Books on Big Game 



lunt only the 

 ) went on long 

 mply as travel- 

 }wn lands was 

 ous to exclude 

 of sportsman, 

 langed. Even 

 . The Dutch 

 i the English 

 America, found 

 fe where hunt- 

 sod, as well as 

 »times. These 

 ice had known 

 and until the 

 American and 

 ;d the lives of 

 ffalo Bill have 

 id middle age; 

 easts and wild 

 work of both, 

 oneer work of 

 now vanished 

 he passing of 

 the big game 

 e are not sim- 

 ettler, will re- 

 is of him and 



his big game 

 like all early 

 ed. Le Vail- 



lant hunted in South Africa, and his book is excellent 

 reading now. A still better book is that of Bruce, the 

 Abyssinian explorer, who was a kind of Burton of his 

 days, with a marvelous faculty for getting into quarrels, 

 but an even more marvelous faculty for doing work 

 which no other man could do. He really opened a new 

 world to European men of letters and science; who 

 thereupon promptly united in disbelieving all he said, 

 though they were credulous enough toward people who 

 really should have been distrusted. But his tales have 

 been proved true by many an explor'^r since then, and 

 his book will always possess interest for big game 

 hunters, because of his experiences in the chase. Some- 

 times he shot merely in self-defense or for food, but he 

 also made regular hunting trips in company with the 

 wild lords of the shifting frontier between dusky Chris- 

 tian and dusky infidel. He feasted in their cane palaces, 

 where the walls were hung with the trophies of giant 

 game, and in their company, with horse and spear, he 

 attacked and overcame the buffalo and the rhinoceros. 



By the beginning of the present century the hunting 

 book proper became differentiated, as it were, from the 

 book of the explorer. One of the earliest was William- 

 son's " Oriental Field Sports." This is to the present 

 day a most satisfactory book, especially to sporting 

 parents with large families of small children. The pic- 

 tures are all in colors, and the foliage is so very green, 

 and the tigers are so very red, and the boars so very 

 black, and the tragedies so uncommonly vivid and start- 

 ling, that for the youthful mind the book really has no 

 formidable rival outside of the charmed circle where 

 Slovenly Peter stands first. 



333 



