THE GUN AT HOME AND ABROAD 
rush on the point of steel-tipped spears. There was some fun in this and 
the man did not always escape scathless, but shooting bears out of their 
winter dens is not the kind of sport that anyone calling himself a hunter 
should indulge in. When hunting other animals in the forests of Europe, 
Asia and America there is always the chance of meeting a bear wandering 
about, and it is well to remember that the shot, when it presents itself, 
should be taken quickly, for bears have a way of seeing very quickly and 
vanishing out of sight when the hunter thinks himself unnoticed. They are 
tough animals and take more killing than most beasts, so that it is well 
to shoot as long as they show signs of moving. 
WILD BOAR 
The wild boar is common in Spain, and fairly numerous locally in 
south-west and northern France and in Belgium, where it is partially 
protected. A few still roam the Ardennes and throughout Germany it 
is preserved in a great number of enclosed and open forests. It is also 
numerous throughout the Hungarian forests, in the marshes of the Danube, 
and all the other Austrian dependencies. In a completely feral state wild 
boar are found throughout the Carpathians and to the east in all the Balkan 
States, Turkey, Asia Minor, Palestine, the Caucasus, Armenia and Persia. 
They are also common in Sardinia. Nowhere does the wild boar grow 
to such a large size or carry finer tusks than in Algeria and Morocco, and 
here every forest range and grassy jungle or swamp hides numbers of 
these animals. They are also very abundant in the swamps of Mesopo- 
tamia. The Indian wild boar is only a smaller and localized form of the 
European species. 
Wild swine must have been very abundant in the British Isles in former 
times, their remains being very numerous in all deposits from the Pleisto- 
cene age onwards, throughout the historic period until the end of the seven- 
teenth century, when they were found to be such a nuisance to agri- 
culture that they were destroyed ruthlessly by gun and trap. In the twelfth 
century wild swine overran England and Ireland, whilst they were also 
very common in the south of Scotland. The successive Kings and nobles 
hunted them regularly until 1600. Full particulars of the “ last ” of the 
British wild boars will be found in my work on “ The Mammals of Great 
Britain and Ireland,” whilst it seems the species became extinct in Scot- 
land at the end of the eighteenth century. 
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