THE EUROPEAN BEARS AND THE WILD BOAR 
During the summer months they create innumerable wallows in the 
marshy parts of the forest and love to bathe and roll here in the warm 
hours. I have generally found it useless to try and shoot these animals in 
the daytime, as they are very difficult to see and when stumbled on by accident 
rush off through thickets, thus giving the hunter no chance of a shot. 
At daybreak or sunset the case is sometimes different, for in unfrequented 
places the sounder of hogs can often be detected slowly feeding by the 
hunter, as he creeps through the forest in his rubber-soled boots. Old boars 
are on such occasions more easy to approach than deer or bear, and it is 
not difficult to crawl within shooting range. There is not much danger in 
shooting a wild boar unless it has been wounded and followed, though 
there are occasions on which its temper having been ruffled it will charge 
without warning. If the shot is not immediately fatal it is best to wait an 
hour to give effect to the wound and then to approach the wounded beast 
from above. 
Nearly all the boars killed in Germany, Austria and Albania are shot 
by driving the forests with a crowd of beaters, and but little danger attaches 
to this sport if the hunter is careful in approaching wounded males. As a 
rule the beaters are accompanied by dogs, so that when these come up, as 
they do at the end of a drive, the shooter need not take unnecessary risks 
unless he wishes to do so. As many as eighty to one hundred wild boars 
(males and females) are sometimes shot in some of the big drives in Ger- 
many, organized for the amusement of the Kaiser and large landowners; 
but as the animals are generally bred in park-forests, much as our own 
fallow deer are, the shooting is not a high form of sport nor a dangerous 
one, each of the guns being hidden and protected by a scrub -redoubt. 
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