Hunting

   Hunting is the sport of pursuing game. No occupation is of more ancient standing than hunting. With us a recreation, with the primitive man it was the very means of supporting life. Though the steady advance of civilization has relieved man more and more from the need of earning his living in this wise, the love of the chase has never left him. A normal, healthy man without a fondness for hunting is a curiosity rarely met with. The sport has been the favorite pastime of many great men. Never has Theodore Roosevelt waxed more enthusiastic than over the delights of hunting big game; several of his books deal solely with his hunting expeditions and their results. The excitement of the chase has inspired some of the merriest music even of great composers. Everyone is familiar with some of these rollicking "jagdlieder." One can scarcely think of an English country-gentleman without conjuring up the early morning hunt,—the scarlet-clad party of fresh-faced men and women dashing off through the parks in quest of the prized "brush." Among true sportsmen there are definite rules of the game which constitute a sort of unwritten code of honor. "Pot" shooting, or the cruel slaughter of wild creatures for market purposes, is as distasteful to them as to those outside the pale. No less so is the "sport" of those so-called hunters who shoot ducks by the hundred, simply to "make a record." In the early days of the first railroad to the Pacific, numbers of such "hunters" shot down hundreds of bison from the windows of the trains.