4 INTRODUCTION. 



creatures; — ^in a word, which shall endeavor always, and in 

 every country, to present the Human Actor with the natural 

 scene — ^the hunter with the hunted — and the Hunter-Natural- 

 ist, , placed amidst his chosen accessories, however remote, 

 whether of climate, individual action and adventure, or the 

 living and characteristic objects of his pursuit. 



And who is this Hunter-Naturalist ? I answer, something 

 of the Primitive Hunter and modern Field-Naturalist com- 

 biM&t The name best defines itself — since Sunter-'N a,iwca,h.st 

 implies at once a rugged and freebooter intrusion into the 

 realms of Nature, in which the nice mail of Science has ex- 

 changed its glitter and its polish for the greasy, powder-black- 

 ened, blood-stained buckskins of the rough, earnest wilderness 



While pretending to no dainty refinements of technical 

 accuracy, if his clear eye, aided by his stout limbs, explores, 

 discovers and assists to glorify, through art and thought, the 

 ■wide fields of Natural Science, I see no good reason why his 

 pale Brother of the Closet should sneer at him if he forgets 

 his Latin in a " stampede," or spells the jaw-cracking name of 

 a genus wrong, when his notes are often written, as much by 

 the flashes of the covering storm, or the smouldering light of 

 a half-drowned fire, as by honest sun light. 



Familiar with Nature in all her modes and moods, the 

 Hunter-Naturalist is he who being accustomed to know her 

 through the medium of his own senses rather than books, should 

 only be held responsible, in a scientific sense, for what he him- 

 self has felt, seen, tasted, smelt, heard, and thought, out in 

 unchallenged communion with the secrets of his great Mother. 

 His observations then are essentially his own. 



They but constitute one man's impressions of Nature, and 

 convey an individual method of expressing them, which may 

 be as reliable in the facts presented, — to say the least of it, 

 — as if they had been drained, diluted, altered and amended 

 through the musty pages of an hundred folios. 



Not that I would presume by any means to arrogate for 



