We have so fostered this attitude of fear and 

 distrust that our wild neighbors are at best but 

 casual acquaintances, if not complete strangers to 

 us. We are like sharpshooters ambushed around 

 the outposts of an encampment. A stray inmate 

 pokes his head out of the trenches and essays to go 

 to the spring for water. Perhaps we let him drink 

 and make a note of that, then — whiz! we let 

 fly at him. We discover what he has had for 

 dinner and a few other trifling matters — and we 

 get his skin. His ways remain strange to us and 

 his language no more familiar than Choctaw. 

 Sometimes we catch him and put him in a cage. 

 But what can be learned of a poor, sullen prisoner 

 fretting away his life with terrible thoughts of 

 distant sunlight and running streams and friendly 

 woods ? 



The acquaintance of a wild animal is not to be 

 made with a gun. Practically nothing is learned 

 in this way; it is difficult enough to know them 

 without this barrier. But never to have loved the 

 wild things is to have lost much — to have lived 

 less. Any dolt can shoot an animal and have a 

 bag of bones for his pains, but to win over such a 

 creature in the smallest degree implies a victory, 



137 



