12 
WILD NORWAY. 
head in the herd.” These facts may, perhaps, weigh in 
our favour when next the Norsk legislature reviews the 
game-laws. At present we foreigners pay two hundred 
kroners (over £11) for a license which only entitles us 
to compete with hosts of unlicensed natives, many if 
not most of whom are pot-hunters of the worst type— 
that is to say, they shoot mercilessly for meat, sparing 
neither age nor sex. There is also the further question 
of the Lapps, of whom anon. 
I am not grudging the two hundred kroner—nor 
four hundred either. It is a broader question. The 
Crown of Norway, possessing the whole vast area of 
her “ alpine regions,” is the largest owner on earth of 
deer-forests, and those within easy reach of the richest 
country on earth, whose sportsmen are prepared to 
pay handsomely for sporting privilege. But it must 
be privilege. The question I respectfully submit to 
the consideration of the Norsk authorities is, whether 
their vast domains might not more advantageously be 
reserved for those who will pay—and pay handsomely— 
rather than allow the stock of deer to be exterminated 
within a few decades by rent-free, tax-free and unlicensed 
pot-hunters. 
My apologies are due to my old friends, the pot¬ 
hunters aforesaid. Of course, they are pot-hunters— 
their poverty compels them to be—and they shoot to 
lay in a winter’s stock of provision. We were all 
pot-hunters in the first instance; the sportsman is 
merely the latest development. But, for all that, the 
pot-hunter is utterly out of date, and, if wisdom prevails, 
he should be superseded. The country is flooded to-day 
with cheap “ repeating rifles,” sighted up to unknown 
