Tales of lonely trails

by Zane Grey

What youngster has not made wooden knives to spill the blood of his pretended enemies? Little girls play with dolls, and with toy houses, and all the implements of making a home; but sweet and dear as the little angels are they love a boy's game, and if they can through some lucky accident participate in one it is to scream and shudder and fight, indeed like the females of the species. No break here between these little mothers of doll-babies and the bloody mothers of the French Revolution, or of dusky, naked, barbarian children of a primitive day!

Boys love the chase. And that chase depends upon environment. For want of wild game they will harry a poor miserable tom-cat with sticks and stones. I belonged once to a gang of young ruffians who chased the neighbor's chickens, killed them with clubs, and cooked them in tin cans, over a hidden fire. Boys love nothing so much as to chase a squirrel or a frightened little chipmunk back and forth along a rail fence. They brandish their sticks, run and yell, dart to and fro, like young Indians. They rob bird's nests, steal the eggs, pierce them and blow them. They capture the young birds, and are not above killing the parents that fly frantically to the rescue. I knew of boys who ground captured birds to death on a grindstone. Who has not seen a boy fling stones at a helpless hop-toad?

As boys grow older to the age of reading they select, or at least love best, those stories of bloodshed and violence. Stevenson wrote that boys read for some element of the brute instinct in them. His two wonderful books Treasure Island and Kidnapped are full of fight and the killing of men. Robinson Crusoe is the only great boy's book I ever read that did not owe its charm to fighting. But still did not old Crusoe fight to live on his lonely island? And this wonderful tale is full of hunting, and has at the end the battle with cannibals.

When lads grow up they become hunters, almost without exception, at least in spirit if not in deed. Early days and environment decide whether or not a man becomes a hunter. In all my life I have met only two grown men who did not care to go prowling and hunting in the woods with a gun. An exception proves a great deal, but all the same most men, whether they have a chance or not, love to hunt. Hunters, therefore, there are of many degrees. Hunters of the lowly cotton-tail and the woodland squirrel; hunters of quail, woodcock, and grouse; hunters of wild ducks and geese; hunters of foxes—the red-coated English and the homespun clad American; hunters—which is a kinder name for trappers—of beaver, marten, otter, mink, all the furred animals; hunters of deer, cat, wolf, bear, antelope, elk, moose, caribou; hunters of the barren lands where the ice is king and where there are polar bears, white foxes, musk-ox, walrus. Hunters of different animals of different countries. African hunters for lion, rhinoceros, elephant, buffalo, eland, hartebeest, giraffe, and a hundred species made known to all the world by such classical sportsmen as Selous, Roosevelt, Stewart Edward White.

But they are all hunters and their game is the deadly chase in the open or the wild. There are hunters who hate action, who hate to walk and climb and toil and wear themselves out to get a shot. Such men are hunters still, but still not men! There are hunters who have game driven up to them. I heard a story told by an officer whom I believe. In the early days of the war he found himself somewhere on the border between Austria and Germany. He was invited to a hunt by personages of high degree. They motored to a sequestered palace in the forest, and next day motored to a shooting-lodge. At daylight he was called, and taken to the edge of a forest and stationed in an open glade. His stand was an upholstered divan placed high in the forks of a tree. His guide told him that pretty soon a doe would come out of the forest. But he was not to shoot it. In fifteen minutes a lame buck would come out. But he was not to shoot that one either. In ten more minutes another buck would come out, and this third deer he was to kill. My informant told me this was all very seriously meant. The gun given him was large enough in calibre to kill an elephant. He walked up the steps to the comfortable divan and settled himself to await events. The doe trotted out exactly on schedule time. So did the lame buck. They came from the woods and were not frightened. The third deer, a large buck, was a few moments late—three minutes to be exact. According to instructions the American killed this buck—a matter that took some nerve he said, for the buck walked out like a cow. That night a big supper was given in the guest's honor. He had to eat certain parts of the buck he had killed, and drink flagons of wine. This kind of hunting must be peculiarly German or Austrian, and illustrates the peculiar hunting ways of men.

A celebrated bear hunter and guide of the northwest told me that for twenty years he had been taking eastern ministers—preachers of the gospel—on hunting trips into the wild. He assured me that of all the bloody murderers—waders in gore, as he expressed it—these teachers of the gospel were the worst. The moment they got out into the wild they wanted to kill, kill, kill. He averred their natures seemed utterly to change.

In reading the books of hunters and in listening to their talks at Camp-fire Club dinners I have always been struck with the expression of what these hunters felt, what they thought they got out of hunting. The change from city to the open wilderness; the difference between noise, tumult, dirt, foul air, and the silence, the quiet, the cleanness and purity; the sweet breath of God's country as so many called it; the beauty of forest and mountain; the wildness of ridge and valley; the wonder of wild animals in their native haunts; and the zest, the joy, the excitement, the magnificent thrill of the stalk and the chase. No one of them ever dwelt upon the kill! It was mentioned, as a result, an end, a consummation. How strange that hunters believed these were the attractions of the chase! They felt them, to be sure, in some degree, or they would not remember them. But they never realized that these sensations were only incidental to hunting.

Men take long rides, hundreds and thousands of miles, to hunt. They endure hardships, live in camps with absolute joy. They stalk through the forest, climb the craggy peaks, labor as giants in the building of the pyramids, all with a tight clutch on a deadly rifle. They are keen, intent, strained, quiveringly eager all with a tight clutch on a deadly rifle. If hunters think while on a stalk—which matter I doubt considerably—they think about the lay of the land, or the aspect of it, of the habits and possibilities of their quarry, of their labor and chances, and particularly of the vague unrealized sense of comfort, pleasure, satisfaction in the moment. Tight muscles, alert eyes, stealthy steps, stalk and run and crawl and climb, breathlessness, a hot close-pressed chest, thrill on thrill, and sheer bursting riot of nerve and vein—these are the ordinary sensations and actions of a hunter. No ascent too lofty—no descent too perilous for him then, if he is a man as well as a hunter!

Take the Brazilian hunter of the jungle. He is solitary. He is sufficient to himself. He is a survival of the fittest. The number of his tribe are few. Nature sees to that. But he must eat, and therefore he hunts. He spears fish and he kills birds and beasts with a blow-gun. He hunts to live. But the manner of his action, though more skilful, is the same as any hunter's. Likewise his sensations, perhaps more vivid because hunting for him is a matter of life or death. Take the Gaucho of Patagonia—the silent lonely Indian hunter of the Pampas. He hunts with a bola, a thin thong or string at each end of which is a heavy leather-covered ball of stone or iron. This the Gaucho hurls through the air at the neck or legs of his quarry. The balls fly round—the thong binds tight—it is a deadly weapon. The user of it rides and stalks and sees and throws and feels the same as any other hunter. Time and place, weapon and game have little to do with any differences in hunters.

Up to this 1919 hunting trip in the wilds I had always marveled at the fact that naturalists and biologists hate sportsmen. Not hunters like the Yellow Knife Indians, or the snake-eating Bushmen of Australia, or the Terra-del-Fuegians, or even the native country rabbit-hunters—but the so-called sportsmen. Naturalists and biologists have simply learned the truth why men hunt, and that when it is done in the name of sport, or for sensation, it is a degenerate business. Stevenson wrote beautiful words about "the hunter home from the hill," but so far as I can find out he never killed anything himself. He was concerned with the romance of the thought, with alliteration, and the singular charm of the truth—sunset and the end of the day, the hunter's plod down the hill to the cottage, to the home where wife and children awaited him. Indeed it is a beautiful truth, and not altogether in the past, for there are still farmers and pioneers.