primarily
their purpose is to prevent the extermination of big game. In California
this has gone as far as it is safe to go if we are to save the
remnant. Even the California grizzly has been killed off so relentlessly
that it was a question, when I was there, whether a single pair survived
which might possibly in that State preserve the species. The ranger who
knew the most about this was of the opinion that two or three were still
left alive. He had seen their tracks within a year.[11] There are, I
have been assured, others in Oregon.

[Footnote 11: I have been informed since the above was written that he
saw the tracks of a single grizzly after I was there, toward the end of
July.]

If I had my way, the first act in creating a game refuge should be to
insure the survival of the few that remain. These bears are pitifully
wary as compared with their former bold and domineering attitude; they
would gladly keep out of harm's way if only they might be allowed to do
so. It is time, it seems to me, to call a truce to man's hostility to
them, once a foe not to be despised. Now they are so completely
conquered that man owes it to himself not too relentlessly to pursue a
vanquished enemy. When we think of the enormous period of time,
involving millions of years, required to develop a creature of such
gigantic strength as the California grizzly, so splendidly equipped to
win his living and to maintain his unquestioned supremacy--the Sequoia
of the animal kingdom of America--and when we contemplate this creature
as the very embodiment of vitality in the wild life, we shall not
wantonly permit him to be exterminated, and thus deprive those who are
to come after us of seeing him alive, and of seeing him where his
presence adds a fine note of distinction to the landscape, a fitting
adjunct to the glacier-formed ravines of the Sierras.

The domestic sheep, which were once the prey of the bears, no longer
range in these forests, and so far as the depredation of bears among
cattle is concerned, it is of so trifling a nature as practically not to
exist. It would seem that a nation of so vast wealth as ours could
afford to indulge in an occasional extravagance, such as keeping alive
these few remaining bears; of maintaining them at the public expense
simply for the gratification of curiosity, of a quite legitimate
curiosity on the part of those who love the wild life, and every last
vanishing trait that remains of its old, keen energ