urderers--waders in gore, as he expressed it--these teachers of
the gospel were the worst. The moment they got out into the wild they
wanted to kill, kill, kill. He averred their natures seemed utterly to
change.

In reading the books of hunters and in listening to their talks at
Camp-fire Club dinners I have always been struck with the expression of
what these hunters felt, what they thought they got out of hunting. The
change from city to the open wilderness; the difference between noise,
tumult, dirt, foul air, and the silence, the quiet, the cleanness and
purity; the sweet breath of God's country as so many called it; the
beauty of forest and mountain; the wildness of ridge and valley; the
wonder of wild animals in their native haunts; and the zest, the joy,
the excitement, the magnificent thrill of the stalk and the chase. No
one of them ever dwelt upon the kill! It was mentioned, as a result, an
end, a consummation. How strange that hunters believed these were the
attractions of the chase! They felt them, to be sure, in some degree, or
they would not remember them. But they never realized that these
sensations were only incidental to hunting.

Men take long rides, hundreds and thousands of miles, to hunt. They
endure hardships, live in camps with absolute joy. They stalk through
the forest, climb the craggy peaks, labor as giants in the building of
the pyramids, all with a tight clutch on a deadly rifle. They are keen,
intent, strained, quiveringly eager all with a tight clutch on a deadly
rifle. If hunters think while on a stalk--which matter I doubt
considerably--they think about the lay of the land, or the aspect of it,
of the habits and possibilities of their quarry, of their labor and
chances, and particularly of the vague unrealized sense of comfort,
pleasure, satisfaction in the moment. Tight muscles, alert eyes,
stealthy steps, stalk and run and crawl and climb, breathlessness, a hot
close-pressed chest, thrill on thrill, and sheer bursting riot of nerve
and vein--these are the ordinary sensations and actions of a hunter. No
ascent too lofty--no descent too perilous for him then, if he is a man
as well as a hunter!

Take the Brazilian hunter of the jungle. He is solitary. He is
sufficient to himself. He is a survival of the fittest. The number of
his tribe are few. Nature sees to that. But he must eat, and therefore
he hunts. He spears fish and he kills birds and beasts with a blow-gun.
He hunts to live