Since then multitudes of books have been written about big game hunting. Most of them are bad, of course, just as most novels and most poems are bad; but some of them are very good indeed, while a few are entitled to rank high in literature—though it cannot be said that as yet big game hunters as a whole have produced such writers as those who dwell on the homelier and less grandiose side of nature. They have not produced a White or Burroughs, for instance. What could not Burroughs have done if only he had cared for adventure and for the rifle, and had roamed across the Great Plains and the Rockies, and through the dim forests, as he has wandered along the banks of the Hudson and the Potomac! Thoreau, it is true, did go to the Maine Woods; but then Thoreau was a transcendentalist and slightly anæmic. A man must feel the beat of hardy life in his veins before he can be a good big game hunter. Fortunately, Richard Jeffries has written an altogether charming little volume on the Red Deer, so that there is at least one game animal which has been fully described by a man of letters, who was also both a naturalist and a sportsman; but it is irritating to think that no one has done as much for the lordlier game of the wilderness. Not only should the hunter be able to describe vividly the chase, and the life habits of the quarry, but he should also draw the wilderness itself, and the life of those who dwell or sojourn therein. We wish to see before us the cautious stalk and the headlong gallop; the great beasts as they feed or rest or run or make love or fight; the wild hunting camps; the endless plains shimmering in the sunlight; the vast, solemn forests; the desert and the marsh and the mountain chain; and all that lies hidden in the lonely lands through which the wilderness wanderer roams and hunts game.