CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 55 



very keen, and his eye and ear remarkably quick He 

 usually saw the bird or heard its note as quickly as I 

 did, — and I had nothing else to think about, and 

 had been teaching my eye and ear the trick of it for 

 over fifty years. Of course, his training as a big-game 

 hunter stood him in good stead, but back of that were 

 his naturalist's instincts, and his genuine love of all 

 forms of wild life. 



I have been told that his ambition up to the time 

 he went to Harvard had been to be a naturalist, but 

 that there they seem to have convinced him that all 

 the out-of-door worlds of natural historv had be^n 

 conquered, and that the only worlds remaining were 

 in the laboratory, and to be won with the microscope 

 land the scalpel. But Roosevelt was a man made for 

 action in a wide field, and laboratory conquests could 

 not satisfy him. His instincts as a naturalist, how- 

 ever, lie back of all his hunting expeditions, and, in a 

 larger measure, I think, prompt them. Certain it is 

 that his hunting records contain more live natural 

 history than any similar records known to me, unless 

 it be those of Charles St. John, the Scotch naturalist- 

 Siportsman. 



The Canada jays, or camp-robbers, as they are 

 often called, soon found out our camp that afternoon, 

 and no sooner had the cook begun to throw out peel- 

 ings and scraps and crusts than the jays began to carry 

 them off, not to eat, as I observed, but to hide them 

 in the thicker branches of the spruce trees. How tame 

 they were, coming within three or four yards of one! 

 Why this species of jay should everywhere be so fa- 

 miliar, and all other kinds so wild, is a puzzle. 



In the morning, as we rode down the valley toward 



