Outdoor pastimes of an American hunter

by Theodore Roosevelt

There was good hunting in Macedonia in the days of Alexander the Great; there was good hunting in the Hercynian Forest when Frank and Bergund were turning Gaul into France; there was good hunting in Lithuania and Poland as late as the days of Sobiéski; but the most famous kings and nobles of Europe, within historic times, though they might kill the aurochs and the bison, the bear and the boar, had no chance to test their prowess against the mightier and more terrible beasts of the tropics.

No modern man could be more devoted to the chase than were the territorial lords of the Middle Ages. Two of the most famous books of the chase ever written were the Livre de Chasse of Count Gaston de Foix—Gaston Phœbus, well known to all readers of Froissart—and the translation or adaptation and continuation of the same, the “Master of Game,” by that Duke of York who “died victorious” at Agincourt. Mr. Baillie-Grohman, himself a hunter and mountaineer of wide experience, a trained writer and observer, and a close student of the hunting lore of the past, has edited and reproduced the “Master of Game,” in form which makes it a delight to every true lover of books no less than to every true lover of sport. A very interesting little book is Clamorgan’s Chasse du Loup, dedicated to Charles the Ninth of France; my copy is of the edition of 1566. The text and the illustrations are almost equally attractive.

As the centuries passed it became more and more difficult to obtain sport in the thickly settled parts of Europe save in the vast game preserves of the Kings and great lords. These magnates of Continental Europe, down to the beginning of the last century, followed the chase with all the ardor of Gaston Phœbus; indeed, they erred generally on the side of fantastic extravagance and exaggeration in their favorite pursuit, turning it into a solemn and rather ridiculous business instead of a healthy and vigorous pastime; but they could hunt only the beasts of their own forests. The men who went on long voyages usually had quite enough to do simply as travellers; the occupation of getting into unknown lands, and of keeping alive when once in them, was in itself sufficiently absorbing and hazardous to exclude any chance of combining with it the role of sportsman.

With the last century all this had changed. Even in the eighteenth century it began to change. The Dutch settlers at the Cape of Good Hope, and the English settlers on the Atlantic coast of North America, found themselves thrown back into a stage of life where hunting was one of the main means of livelihood, as well as the most exciting and adventurous of pastimes. These men knew the chase as men of their race had not known it since the days before history dawned; and until the closing decades of the last century the Americans and the Afrikanders of the frontier largely led the lives of professional hunters. Oom Paul and Buffalo Bill led very different careers after they reached middle age; but in their youth warfare against wild beasts and wild men was the most serious part of the life-work of both. They and their fellows did the rough pioneer work of civilization, under conditions which have now vanished for ever, and their type will perish with the passing of the forces that called it into being. But the big game hunter, whose campaigns against big game are not simply incidents in his career as a pioneer settler, will remain with us for some time longer; and it is of him and his writings that we wish to treat.

Toward the end of the eighteenth century this big game hunter had already appeared, although, like all early types, he was not yet thoroughly specialized. Le Vaillant hunted in South Africa, and his volumes are excellent reading now. A still better book is that of Bruce, the Abyssinian explorer, who was a kind of Burton of his days, with a marvellous faculty for getting into quarrels, but an even more marvellous faculty for doing work which no other man could do. He really opened a new world to European men of letters and science; who thereupon promptly united in disbelieving all he said, though they were credulous enough toward people who really should have been distrusted. But his tales have been proved true by many an explorer since then, and his book will always possess interest for big game hunters, because of his experiences in the chase. Sometimes he shot merely in self-defense or for food, but he also made regular hunting trips in company with the wild lords of the shifting frontier between dusky Christian and dusky infidel. He feasted in their cane palaces, where the walls were hung with the trophies of giant game, and in their company, with horse and spear, he attacked and overcame the buffalo and the rhinoceros.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century the hunting book proper became differentiated, as it were, from the book of the explorer. One of the earliest was Williamson’s “Oriental Field Sports.” This is to the present day a most satisfactory book, especially to sporting parents with large families of small children. The pictures are all in colors, and the foliage is so very green, and the tigers are so very red, and the boars so very black, and the tragedies so uncommonly vivid and startling, that for the youthful mind the book really has no formidable rival outside of the charmed circle where Slovenly Peter stands first.

Since then multitudes of books have been written about big game hunting. Most of them are bad, of course, just as most novels and most poems are bad; but some of them are very good indeed, while a few are entitled to rank high in literature—though it cannot be said that as yet big game hunters as a whole have produced such writers as those who dwell on the homelier and less grandiose side of nature. They have not produced a White or Burroughs, for instance. What could not Burroughs have done if only he had cared for adventure and for the rifle, and had roamed across the Great Plains and the Rockies, and through the dim forests, as he has wandered along the banks of the Hudson and the Potomac! Thoreau, it is true, did go to the Maine Woods; but then Thoreau was a transcendentalist and slightly anæmic. A man must feel the beat of hardy life in his veins before he can be a good big game hunter. Fortunately, Richard Jeffries has written an altogether charming little volume on the Red Deer, so that there is at least one game animal which has been fully described by a man of letters, who was also both a naturalist and a sportsman; but it is irritating to think that no one has done as much for the lordlier game of the wilderness. Not only should the hunter be able to describe vividly the chase, and the life habits of the quarry, but he should also draw the wilderness itself, and the life of those who dwell or sojourn therein. We wish to see before us the cautious stalk and the headlong gallop; the great beasts as they feed or rest or run or make love or fight; the wild hunting camps; the endless plains shimmering in the sunlight; the vast, solemn forests; the desert and the marsh and the mountain chain; and all that lies hidden in the lonely lands through which the wilderness wanderer roams and hunts game.

But there remain a goodly number of books which are not merely filled with truthful information of importance, but which are also absorbingly interesting; and if a book is both truthful and interesting it is surely entitled to a place somewhere in general literature. Unfortunately, the first requisite bars out a great many hunting-books. There are not a few mighty hunters who have left long records of their achievements, and who undoubtedly did achieve a great deal, but who contrive to leave in the mind of the reader the uncomfortable suspicion, that besides their prowess with the rifle they were skilled in the use of that more archaic weapon, the long bow. “The Old Shekarry,” who wrote of Indian and African sport, was one of these. Gerard was a great lion-killer, but some of his accounts of the lives, deaths, and especially the courtships, of lions, bear much less relation to actual facts than do the novels of Dumas. Not a few of the productions of hunters of this type should be grouped under the head-lines used by the newspapers of our native land in describing something which they are perfectly sure hasn’t happened—“Important, if True.” The exactly opposite type is presented in another Frenchman, M. Foa, a really great hunter who also knows how to observe and to put down what he has observed. His two books on big game hunting in Africa have permanent value.

If we were limited to the choice of one big game writer, who was merely such, and not in addition a scientific observer, we should have to choose Sir Samuel Baker, for his experiences are very wide, and we can accept without question all that he says in his books. He hunted in India, in Africa, and in North America; he killed all the chief kinds of heavy and dangerous game; and he followed them on foot and on horseback, with the rifle and the knife, and with hounds. For the same reason, if we could choose but one work, it would have to be the volumes of “Big Game Shooting,” in the Badminton Library, edited by Mr. Phillipps Wolley—himself a man who has written well of big game hunting in out-of-the-way places, from the Caucasus to the Cascades. These volumes contain pieces by many different authors; but they differ from most volumes of the kind in that all the writers are trustworthy and interesting; though the palm must be given to Oswell’s delightful account of his South African hunting. The book on the game beasts of Africa edited by Mr. Bryden is admirable in every way.