In the intensity of the stillness the fir cones which the squirrels drop make you start, expecting to see the bushes divide for a bull moose at least to pass through them: at night, when you are watching by the river for bear, you think that you hear distinctly the ‘splosh, splosh’ of the grizzly’s feet as he wades down the shallows towards you. Not a bit of it: it is only a foolish kelt who has run himself aground and is trying to kick himself off again into deep water. On the other hand, that grating of one bough against another which you fancied that you heard may have been a ‘bull elk’ burnishing his antlers against a cottonwood-tree, that far-away whistle of the wind may have been a fragment of a forest monarch’s love-call, and that angry squirrel across the canyon was actually chattering _not_ because he had seen you, but because he was disturbed by a bear passing by the log on which he was sitting. But the language of the woods can only be learnt by residence amongst them, and this is especially true of the written language of tracks, which is to my mind one of the few things utterly beyond a white man’s powers ever thoroughly to master. Such proficiency as a man may acquire in tracking he must acquire for himself in the woods, since any essay upon it would need more illustrations than words to make the meaning plain. Fishing is said to require patience. Believe me, still hunting requires more. Although you have toiled all day and seen nothing; although you are hot, ‘played out,’ and therefore intensely irritable (perhaps you have even a touch of fever upon you); although every log on your way home ‘barks’ your shins, and every tendril clings to your ankle--you _must_ keep your temper; and even when that thorny creeper hooks you by the fleshy part of your nose, you must not swear--at least, not aloud. If you do, at the very moment that the words leave your lips, the only beast you have seen all day will get up with a contemptuous snort from _the other side_ of the bush in front of you. But when all is written that can be written upon ‘still hunting,’ there is still much which can only be taught in the woods--or, if on paper, then it has been done already, as well as man could possibly do it, in the pages of the best book ever written by an American, Van Dyke’s ‘Still Hunter.’ I am glad to have a chance of acknowledging my indebtedness to this author. Whatever I know of still hunting I have learned from his book and from experience, and have never yet known my two teachers disagree. There is only one word which I would add here, but it is the most important that I shall write. There is one danger in still hunting in the woods more terrible than any other which the big game hunter can encounter: the danger, I mean, of accidentally shooting his fellow-man.