A Duel in the Desert.

 Of the innumerable tragedies of the wilderness—the grim procession of life and death, the irreconcilable conflict of the animals as bounden as we are to appetite and passion and self-preservation—probably every hunter of considerable experience has seen the eloquent tokens; and every reader has heard at least of the sensational cases. The wonder is, perhaps, that these latter are so few; that only one death out of a million is so far outside the vast inclusive rule as to be of interest to us dull-eyed observers. For the law of conflict is inexorable. Outside of man and his protected servitors, only a tiny fraction of a per cent. of the animals die “a natural death”—that is, without violence. Of teeming sea and teeming forest, a vast majority of the denizens perish “with their boots on”—overwhelmingly a prey to that insatiate “hollow feeling” which Nature has put for warder[276] of the feral population, lest it overwhelm the earth. The “defensive” animals fall, as a rule, to the appetite of their predatory neighbors; the predatory beasts, in turn, have a reasonable expectation of death at the “hands” of their rivals in the tribe, their foes outside, or the only unnatural killer, Man. Every acre of field and forest has had its myriad tragedies of the humble wild-folk—though we are too unobservant to note the fact. A few bleaching bones, a wisp of fur or feathers, a dim scurry in the dust—this and no more is the chronicle of the snuffing out of a life as gladly lived, as hardly parted with as our own. Many authors have become famous by their skillful dissection of the Beastliness of Man; but we too seldom remember (unless while reading the Jungle Stories or Wahb) the Humanity of the Beasts, which is quite as true a part of natural history. This is mostly because in our civilized cushioning we know nothing real about the beasts. They are very little more to us than so many forms of speech, raw material for perfunctory literature or for “hunting,” whose only serious penetration is put up in brass cylinders by the U.M.C. Co. It is nothing short of astounding how little the average “hunter” knows of the game he[277] kills, except so much of its habit as shall enable him to kill it. Indeed, the very name “Game” is perhaps significant of this blindness. It is a game, and a great game, if shrewdly played; but pity the man who can see in it nothing but the killing! He is as far from being what I would soberly call a hunter as the fellow whose only notion of whist is to play trumps at every lead is far from being a whist player. One who knows as well as anyone, and as well loves, the wild thrill of the chase, who has hunted and been hunted, and found the keenest “sport” when the “game” turned the tables and he had to fight hand-to-hand for his own life, is not apt to be foolishly sentimental. But he is very apt to pity those who have never learned the higher side of hunting. To watch a beaver colony at work; or a vixen with her pups; or a bear family at play; or the wild stallion herding his flirtatious manada and falling like a thunderbolt upon some mustang Lothario; or partridge or wild turkey at mating time—experto credite, it is quite as much “fun” and rather more woodcraft than trapping or killing or “creasing.” Which is saying a great deal. And to such as mix the game with brains, these things become more and more the refinement and expertness[278] of it. As a matter of fact, a fox is a much smarter hunter than any man who hunts only to kill. His eyes and ears are far better, his nose is a genius of which no human has so much as an inkling, his foot-fall is infinitely softer, his strategy far more competent. For that matter, more foxes escape the allied force and wit of a score of men and a half-score of hounds than partridges or quail escape the unaided campaign of one fox. As to that, in the average foxhunt, at least (and leaving out of the count the trapper and real wilderness hunter), one hound is worth in effectiveness half a hundred people. Without a single dog to lead them, the whole chase could as soon stay at home.