45 The Wilderness Hunter. 



merous bears who infested his neighborhood. He took 

 a grimly humorous revenge each fall by doing his winter 

 killing among the bears instead of among the hogs they 

 had slain ; for as the cold weather approached he regu- 

 larly proceeded to lay in a stock of bear-bacon, scouring 

 the canebrakes in a series of systematic hunts, bringing 

 the quarry to bay with the help of a big pack of hard- 

 fighting mongrels, and then killing it with his long, 

 broad-bladed bowie. 



Again, I should like to make a trial at killing peccaries 

 with the spear, whether on foot or on horseback, and with 

 or without dogs. I should like much to repeat the expe- 

 rience of a friend who cruised northward through Bering 

 Sea, shooting walrus and polar bear; and that of two 

 other friends who travelled with dog-sleds to the Barren 

 Grounds, in chase of the caribou, and of that last survivor 

 of the Ice Age, the strange musk-ox. Once in a while it 

 must be good sport to shoot alligators by torchlight in 

 the everglades of Florida or the bayous of Louisiana. 



If the big-game hunter, the lover of the rifle, has a 

 taste for kindred field sports with rod and shotgun, many 

 are his chances for pleasure, though perhaps of a less in- 

 tense kind. The wild turkey really deserves a place beside 

 the deer ; to kill a wary old gobbler with the small-bore 

 rifle, by fair still-hunting, is a triumph for the best sports- 

 man. Swans, geese, and sandhill cranes likewise may 

 sometimes be killed with the rifle ; but more often all 

 three, save perhaps the swan, must be shot over decoys. 

 Then there is prairie-chicken shooting on the fertile grain 

 prairies of the middle West, from Minnesota to Texas ; 



