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 
_ fealise more thoroughly how hard it is to distinguish stationary 
'  gameincover. 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. 
4 In the intensity of the stillness the fir cones which the squir- 
_ tels 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. Nota 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 ot because he had seen you, but because he was disturbed 
_ bya 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 
" c2 
