382 WILD SCENES AND WILD HUNTERS. 



to dispute ascendency with them in the land. They had 

 been accustomed to grapple with the Red man, armed only 

 as he was with lance and bow, and in these conflicts, the 

 animals were by no means unfrequently the conquerors. 

 Now they are compelled to battle with a new and invisible 

 power- — an agent as mysterious in its operations, as it is 

 terrible in its effects — which, as it overawed and intimidated 

 their ancient foes, the Red men, might well be expected to fill 

 them with the panic of an indefinable dread. 



The growth of this wholesome fear has been very gradual 

 and slow. The rifle had driven them from frontier to frontier 

 of all the older States, before any marked change in their 

 respect for the genus homo began to be apparent. 



The Panther, which at first made fight with the hunter 

 wherever he met him, had learned to be more circumspect, 

 and instead of becoming the assailant, and leaping from the 

 limb whereon he crouched above, down on his foe below, was 

 content to let him pass, and stand entirely upon the defensive ; 

 even the Black Bear, who formerly had been notorious for 

 his unceremonious habit of pushing his cold nose into what- 

 ever he might perceive going on before him, be the actors 

 who they might, became almost a proverb of prudence. The 

 wild cat, who sometiines lost his temper in love-making time, 

 and challenged any buck-skinned intruder he might meet on 

 the war-path for a fight hand to claw, now contented himself 

 with "giving the road" as his sagacious nostrils recognized 

 the smell of gunpowder ahead. 



Now these changes should not by any means be stigmatized 

 as the result of cowardice, but be honorably set down to the 

 credit of a cautious reasoning : they had found an enemy 

 armed with an agency, the nature or efiects of which they 

 could neither comprehend nor counteract ; they therefore 

 wisely concluded to avoid it — just as any other logical 

 thinkers, reasoning from experience, would have done. 



However, let any of those believers in the cowardice of 



