Inter-Ocean Hunting Tales

by Edgar Fritz Randolph

Guides may be divided into three classes:

(1) Ordinary frauds who are watching an opportunity to “work” some “dude,” by which name sportsmen are sometimes designated in the slang of the country.

(2) Backwoodsmen who are good hunters and tireless and will supply a sportsman with the best they know how to provide, but being ignorant of the ordinary comforts of civilized life, treat their sportsmen with the same cruel neglect to which they have accustomed themselves.

(3) The man who makes a regular business of acting as a guide, who is a good hunter and who also knows how to provide a first-class outfit.

Game has greatly decreased before the advance of civilization and the wanton slaughter which took no thought of the future; the wild life which survives owes its preservation to the almost inaccessible character of the country in which it has taken refuge, and to its own cunning, which of necessity has become very acute.

To know the habitat of game and outwit its wariness requires the skill of the practiced hunter.

We have heard a great deal about roughing it. That phrase as formerly understood must be greatly qualified if the modern sportsman patronizes an up-to-date outfit.

Going to a wild and rather inaccessible country has about it a certain charm of novelty, and part of that charm grows out of the idea of roughing it. Some people have a tendency to greatly exaggerate the ordeals through which they pass in order that they may enhance the interest of their experience. This goes with the weakness for overstating the distance and increasing the apparent difficulty of the shots which they make in securing their trophies, in which error they are too frequently sustained by the somewhat elastic conscience of the guide. This is an age of progress, and that phrase applies to methods of enjoying sport quite as well as it does to anything else. Having good sport with comfort in camp life is simply a question of dollars and cents. The average person does not understand the present conditions of sporting life in a wild country.

It must be borne in mind that in traveling in rough sections of the West, where big game still abounds, although in much smaller numbers than formerly, everything has to be carried on pack horses. What you are to take is limited simply by the supply of pack horses you are to engage. In an up-to-date outfit the open camp-fire, such a picturesque feature in an illustration, has been supplanted by a plain sheet-iron stove which is placed in the tent, with a few feet of pipe attached to carry off the smoke. If one wants the open fire it of course can be easily supplied, and at first a good many sportsmen desire it on account of the romance and novelty of the experience, but the same pampered tastes, which have forced man from a savage life to adopt the comforts which civilization supplies, will invariably lead to the open camp-fire being abandoned for the commonplace sheet-iron stove—very unromantic but thoroughly practical and useful. The open camp-fire, with the smoke blowing in your eyes from every direction, which gives the sensation of being scorched on one side and frozen on the other, does not appeal to the modern sportsman who disassociates sport from martyrdom.

Folding tables and chairs can be “packed” quite easily, and it is much pleasanter to sit in a chair and eat off of a table than to sit on a log trying to make a table of your knees, and occasionally converting your lap into a plate for your spilled victuals. A portable rubber bathtub, if one objects to jumping into cold water, satisfies the desire for cleanliness. With a fire in the stove one can take a bath as easily and comfortably in camp as at home. For thorough cleansing it is best for one to take a bath in a tent in warm water, but I strongly recommend to those who can stand it a plunge in cold water or being soused with a bucket or two every morning before dressing for the day. This stimulates the body and gets the system in fine condition.