ON BIG GAME SHOOTING GENERALLY 19 



idly for several minutes gets up as you move, and goes off with 

 a snort, before you can get your rifle to your shoulder, you will 

 realise more thoroughly how hard it is to distinguish stationary 

 game in cover. Keep your ears, too, on the alert : a bear will 

 move through a dry azalea bush, when he pleases, almost less 

 noisily than a blackbird, and his great soft feet make far less 

 sound on the dead leaves than yours do. Slow ears are almost 

 as bad as slow eyes in still hunting ; but do not condemn either 

 your eyes or ears as worse than the natives' until the eyes 

 have learned from experience what to take note of, and the ears 

 which are the sounds worth listening to. In time the language 

 of the forest will become plain to you, whether it is spoken in 

 the voices of birds and beasts, in the rustlings and scurryings 

 amongst the bushes, or written in tracks upon the great white 

 page of new-fallen snow at your feet ; but at first your ears will 

 send many a false message to your brain. 



In the intensity of the stillness the fir cones which the squir- 

 rels drop make you start, expecting to see the bushes divide 

 for a bull moose at least to pass through them : at night, when 

 you are watching by the river for bear, you think that you 

 hear distinctly the ' splosh, splosh ' of the grizzly's feet as he 

 wades down the shallows towards you. Not a bit of it : it is 

 only a foolish kelt who has run himself aground and is trying 

 to kick himself off again into deep water. On the other hand, 

 that grating of one bough against another which you fancied 

 that you heard may have been a ' bull elk ' burnishing his 

 antlers against a cottonwood-tree, that far-away whistle of the 

 wind may have been a fragment of a forest monarch's love-call, 

 and that angry squirrel across the canyon was actually chatter- 

 ing not because he had seen you, but because he was disturbed 

 by a bear passing by the log on which he was sitting. 



But the language of the woods can only be learnt by resi- 

 dence amongst them, and this is especially true of the written 

 language of tracks, which is to my mind one of the few things 

 utterly beyond a white man's powers ever thoroughly to master. 

 Such proficiency as a man may acquire in tracking he must 



