Big Game Shooting, Volume 1 (of 2)

CHAPTER I. On Big Game Shooting Generally

ON BIG GAME SHOOTING GENERALLY

BY CLIVE PHILLIPPS-WOLLEY

It may be asked, as to these volumes, why ‘Big Game Shooting’ should find a place in a series devoted to British sports and pastimes, whereas, except the red deer, there is no big game in Great Britain?

It is true that there is no big game left in Britain; but if the game is not British, its hunters are, and it is hardly too much to say that, out of every ten riflemen wandering about the world at present from Spitzbergen to Central Africa, nine are of the Anglo-Saxon breed.

It may be asked, again, what justification there is for the animal life taken, and for the time and money spent in the pursuit of wild sport?

That, too, is an easy question to answer. Luckily for England, the old hunting spirit is still strong at home, and the men who, had they lived in Arthur’s time, might have been knights-errant engaged in some quest at Pentecost, are now constrained to be mere gunners, asking no more than that their hunting-grounds should be wild and remote, their quarry dangerous or all but unapproachable, and the chase such as shall tax human endurance, human craft, and human courage to the uttermost.

If in these days of ultra-civilisation an apology is needed for such as these, let it be that their sport does no man any harm; that it exercises all those masculine virtues which set the race where it is among the nations of the earth, and which but for such sport would rust from disuse; that if the hunter of big game takes life, he often enough stakes his own against the life he takes; and if he be one of the right sort, he never wastes his game.

Incidentally, however, the hunter does a good deal for his race and for the men who come after him; something for science, for exploration, and even for his worst enemy--civilisation.

In Africa, hunting and exploration have gone hand in hand; in America the hunters have explored, settled, and developed much of the country, replacing the buffalo with the shorthorn and the Hereford; while in India, not the least amongst those latent powers which enable us to govern our Asiatic fellow-subjects is the respect won by generations of English hunters from the native shikaries and hillmen.

From Africa to Siberia the story of exploration has never varied. The world’s pioneers have almost invariably belonged to one of two classes. It has been the love of sport, or the lust of gold, which has led men first to break in upon those solitudes in which nature and her wild children have lived alone since the world’s beginning. Hunters or gold prospectors still find the mountain passes, through which in later days the locomotives will rush and the world’s less venturous spirits come in time to reap their harvests and make fortunes in the footsteps of those who ask nothing better than to spend their strength and wealth in the first encounter with an untrodden world, living as hard as wolves, and content to think themselves rich in the possession of a few gnarled horns and grizzled hides. As for us who are Englishmen, it is well for us to remember that in most lands in which we shoot we are but guests, and the beasts we hunt are not only the property of the natives, but one of their most important sources of food supply. Bearing this in mind, we should be moderate in the toll we take of the great game, and considerate even of those who may not be strong enough to enforce their wishes. The recklessness of one man in a country where foreigners are few may suffice to damn a whole nation in the eyes of a prejudiced people, and it is worth while to recollect that any one of us who strays off the world’s beaten tracks may serve for a type of his nation to men who have never seen another sample of an Englishman.

Looked at from any point of view, the wholesale slaughter of big game must be condemned by every thinking man. The sportsman who in one season is lucky enough to obtain a dozen good heads does no harm to anybody, and probably does good to the bands of game in his district by killing off the oldest of the stags or rams. But the man who kills fifty or a hundred foolish ‘rhinos’ (beasts, according to Mr. Jackson, which any man can stalk) in one year, or scores of cariboo at the crossings during their annual migration in Newfoundland, or deer and sheep by the hundred in America, shocks humanity and does a grave injury to his class. The waste of good meat is quite intolerable; kindly natured men hate to hear of the infliction of needless pain, and waste of innocent animal life; good sportsmen recoil in disgust from a record of butchery misnamed sport, for, according to the very first article of their creed, it is the difficulty of the chase which gives value to the trophies. If there were no difficulties, no dangers, no hardships, then the sport would have no flavour and its prizes no value. The mere fact that a man can kill as many of any particular kind of animal as he pleases should be sufficient to make him let that beast alone, unless he wants it for food, as soon as he has secured (say) a couple of fine specimen heads. Finally, to look at this question from the lowest and most selfish standpoint, the wholesale slaughter of wild game in foreign countries should be discouraged unanimously by all who love the rifle, since men who kill or boast of having killed exceptionally large bags of big game in any country are extremely likely to arouse the natural and proper indignation of local legislators, who have it in their power to close their happy hunting grounds to all aliens for the fault of a few individuals, not by any means typical of, or in sympathy with, their class.

On the other hand, it would be well if some of those of our own race, who should know better, would be less ready to call other men butchers merely because they have killed large quantities of game. Everything depends upon the circumstances connected with the slaying. If a man needs and can utilise a hundred antelope, surely he has as good a right to kill them as if he were killing a hundred sheep for market. There are occasions when not only does the hunter’s skill win the regard of savages who value nothing in friend or foe more than real manhood, but it is absolutely necessary to kill game in order to keep a native following in food. Without the hunter’s skill, food would have to be bought or looted from hostile natives, a feud engendered which might end in the shedding of other blood than that of the beasts, and a serious obstacle be thus raised in the path of the pioneers of civilisation and trade.

Our big game sportsmen have made more friends than foes, have always contrived to feed their men, and the very greatest of them have never shed a drop of native blood. Where gallant Oswell or Selous have been, there are no blood feuds against the English to hamper an expedition of their countrymen.

So much for the ethics of Big Game Shooting; as to the practical side of it, let it be said at once that it is impossible upon paper to teach any man to become a successful big game hunter. Upon the hillside or in the forest, with an expert to guide him, with the floating mists to teach him something of the way of the winds, with game tracks or the game itself before him, each man has to learn for himself, and even then he learns more from his own mistakes than from anyone else. To be really successful a man wants so many things; he needs so many qualities combined in his own person. To be a good shot means but little. The man who can win prizes at Wimbledon may be a successful deer-stalker, but it by no means follows that he will be. He has one good quality in his favour, but even that quality varies with the varying conditions under which he shoots. With his pulses steady, his heart beating regularly, his wind sound, his digestion unimpaired, his eyes free from moisture, with the distances measured off for him, and with a bull’s-eye to shoot at, he may make phenomenal scores; but when he has been living upon heavy dampers and strong tea taken at irregular intervals, his digestion may become impaired. When he has toiled all day and come fast up a steep incline at the end of a long stalk, his pulse will not be steady, his sides may be heaving like those of a blown horse, his eye may be dimmed by a bead of sweat which will cling to his eyelash and fall salt and painful into his eye just when it should be at its clearest. The distances are not marked for him, and the atmosphere varies so much at different altitudes, that it is not always easy to judge how far he is from his quarry, and that quarry, instead of being marked in black and white for his convenience, has an awkward trick of being just the colour of the hillside, with an outline which at 200 yards melts into the background and becomes one with its surroundings.

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