nd goats! The flesh of all these may be sold during the open season,
and for sixty days thereafter. Of the species named above, the barren
ground caribou is the only one regarding which we need not worry;
because that species still exists in millions. The Osborn caribou
(_Rangifer osborni_), can be exterminated in our own times, because it is
nowhere really numerous, and it inhabits exposed situations.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XXXVIII

PRIVATE GAME PRESERVES

Primarily, in the early days of the Man-on-Horseback, the self-elected
and predatory lords of creation evolved the private game preserve as a
scheme for preventing other fellows from shooting, and for keeping the
game sacred to slaughter by themselves. The idea of conserving the game
was a fourth-rate consideration, the first being the estoppel of the
other man. The old-world owner of a game preserve delights in the annual
killing of the surplus game, and we have even heard it whispered that in
the Dark Ages there were kings who enjoyed the wholesale slaughter of
deer, wild boar, pheasants and grouse. If we may accept as true the
history of sport in Europe, there have been men who have loved slaughter
with a genuine blood-lust that is quite foreign to the real
nature-loving sportsman.

In America, the impulse is different. Here, there is raging a genuine
fever for private game preserves. Some of those already existing are of
fine proportions, and cost fortunes to create. Every true sportsman who
is rich enough to own a private game preserve, sooner or later acquires
one. You will find them scattered throughout the temperate zone of North
America from the Bay of Fundy to San Diego. I have had invitations to
visit preserves in an unbroken chain from the farthest corner of Quebec
to the Pacific Coast, and from Grand Island, Lake Superior to the Gulf
of Mexico. It was not necessarily to hunt, and kill something, but to
_see_ the game, and the beauties of nature.

The wealthy American and Canadian joyously buys a tract of wilderness,
fences it, stocks it with game both great and small, and provides game
keepers for all the year round. At first he has an idea that he will
"hunt" therein, and that his guests will hunt also, and actually kill
game. In a mild way, this fiction sometimes is maintained for years. The
owner may each year shoot two or three head of his surplus big game, and
his tenderfoot guests who don't know what real hun