or stone mace. Perhaps he stole his neighbor's woman, but if
so he had more reason to hunt than before--he had to feed her as well as
himself. This cave-man, savagely descended, savagely surrounded, must
have had to hunt all the daylight hours and surely had to fight to kill
his food, or to keep it after he killed it. Long, long ages was the
being called cave-man in developing; more long ages he lived on the
earth, in that dim dark mystic past; and just as long were his
descendants growing into another and higher type of barbarian. But they
and their children and grandchildren, and all their successive,
innumerable, and varying descendants had to hunt meat and eat meat to
live.

The brain of barbarian man was small, as shown by the size and shape of
his skull, but there is no reason to believe its construction and use
were any different from the use of other organs--the eye to see
with--the ear to hear with--the palate to taste with. Whatever the brain
of primitive man was it held at birth unlimited and innumerable
instincts like those of its progenitors; and round and smooth in
babyhood, as it was, it surely gathered its sensations, one after
another in separate and habitual channels, until when manhood arrived it
had its convolutions, its folds and wrinkles. And if instinct and
tendency were born in the brain how truly must they be a part of bone,
tissue, blood.

We cannot escape our inheritance. Civilization is merely a veneer, a
thin-skinned polish over the savage and crude nature. Fear, anger, lust,
the three great primal instincts are restrained, but they live
powerfully in the breast of man. Self preservation is the first law of
human life, and is included in fear. Fear of death is the first
instinct. Then if for thousands, perhaps millions of years, man had to
hunt because of his fear of death, had to kill meat to survive--consider
the ineradicable and permanent nature of the instinct.

The secret now of the instinctive joy and thrill and wildness of the
chase lies clear.

Stealing through the forest or along the mountain slope, eyes roving,
ears sensitive to all vibrations of the air, nose as keen as that of a
hound, hands tight on a deadly rifle, we unconsciously go back. We go
back to the primitive, to the savage state of man. Therein lies the joy.
How sweet, vague, unreal those sensations of strange familiarity with
wild places we know we never saw before! But a million years before that
hour a hairy a