes a hunting animal, the most 

 patient and cunning of all animals, and one of the most 

 enduring. If there is a fish in the river, or a quadruped 

 in the woods, he will have that fish, he will have that 

 quadruped, when the common sportsman might as hope- 

 fully propose to himself to arrest the wild swans in their 

 longest and loftiest travelling in the upper air. I found 

 afterwards that this man was never called by his own 



