The only remedy for the present extermination of game according to law that so rapidly and so furiously is proceeding all over the United States, Canada, Alaska, and Africa, is ten-year close seasons on all the species threatened with extinction, and immensely reduced open seasons and bag limits on all the others. Will the people who still have wild game take heed now, and clamp down the brakes, hard and fast before it is too late, or will they have their game exterminated? Shall we have five-year close seasons, or close seasons of 500 years? We must take our choice. Shall we hand down to our children a gameless continent, with all the shame that such a calamity will entail? We have _got_ to answer these questions like men, or they will soon be answered for us by the extermination of the wild life. For twenty-five years we have been smarting under the disgrace of the extermination of our bison millions. Let us not repeat the dose through the destruction of other species. * * * * * CHAPTER VII THE GUERRILLAS OF DESTRUCTION We have now to deal with THE GUERRILLAS OF DESTRUCTION. In warfare, a _guerrilla, or bushwhacker_, is an armed man who recognizes none of the rules of civilized warfare, and very often has no commander. In France he is called a "franc-tireur," or free-shooter. The guerrilla goes out to live on the country, to skulk, to war on the weak, and never attack save from ambush, or when the odds clearly are on his side. His military status is barely one remove from that of the spy. The meat-shooters who harry the game and other wild life in order to use it as a staple food supply; the Italians, negroes and others who shoot song-birds as food; the plume-hunters and the hide-and-tusk hunters all over the world are the guerrillas of the Army of Destruction. Let us consider some of these grand divisions in detail. Here is an inexorable law of Nature, to which there are no exceptions: _No wild species of bird, mammal, reptile or fish can withstand exploitation for commercial purposes_. The men who pursue wild creatures for the money or other value there is in them, never give up. They work at slaughter when other men are enjoying life, or are asleep. If they are persistent, no species on which they fix the Evil Eye escapes extermination at their hands. Does anyone question this statement? If so let him turn backward and look at the lists of dead and dying species.