Trail and Camp-Fire 



a man who has too much serious work on hand ever to 

 let himself become a mere globe-trotting rifleman. We 

 are not disposed to undervalue manly outdoor sports, or 

 to fail to appreciate the advantage to a nation, as well as 

 to an individual, of such pastimes; but they must be 

 pastimes, and not business, and they must not be carried 

 to excess. There is a good deal to be said for the life of 

 a professional hunter in lonely lands; but the man able 

 to be something more, should be that something more 

 an explorer, a naturalist, or else a man who makes his 

 hunting trips merely delightful interludes in his life work. 

 As for excessive game butchery, it amounts merely to a 

 debauch. The man whose chief title to glory is that, 

 during an industrious career of destruction, he has 

 slaughtered 200,000 head of deer and partridges, stands 

 unpleasantly near those continental kings and nobles 

 who, during the centuries before the French Revolution, 

 deified the chase of the stag, and made it into a highly 

 artificial cult, which they followed to the exclusion of 

 state-craft and war-craft and everything else. James, 

 the founder of the ignoble English branch of the Stuart 

 kings, as unkingly a man as ever sat on a throne, was 

 fanatical in his devotion to the artificial kind of chase 

 which then absorbed the souls of the magnates of con- 

 tinental Europe. 



There is no need to exercise much patience with men 

 who protest against field sports; unless, indeed, they are 

 logical vegetarians of the flabbiest Hindoo type. If it is 

 morally right to kill an animal to eat its body, then it is 

 morally right to kill it to preserve its head. A good 

 sportsman will not hesitate as to the relative value he 

 puts upon the two, and to get the one he will go a long 



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