200 PORTRAITS IN INK 



protection of game and fish to be an infringement 

 on his rights, and is as cunning as a fox in persist- 

 ent violation of all such statutes. All wild things 

 are his by natural inheritance, and what does a 

 week or month matter, and whose affair is it if he 

 desires fish, flesh, or fowl to-day? 



He is somewhat conceited and boastful and en- 

 vious of another's renown in his craft, to be fore- 

 most in which is his highest ambition. You confess 

 it is a poor ambition to be most skillful in a trade 

 that is obsolete and unrequited. With a slightly 

 different bent, with one omitted trait, he would 

 have had a higher aim and have been an Audubon 

 or Thoreau, performing useful if ill-paid work, 

 making a name honorably remembered. 



As he is what he is, he slouches into old age and 

 down to his last sod-roofed shanty, a shiftless, lazy, 

 good-natured, disreputable old trapper, hunter 

 and fisherman, and only by a few will he be kindly 

 and briefly remembered. 



Yet as you see him stealing through the second 

 growth woods, tame and puny successors of the 

 wild, majestic forests, or plying the noiseless pad- 

 dle of his skiff in the nakedness of a shrunken 

 stream, he is so like a lingering spirit of the old 

 days that you are thankful for the picturesque 

 figure which gives one touch of remote half-savage 

 past to the commonplace present. 



