time, and, when he
finds himself again in the forest for his annual hunt, with the
enthusiasm of youth, he would almost rather die than be defeated.

How hard the conditions are for the hunter no one would believe who has
not himself seen the country. In many places the hills are covered with
an almost impenetrable chaparral of scrub oak, buckthorn, greasewood,
manzanita, and deer-brush, in which the wary deer have taken refuge. In
and through these, guided sometimes by the tracks of the deer, or
encouraged by the presence of such tracks even if he cannot follow them,
up steep mountains, exposed to the heat of the sun, in dust, over rocks,
and without water, toils the hunter, who accounts himself lucky if, by
tramping scores of miles through this sort of impediment, he succeeds,
after days of toil, in killing his deer. Perhaps he has been without
fresh meat for a week or a fortnight, and often on short commons; is it
to be wondered at that when a shot offers he avails himself of the
opportunity even if it be a doe that he fires at? How can the deer
withstand such concentration of fury?

Dr. Bartlett, Forest Supervisor of the Trabuco and San Jacinto Reserves,
assured me that the number of licenses to hunt in those two reserves
issued annually exceeded, in his opinion, the entire number of deer
within their boundaries.

Everyone now is ready to admit that the extermination of the herd of
buffalo in the seventies was permitted by a crude, short-sighted policy
on our part as a nation, and should we of the early twentieth century
allow the remaining deer, elk, mountain sheep, and antelope, the last of
the great bears, and the innumerable small creatures of the wild, to be
crowded off the face of the earth, we should be depriving our children
and our children's children of a satisfaction and of a source of
interest which they would keenly regret. It would be well if we bore in
mind that we stand in a sort of fiduciary relation to the people who are
to come after us, so far as the wild portion of our land is concerned,
those few remote tracts still untarnished by man's craze to convert
everything in the world, or beneath the surface of the earth, into
dollars for his own immediate profit. He has the same short-sighted
policy in his hunting. He is content to gratify the impulse of the hour
without thought of those who are to spend their lives here when we have
led our brief careers and have gone to a well merited oblivion, t