A PILE OF BUFFALO BONES C. Whymper 380 A GROUP OF BIGHORN 382 MR. ARNOLD PIKE’S GREAT RAM From a photograph 386 ROCKY MOUNTAIN GOATS 390 ANTILOCAPRA AMERICANA C. Whymper 393 A HERD OF PRONGHORNS ” 395 THE RECORD HEAD From a photograph 397 ABNORMAL PALMATED WAPITI HEAD 414 WOODLAND AND BARREN GROUND CARIBOU ANTLERS C. Whymper 415 TYPICAL MULE DEER (_C. macrotis_) From a photograph 419 ABNORMAL HEAD OF MULE DEER 420 THE WHITE-TAIL’S HAUNT C. W., from a photograph by J. Lord 422 GUANACO, C. PALUDOSUS, C. COLUMBIANUS C. Whymper 425 MUSK OX 428 VIGNETTE H. Willink 435 BIG GAME SHOOTING [Illustration: 1 Springbuck. 2 Steinbuck. 3 Blesbuck. 4 Reedbuck.] CHAPTER I 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.