Where Silence Is Eloquent 



It is even so with bear, moose, caribou and 

 other creatures your best "shots" come when 

 you are not expecting them, and it is not chance, 

 but psychological law, which determines that you 

 shall see most game when you leave your gun at 

 home. A hunter must be dull indeed not to have 

 discovered that the animal he approaches peace- 

 ably, trying to make his eyes or his heart say 

 friendly things, is a very different animal from the 

 one he stalks with muscles tense and eyes hard 

 and death in the curl of his trigger finger. 



I once met an English hunter, a forest officer in 

 India, who told me that for the first year of his 

 stay in the jungle he was "crazy" to kill a tiger. 

 He dreamed of the creatures by night ; he hunted 

 them at every opportunity and in every known 

 fashion by day; he never went abroad on forest 

 business without a ready rifle; and in all that 

 time he had just one glimpse of a running tiger. 

 One day he was led far from his camp by a new 

 bird, and as he watched it in a little opening, un- 

 armed and happy in his discovery, a tiger lifted its 

 huge head from the grass, not twenty steps away. 

 The brute looked at him steadily for a few mo- 

 ments, then moved quietly aside, stopped for an- 

 other look, and leaped for cover. 



That put a new idea into the man's head, and 

 the idea was emphasized by the fact that the un- 



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