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he Sport 
“Now 
thing, don’t you, in knocking that poor old cat 
you think you've done a mighty fine 
over with that big six-shooter, and slashing it 
up with your machete and coming in here with 
that wild yarn about its jumping you while you 
was taking its picture? Thought you was doing 
a pretty nervy thing taking that picture, didn’t 

you? But you had your gun out all the time, 
or I miss my. guess; and, what’s more, I’ll bet 
you didn’t do that cutting until the poor old 
brute was all in from the bullets of that fusilade 
I heard you pumping at him with that heavy 
artillery of yours. Made enough racket to start 
the rocks rolling down in Culebra. 
times did you shoot? 
Six 
weigl 
How many 
Be honest about it. Six! 
poor little cat that didn’t 
half what you do! It 
2 
wouldn't have been anything to brag of if you'd 
shots for one 
much more’n 
gone in and killed him with your hands—but a 
forty-four automatic and a two-foot bladed knife 
to back it up, and a pair of legs like yours to 
run with if things turned against you—bah! it 
makes me sick. And it makes me sicker to see 
all these greenies stopping work to crowd in 
and shake hands with you; and you standing up 
there and getting your picture snapped with the 
hide under your arm and your chest thrown out 
as if you'd just finished digging the canal single- 
handed. 
Run on 
with your cat-skin, little boy, and tell them all 
. about it down in Panama. 
“There’s your train whistling now. 
You'll probably want 
the reviewing-stand they set up in the plaza for 
the President before you get through with it.’ 
Blake, the old boss of the Pedro Miguel sec- 
tion of the Panama railroad, said a good ‘deal 
more than this on the occasion to which I am 
about to allude, and, moreover, said it a good 
deal more forcibly. 
eral drift of remarks, 
sufficient for my present purpose. 
I have indicated the gen- 
his which is 
I thought at 
the time that the old fellow was rubbing it in a 
bit, considering that it was not his cat that I had 
shot, but when I afterward learned that he had 
once 
however, 
“tigre” into the 
‘ditch by running it down with his hand-car. after 
which he waded in and despatched it with a 
short-handled monkey-wrench, and that he had 
knocked a_ full-grown 
also tackled another animal of the same species, 
belaboring it with a shovel until it desisted from 
its attack and retreated, fatally wounded, to the 
bush, I was able to understand his contempt for 

of 
Shooting Animals 
A Misapplied Term 
By LEWIS R. FREEMAN 
a man who allowed his picture to be taken after 
killing a “poor little cat with a forty-four auto- 
and a two-foot had a 
legs like mine to run away with if things 
matic” knife, and who 
pair of 

ak, 
“STANDING UP THERE AND GETTING 
SNAPPED,”’ 
YOUR PICTURE 
got too hot for him. Moreover, I am compelled 
to admit that there was much truth in what the 
crusty old section-boss said. 
Putting firearms entirely out of the reckoning, 
a man with a long-bladed knife should have all 
the advantage in fighting an animal that must 
depend entirely upon:teeth and claws of hardly 
more than half an inch in length. The much 
greater skill the animal possesses in the use of 
its weapons offsets this advantage to a certain 
extent and would make a rough-and-tumble be- 
tween a man armed with a knife and an animal 
of somewhere near his own size a passably fair 
sporting proposition. But take the knife away 
from the man and the superior natural fighting 
qualities of the beast would give it an immense 
advantage; so much so, that, generally speaking, 
a fifty-pound wildcat or lynx should make lively 
work for an unarmed man of two hundred. 
Those who shoot big game for a pastime are 
accustomed to speak of themselves, and to hear 
themselves spoken of, as sportsmen, quite losing 
sight of the fact that ‘in sport both sides are 
supposed to have an equal show. One of the 
most _ self-satisfied I ever met grandilo- 
quently styled himself an “international sports- 
man,” and reckoned as his greatest achievement 
men 
the shooting of a certain notorious man-eating 
tiger that had won a great reputation for itself 
by decimating the population of a small village 
near the point at which this gentleman was 
stationed during his service as an officer in the 
British army in India. Yet this shooting was 
done from a tiger-proof perch forty feet from 
the ground, up to which the valiant sportsman 
had climbed before pulling up the ladder to 
render himself doubly safe against attack. It 
was unquestionably a good deed to rid the dis- 
trict of, and deliver the terror-stricken natives 
from, the menace of the savage “man-eater,” but 
the accomplishing of it in the manner indicated 
has about as much right to be termed “sport” 
as the extermination of a hatching of cut-worms 
With paris green. 
Big-game shooting is all well and good as a 
pastime, but, as generally practiced, in no wise 
entitled to be classed as. sport on any but: the 
loosest interpretation of that much-abused term: 
I am quite ready to cry “peccavi” myself in the 
matter, for I was once guilty of staking a mile 
of Arizona desert with “markers” in order to 
get a correct range on an unusually fine speci- 
men of pronghorn antelope that was accustomed 
to forage there, and which my poor marksman- 
ship—or rather my poor judgment of distance, 
a very common fault of one not accustomed to 
the clear air of thé interior of the Southwest— 
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