gun, and food and determination, you seek his trail, and follow it
unreasoningly until you terminate the stolid quest with a discovery of
the quarry lying close along the body of some eloping, stunted tree,
and with a lively episode in immediate prospect? Did you ever chase a
wolverine, last of his kind in a clearing-overflowed region, strange
combination in character and form of bear and lynx, gluttonous and
voracious, and strong and fearless, a beast descended almost unchanged
from the time of the earliest cave-men, the horror of the bravest dog,
and end his too uncivilized career with a rifle-shot at thoughtful
distance?

Have you seen the wild pigeons, before pot-hunters invaded their
southern roosts and breeding-grounds and slaughtered them by millions,
exterminating one of the most wonderful of American game birds, sweep
over in such dense clouds that the sun would be obscured, and at times
so close to earth that a long pole thrust aloft from tree or hillock
would stun such numbers as would make a gallant pot-pie? Have you
followed the deer in the dense forest, clinging doggedly to his track
upon the fresh snow from the dusk of early morning, startling him again
and again from covert, and shooting whenever you caught even so much as
a glimpse of his gray body through distant interstices of tree and
brush, until, late in the afternoon, human endurance, which always
surpasses that of the wild beast, overcame him, and he leaped less
strongly with each new alarm and grew more reckless before twilight,
and came within easy range and fed his enemies on the morrow? Have you
watched for him beside the brackish waters of the lick, where, perched
upon a rude, high scaffold built beside a tree, mosquito-bitten and
uneasy, you waited and suffered, preserving an absolute silence and
immobility until came ghost-like flitting figures from the forest to
the shallow's edge, when the great gun, carrying the superstitious