3882 WILD SCENES AND WILD HUNTERS. 
to dispute ascendency with them in the land. They had 
been accustomed to grapple with the Red man, armed only 
as he was with lance and bow, and in these conflicts, the 
animals were by no means unfrequently the conquerors. 
Now they are compelled to battle with a new and invisible 
power—an agent as mysterious in its operations, as it is 
terrible in its effects—which, as it overawed and intimidated 
their ancient foes, the Red men, might weil be expected to fill 
them with the panic of an indefinable dread. 
The growth of this wholesome fear has been very gradual . 
and slow. The rifle had driven them from f-onticr to frontier 
of all the older States, before any marked cnange in their 
respect for the genus homo began to be apparent. 
The Panther, which at first made fight wits the hunter 
wherever he met him, had learned to be mire circumspect, 
and instead of becoming the assailant, and haping from the 
limb whereon he crouched above, diwn on his foe below, was 
content to let him pass, and stand cnt:-ely upon the defensive ; 
even the Black Bear, who formerly had been notorious for 
his unceremonious habit of purhing his cold nose into what- 
ever he might perceive going on before him, be the actors 
who they might, became almost a proverb of prudence. The 
wild cat, who sometimes lost his temper in love-making time, 
and challenged any buck-skinned intruder he might meet on 
the war-path for a fight hand to claw, now contented himself 
with “giving the road” as his sagacious nostrils recognized 
the smell of gunpowder ahead. 
Now these changes should not by any means be stigmatized 
‘as the result of cowardice, but be honorably set down to the 
credit of a cautious reasoning: they had found an enemy 
armed with an agency, the nature or effects of which they 
could neither comprehend nor counteract; they therefore 
wisely concluded to avoid it—just as any other logical 
thinkers, reasoning from experience, would have done. 
However, let any of those believers in the cowardice of 
