. But the manner of his action, though more skilful, is
the same as any hunter's. Likewise his sensations, perhaps more vivid
because hunting for him is a matter of life or death. Take the Gaucho of
Patagonia--the silent lonely Indian hunter of the Pampas. He hunts with
a _bola_, a thin thong or string at each end of which is a heavy
leather-covered ball of stone or iron. This the Gaucho hurls through the
air at the neck or legs of his quarry. The balls fly round--the thong
binds tight--it is a deadly weapon. The user of it rides and stalks and
sees and throws and feels the same as any other hunter. Time and place,
weapon and game have little to do with any differences in hunters.

Up to this 1919 hunting trip in the wilds I had always marveled at the
fact that naturalists and biologists hate sportsmen. Not hunters like
the Yellow Knife Indians, or the snake-eating Bushmen of Australia, or
the Terra-del-Fuegians, or even the native country rabbit-hunters--but
the so-called sportsmen. Naturalists and biologists have simply learned
the truth why men hunt, and that when it is done in the name of sport,
or for sensation, it is a degenerate business. Stevenson wrote beautiful
words about "the hunter home from the hill," but so far as I can find
out he never killed anything himself. He was concerned with the romance
of the thought, with alliteration, and the singular charm of the
truth--sunset and the end of the day, the hunter's plod down the hill to
the cottage, to the home where wife and children awaited him. Indeed it
is a beautiful truth, and not altogether in the past, for there are
still farmers and pioneers.

Hunting is a savage primordial instinct inherited from our ancestors.
It goes back through all the ages of man, and farther still--to the age
when man was not man, but hairy ape, or some other beast from which we
are descended. To kill is in the very marrow of our bones. If man after
he developed into human state had taken to vegetable diet--which he
never did take--he yet would have inherited the flesh-eating instincts
of his animal forebears. And no instinct is ever wholly eradicated. But
man was a meat eater. By brute strength, by sagacity, by endurance he
killed in order to get the means of subsistence. If he did not kill he
starved. And it is a matter of record, even down to modern times, that
man has existed by cannibalism.

The cave-man stalked from his hole under a cliff, boldly forth with his
huge club