Books on Big Game 



would-be " funny " writing is even worse, as it almost 

 invariably denotes a certain underbred quality of mind; 

 but there is need of a certain amount of detail, and of 

 vivid and graphic, though simple, description. In other 

 words, the writer on big game should avoid equally Car- 

 lyle's theory and Carlyle's practice in the matter of 

 verbosity. 



Really good game books are sure to contain descrip- 

 tions which linger in the mind just like one's pet pas- 

 sages in any other good book. One example is Selous's 

 account of his night watch close to the wagon when, in 

 the pitchy darkness, he killed three of the five lions which 

 had attacked his oxen; or his extraordinary experience 

 while hunting elephants on a stallion who turned sulky, 

 and declined to gallop out of danger. The same is true 

 of Drummond's descriptions of the camps of native hunt- 

 ing parties, of tracking wounded buffalo through the 

 reeds, and of waiting for rhinos by a desert pool under 

 the brilliancy of the South African moon; descriptions, 

 by the way, ^which show that the power of writing inter- 

 estingly is not dependent upon even approximate cor- 

 rectness in style, for some of Mr. Drummond's sentences, 

 in point of length and involution, would compare not un- 

 favorably with those of a Populist Senator discussing 

 bimetalism. 



The experiences of a hunter in Africa, with its teeming 

 wealth of strange and uncouth beasts, must have been, 

 and in places must still be, about what one's experience 

 would be if one could suddenly go back a few hundred 

 thousand years for a hunting trip in the Pliocene or 

 Pleistocene. In Mr. Astor Chanler's book, " Through 

 Jungle and Desert," the record of his trip through the 



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