CHAPTER VIII 



MY FIRST TRIP TO THE ROCKIES 



FRESH from Oxford, I was walking down the Strand 

 in the spring of 1876, when I saw a fine pair of 

 wapiti horns in the window of a gunmaker's shop. 

 Wapiti heads were not so plentiful in London eight - 

 and-twenty years ago as they are now. The size and 

 beauty of that particular head, the first of its kind 

 I had seen, fairly astonished me. A year or so before 

 I had killed my first red-deer stag in Norway. But 

 here was a tined trophy that threw all possible 

 red-deer heads into the shade and aroused my most 

 bloodthirsty instincts. 



Why is it, by-the-by, that the size and beauty of 

 wild stags and other big-game arouse in certain 

 individuals this lust to kill ? In this civilized age 

 this sequence of cause and effect may, to some minds, 

 be difficult to understand. Place some educated and 

 otherwise humane person, of the class I refer to, 

 on a Scotch hillside, a Norwegian fjeld, or on the 

 pine-clad slopes of the Great Divide, with express 

 rifle in hand, and a good stag, a fine reindeer buck, 

 or an old wapiti bull in sight, and he will straightway 

 be seized with an inordinate desire to slay the animal 

 in question. This desire will increase in direct pro- 



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