324 AN AMERICAN HUNTER 



" The Old Shekarry," who wrote of Indian and African 

 sport, was one of these. Gerard was a great lion-killer. 

 but some of his accounts of the lives, deaths, and espe- 

 cially the courtships, of lions, bear much less relation to 

 actual facts than do the novels of Dumas. Not a few 

 of the productions of hunters of this type should be 

 grouped under the head-lines used by the newspapers of 

 our native land in describing something which they are 

 perfectly sure hasn't happened " Important, if True." 

 The exactly opposite type is presented in another French- 

 man, M. Foa, a really great hunter who also knows how 

 to observe and to put down what he has observed. His 

 two books on big game hunting in Africa have permanent 

 value. 



If we were limited to the choice of one big game 

 writer, who was merely such, and not in addition a scien- 

 tific observer, we should have to choose Sir Samuel Baker, 

 for his experiences are very wide, and we can accept with- 

 out question all that he says in his books. He hunted 

 in India, in Africa, and in North America ; he killed all 

 the chief kinds of heavy and dangerous game; and he 

 followed them on foot and on horseback, with the rifle 

 and the knife, and with hounds. For the same reason, if 

 we could choose but one work, it would have to be the 

 volumes of " Big Game Shooting," in the Badminton 

 Library, edited by Mr. Phillipps Wolley himself a man 

 who has written well of big game hunting in out-of-the- 

 way places, from the Caucasus to the Cascades. These 

 volumes contain pieces by many different authors; but 

 they differ from most volumes of the kind in that all the 



