When the light wanes
More than all the pleasures which the rich man feels as he surveys his Murillos or his Raphaels are the hunter’s, as his eyes wander over his antlered walls. He shot the beasts whose spoils are round him, and in the doing of it scenes were graven on his memory which can never be effaced; mental and physical qualities which, but for these silent witnesses, Age the doubter would persuade him that he never possessed, were tried and not found wanting.
But what can bought heads be to the buyer? Furniture for his rooms perhaps, and, even so, misleading; for if a house is to be worth anything, it should represent the tastes and life of the man who lives in it. As a rule, it is long odds that the owners of bought trophies cannot so much as remember the shape of the beasts whose horns they hang up, much less have they any associations connected with them. At the best, they are but costly rubbish; unfortunately they are worse than that. The demand for antlers and sheep’s horns insures a supply being secured in some way, and so it happens that in Canada to-day every up-country trader has been supplied with a printed list of the prices which will be paid for trophies, according to the number of inches they measure round the base or the length and span of the antlers.
In one trader’s house which I know there are nearly a hundred magnificent sheep’s heads waiting for a purchaser, most of which have been brought in by Stony Indians, whom no law can touch for shooting in season or out of season.
The damage done by this head-hunting is twofold: first, to the sportsman, whom it will eventually deprive of his game; secondly, to the country, as tending to rob it of the attractions which it possesses for a class which brings a great deal of money into it. A fair sheep’s head may be bought for twenty-five dollars, but many a hundred pounds of good English money has before now been distributed amongst the natives and traders of British Columbia in the attempt to obtain such a head by fair shooting. No doubt efforts have been made by the legislature to protect the game; but in those countries to which I have had access I have found that, though the laws were good enough, they were rendered useless through lack of men to enforce them.
In Canada no game laws can ever be of much avail as long as the Indian is allowed the privileges which he at present enjoys.
But the principal business of this chapter is to instruct the hunter in the best methods of preserving his trophies when fairly won, until such time as he can hand them over to one of our excellent practical taxidermists at home. In nine cases out of ten, the head is all that a man cares to preserve, and those who are wise will not cumber their houses with too many even of these with the masks on. In spite of infinite pains, moth and dust will corrupt the most carefully guarded collections. However, if you want to mount the head with skin and all complete, let your first care be to sketch or photograph it in profile before the skinner’s knife has touched it, in order that the man who sets up the trophy may have some idea of what it looked like in life.
If the hunter cannot sketch decently, a kodak is a good substitute for the pencil, or the proportions and various bumps and inequalities in the outline may be accurately preserved by laying the head upon a sheet of paper and tracing its outline with a simple instrument, consisting of two pieces of metal four or five inches in length, set at right angles to one another, with a socket at the angle into which a lead pencil is fixed, so that the point projects just far enough to make a mark upon the paper, when, with the lower side upon the paper and the upright side against the head, an outline of the profile is taken. Outlines or photographs should be made as soon after death as possible, before the muscles have time to sink and lose their natural prominence.
In skinning a horned head proceed as follows:—