322 AN AMERICAN HUNTER 



company, with horse and spear, he attacked and overcame 

 the buffalo and the rhinoceros. 



By the beginning of the nineteenth century the hunt- 

 ing book proper became differentiated, as it were, from 

 the book of the explorer. One of the earliest was Will- 

 iamson's " Oriental Field Sports." This is to the present 

 day a most satisfactory book, especially to sporting par- 

 ents with large families of small children. The pictures 

 are all in colors, and the foliage is so very green, and the 

 tigers are so very red, and the boars so very black, and 

 the tragedies so uncommonly vivid and startling, that 

 for the youthful mind the book really has no formidable 

 rival outside of the charmed circle where Slovenly Peter 

 stands first. 



Since then multitudes of books have been written 

 about big game hunting. Most of them are bad, of 

 course, just as most novels and most poems are bad ; but 

 some of them are very good indeed, while a few are enti- 

 tled to rank high in literature though it cannot be said 

 that as yet big game hunters as a whole have produced 

 such writers as those who dwell on the homelier and less 

 grandiose side of nature. They have not produced a 

 White or Burroughs, for instance. What could not Bur- 

 roughs have done if only he had cared for adventure and 

 for the rifle, and had roamed across the Great Plains and 

 the Rockies, and through the dim forests, as he has wan- 

 dered along the banks of the Hudson and the Potomac! 

 Thoreau, it is true, did go to the Maine Woods; but then 

 Thoreau was a transcendentalist and slightly anaemic. 

 A man must feel the beat of hardy life in his veins before 



