8 THE STILL-HUNTER. 



on hunting, the information given has been so ex- 

 tremely general in its nature and form of expression, 

 and so utterly lacking in qualifications and excep- 

 tions quite as essential as the rules themselves, that 

 to a beginner in the woods it is of little more use 

 than the maps in a child's atlas are to a tourist 

 Consequently he who would single-handed and alone 

 outgeneral the bounding beauties of the forest and 

 plain, and with a single ball trip their wily feet, is 

 nearly always compelled to work out his own knowl- 

 edge of how to do it. And this he must generally 

 do, as I had to do it, by a long series of mortifying 

 failures. 



I have spent too many days alone in the depths of 

 the forest primeval and on the mountain's shaggy 

 breast not to know full well that printed precepts are 

 poor substitutes for Nature's wild school of object- 

 teaching. Yet from that same life I have learned 

 another thing quite as true ; namely, that while in- 

 struction cannot carry one bodily to the desired goal, 

 it can nevertheless clear the road of hundreds of 

 stumps and fallen logs, cut away a vast amount of 

 tangled brush, and bridge many a Serbonian bog. 



Not without hesitation have I undertaken to ex- 

 plore this "dark continent" of the world of field- 

 sports. At this day a writer upon almost any other 

 subject has the roads, paths, blaze-marks, and charts 

 of a dozen or more explorers before him. I have 

 nothing to follow ; the only work upon deer, that of 

 Judge Caton, thorough and fine as it is, deals only 

 with the anatomy, physiology, and natural history of 

 deer; all those habits which it is essential for the still- 

 hunter to thoroughly understand being as much be- 

 yond the scope of his work as the part he has treated 



