In the high mountain regions of Central Asia, too, this spell survives, associated with the flocks of those timid creatures the primitive wild sheep, with the graceful wild goats, with the stately ibex,[24] and with the life and movement of the countless huge bears of the mountains, and with a strange flora that I myself have never looked upon, but of whose existence I am as persuaded as of that of the spell itself.
It is to be found in the jungles of India, whence the tolerant natives have never driven it out. They have not expelled the animal world from its paradise. There in the region of the lotus-flower the spell may perhaps be recognised on still, moonlit nights.
It survives everywhere: in the Australian bush, in the New and the Old World, on all islands, in all rivers and waters, in the life and movement of the waves and depths of the ocean, so full of secrets everywhere; in a word, where man has not yet driven it away.
Once it lived everywhere in Germany, and even to-day it is still to be found in many places. It has its being where the mighty elk made its home on moor and marsh-land, and our forefathers hunted the aurochs and the bison in the primitive forest. To-day it is associated with the edelweiss and the chamois in the Alps; it has its being in the oak and beech woods, and where the green current of the Rhine flows down, or where the stag sends afar his cry of challenge to his rival, and the huntsman makes his way over the moor.
There one still experiences the spell of the Elelescho. But everywhere, all over the world, everywhere in our Fatherland, it once lived and held sway.
We may hope that the intimate and beautiful relations that the German sportsman establishes between himself and nature in his Fatherland will for a long, long time be handed down from generation to generation, and thus result in the maintenance and preservation of the noble old spell of the woodland and the wilderness. The ideal of true German sportsmanship has been developed in as high and full a sense as that of fair play in sport in England.
Both of these ideals will be judged in unfriendly fashion only by those who regard them from a distorted point of view. The English ideal of sport is winning the world to itself; the German ideal must do the same.
Coming from a good German school of sport, I consider myself fortunate in having learned to know the wonderful animal world of Africa. There is no doubt whatever that I must ascribe to the influence of this school the fact that my accounts of what I had experienced and seen met with such an appreciative reception both at home and abroad.
How wonderful is the chase in Germany! The primitive attraction for the chase must be a part of every man. One need only once have seen the excitement that seizes upon a gathering of thousands if on a sudden a hare or some other wild creature comes into sight. At such a moment, almost without exception, every one of them is on the move, without the least reflection, and even notwithstanding the consciousness that in no case can he himself secure the prize. It is the call of a strong impulse deep rooted in men. But in our Fatherland how grandly and nobly what we mean by “true sportsmanship” has developed out of this primitive instinct!
A certain kind of organisation of the business of the chase must have been in existence even in primeval times. Those who have made a study of this department of the life of nomadic hunters in many lands tell us that tribes and groups of families hunt only in well-defined areas, and as they value their lives do not venture to pass these boundaries. I have learned the same thing by my own personal experience of the Wandorobo and other nomad huntsmen of the African plateau. It must therefore have been the case everywhere, from the times when primitive men, the cave-dwellers, began their struggle with the mighty beasts of primeval days, down to our own times, when the chase is more and more regulated till at last it becomes the exclusive property of the owner of the land.