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 remotg, 
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- 
bined. The name best defines itself—since Hunter-Naturalist 
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 py 
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 
