e can hardly imagine a more complete
blotting out of the native fauna and flora of any one limited region.
And ever-extending roads for the increasing motor cars are widening the
cleared zone, mile after mile to the north and south.

In this region, as we pushed on over the mountains into the wilderness
of Pahang, we saw little of the actual destruction of the primeval
native growth, but elsewhere it became a common sight. Once, for many
days we studied the wonderful life of a jungle which stretched up to our
very camp. Troops of rollicking wa-was or gibbons frequented the forest;
squirrels, tupaias, birds and insects in myriads were everywhere during
the day. Great fruit-bats, flying lemurs, owls and other nocturnal
creatures made the evenings and nights full of interest.

And then, one day without warning came the sound of an ax, and another
and another. From that moment the songs, cries, chirps and roars of the
jungle were seldom heard from our camp. Every day saw new phalanxes of
splendid primeval trees fallen, or half suspended in their rigging of
lianas. The leaves withered, the flower petals fell and we heard no more
the crackling of bamboos in the wind. Then the pitiful survivors of the
destruction were brought to us; now a baby flying lemur, flung from its
hole by the falling of some tree; young tupaias, nestling birds; a few
out of the thousands of creatures from insects to mammals which were
slain so that a Chinaman or Malay might eke a few dollars, four or five
years hence, from a grove of rubber trees. I do not say it is wrong. Man
has won out, and might is right, as since the dawn of creation; but to
the onlooker, to the lover of nature and the animal world it is a
terrible, a hopeless thing.

One cannot at present leave the tourist line of travel in the East
without at once encountering evidence of the wholesale direct slaughter
of wild life, or its no less certain extermination by the elimination of
the haunts and the food plants of the various beasts and birds.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XXI

THE SAVAGE VIEW-POINT OF THE GUNNER

The mental attitude of the men who shoot constitutes a deadly factor in
the destruction of wild life and the extermination of species. Fully
ninety-five per cent of the sportsmen, gunners and other men and boys
who kill game, all over the world and in all nations, regard game birds
and mammals only as things to be killed _and eaten_, and not