Because from a church rostrum I was hailed as the greatest boy killer in that county! No one of all those Christians told me that I should stop killing. They made a hero of me because I was already becoming a master in the art of killing. They built up my egoism to a point where it became blasphemous--to a point where it more than offset my mother’s pleadings that I stop shooting birds for their wings. Then came a thing which, as I look back upon it now, seems to me monstrous. There was to be a big “hunters’ supper” to end the revival. The men chose sides, and on a certain day all these men set out to kill. They were to kill nothing “outside the law.” But all life not protected by law might be sacrificed. I remember that a rabbit counted five points, a squirrel four, a hawk six, a blue jay two, and so on. The side that lost out on “points,” or, in other words, destroyed the least life, was compelled to furnish the supper. How I did slaughter! When I came in to the “count” that night, my game-bag was filled to the brim with dead things. Among other creatures I had killed seventeen blue jays! Any wonder that Captain Kidd and his pals screamed over my head this morning? And yet good Christian people still regard with horror the day when pagan Rome burned the martyrs. My education in the art of destruction increased as my years grew in number. I was not alone. All the human world was destroying, just as it is destroying to-day. We moved back to the little city of Owosso, in Michigan, where I was born. In Erie County, Ohio, my nickname had been Slippery--just why I don’t know; now, in Michigan, it became Nimrod and Wildcat Jim. I haunted our beautiful Shiawassee River as ghosts are now haunting some of our scientific writers. I trapped and hunted and fished more than I studied--so much more, in fact, that I became decidedly unpopular with our high-school principal, Mr. Austin, who is now my very good friend. At last, I stood at the splitting of the ways--and I chose my own course. I trapped a season, and, with the money earned, started in on a special course at the University of Michigan. Things went well. I slipped through college with the ease of an eel, took up newspaper work in Detroit, became a special writer and a magazine writer and the youngest metropolitan newspaper editor in Michigan. I felt inclined to believe that I was a wild and uproarious success. But under it all burned my desire to get back to my old job of destruction, and this desire led me into my long years of adventuring into the far northern wildernesses.