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CHAPTER XV 



HINTS ON TAXIDERMY, ETC 

 By Clive Phillipps-Wolley 



That ' the reward lies not in the prize but in the race we run ' 

 is probably more true of sport than of any other pursuit, and 

 yet even in big game shooting there are prizes to strive after 

 which serve at any rate to remind the winners of the races they 

 ran to obtain them. To the man who has won them fairly, the 

 mighty antlers and fierce masks which hang in his hall or study 

 are treasures beyond price. As to the men who buy such 

 trophies, they are not of our guild, nor is it easy to comprehend 

 them or their motives. 



When the light is waning and the flames from a wood fire 

 cover the walls of a hunter's den with quaint shadows of the 

 spolia opif?ia of the chase, it is easy to explain to a kindred 

 spirit the value set upon these hardly-earned treasures. To 

 some they may be mere dry bones or hideous mummies ; but 

 out of them and their shadows the tired man, dozing by his 

 hearth, can call up pictures from the deep primeval forest, the 

 sheer snow mountains, or sweet and wild wind-swept upland ; 

 pictures such as no artist ever painted or poet fancied. Each 

 head is to that dreamer a key to some locker in his memory. 

 He has but to look at those antlers in the firelight, and the 

 .past comes back vivid and glorious, aglow with the colours of 

 .an Indian summer, or bright with the blossoms of an Alpine 

 .spring, mellow with the beauty distance lends, and painted 

 by the strong happy hand of youth. 



