America the hunting of big game,—once marvelously abundant,—is fast becoming an extinct pastime? As a game animal, the American bison is gone. In the United States, antelope hunting is gone, forever. The Arizona elk is totally extinct. In the United States, mountain sheep hunting is extinct in all States save two: and it should be so in those also. Mountain goat hunting is possible in two States only. It is now next to impossible to find and kill a wild grizzly in the United States.

There are many persons, of whom I am one, who believe that in a brief span of years there will be no big-game hunting in the mountain States west of the great plains, save around the borders of big-game sanctuaries, such as the Yellowstone Park.

With the exception of the bison and the Arizona elk, we may even yet see in our mountain States good specimens of some of the big-game species that abundantly stocked them in pioneer days. We are glad that we live contemporaneously with the colossal moose and the unique antelope. We rejoice that we are on terms of intimacy with the lordly elk, and that we have a bowing acquaintance with the goat and sheep. We cherish the thought that we have seen real grizzly bears on their native rocks, and also that we have “done our bit,” as the English say, in saving the great American bison from oblivion.

It is not good for red-blooded men to live in a land that contains no big game. It seems effeminate. To correct such a condition as that, the New Zealanders took thought and colonized in their country the European red deer; and that species has waxed numerous, and produced tens of thousands of deer, for food and for sport.

North America has produced a good quota of big game species; but in that line of native industry we are far surpassed by Asia; and by Africa we are left completely out of sight. Really, Africa seems to have been created as an ideal home for big game. Her array of apes, antelopes, carnivores, and thick-skinned beasts compels unbounded admiration.

ON THE MONTANA BISON RANGE

From a photograph taken in the summer of 1913 by H. W. Henshaw, Chief of the Biological Survey

While our game endures, let us make much of it, and appreciate it to the utmost. And it is not all of game enjoyment to kill it, and cut off its head, and let the bulk of the meat go into the discard. The highest type of big-game hunting is the finding of fine animals in their haunts, photographing them movably and unmovably, and then bidding them go in peace. To be really and truly ignorant of such distinguished American citizens as the moose and musk-ox, caribou, sheep, goat, antelope, deer and Alaskan brown bear, is reprehensible, and should be punishable by a fine.

Many wild animals are more interesting per capita than some men. To learn to know our best wild animals is like annexing new territory. It increases our mental and moral resources, and provides a new channel for the disposition of surplus wealth. Like Cupid’s story, they never seem to grow old, and as long as one hoof or horn remains as a going concern, just that long our interest continues in the wearer thereof.

The most interesting side of every wild animal is its mind,—what it thinks, and why. First of all, however, we must know the personality of our animal and be able to speak its name as promptly as the politician names his voting acquaintances. To call an antelope a “deer” is to lose a vote.

The Saving of Big Game

The characteristic features of America’s big game animals are to be treated as natural history. The wasteful slaughter of them is unnatural history. Ever since the days of Daniel Boone, the American pioneers and exploiters of Nature’s resources have most diligently been exterminating our bison, elk, deer, moose, antelope, sheep,