The Creating of Game Refuges 



deer. Perhaps he has been without fresh meat for 

 a week or a fortnight, and often on short com- 

 mons; is it to be wondered at that when a shot 

 offers he avails himself of the opportunity even 

 if it be a doe that he fires at? How can the deer 

 withstand such concentration of fury? 



Dr. Bartlett, Forest Supervisor of the Trabuco 

 and San Jacinto Reserves, assured me that the 

 number of licenses to hunt in those two reserves 

 issued annually exceeded, in his opinion, the entire 

 number of deer within their boundaries. 



Everyone now is ready to admit that the exter- 

 mination of the herd of buffalo in the seventies 

 was permitted by a crude, short-sighted policy on 

 our part as a nation, and should we of the early 

 twentieth century allow the remaining deer, elk, 

 mountain sheep, and antelope, the last of the great 

 bears, and the innumerable small creatures of the 

 wild, to be crowded off the face of the earth, we 

 should be depriving our children and our chil- 

 dren's children of a satisfaction and of a 

 source of interest which they would keenly regret. 

 It would be well if we bore in mind that we stand 

 in a sort of fiduciary relation to the people who are 

 to come after us, so far as the wild portion of our 

 land is concerned, those few remote tracts still un- 

 tarnished by man's craze to convert everything in 



419 



