Another reason why so many Americans do not see their own country is that while one species of fool has scared away holiday seekers by tales of extortionate cost, another sort of fool wisely promulgates the lie--a lie worn shiny from repetition--that "game is scarce in the West." "No more big game"--and your romancer leans back with wise-acre air to let that lie sink in, while he clears his throat to utter another--"trout streams all fished out." In the days when we had to swallow logic undigested in college, we had it impressed upon us that one single specific fact was sufficient to refute the broadest generality that was ever put in the form of a syllogism. Well, then,--for a few facts as to that "no-game" lie! In one hour you can catch in the streams of the Pecos, or the Jemez, or the White Mountains, or the Upper Sierras of California, or the New Glacier Park of the North, more trout than you can put on a string. If you want confirmation of that fact, write to the Texas Club that has its hunting lodge opposite Grass Mountain, and they will send you the picture of one hour's trout catch. By measurement, the string is longer than the height of a water barrel; and these were fish that didn't get away. Last year, twenty-six bear were shot in the Sangre de Christo Canyon in three months. Two years ago, mountain lions became so thick in the Pecos that hunters were hired to hunt them for bounty; and the first thing that happened to one of the hunters, his horse was throttled and killed by a mountain lion, though his little spaniel got revenge by treeing four lions a few weeks later, and the hunter got three out of the four. Near Glorieta, you can meet a rancher who last year earned $3,000 of hunting bounty scrip, if he could have got it cashed. In the White Mountains last year, two of the largest bucks ever known in the Rockies were trailed by every hunter of note and trailed in vain. Later, one was shot out of season by stalking behind a burro; but the other still haunts the canyons defiant of repeater. From the caves of the cliff-dwellers along the Rio Grande, you can nightly hear the coyote and the fox bark as they barked those dim stone ages when the people of these silent caves hunted here. The week I reached Frijoles Canyon, a flock of wild turkeys strutted in front of Judge Abbott's Ranch House not a gun length from the front door. The morning I was driving over the Pajarito Mesa home from the cliff caves, we disturbed a herd of deer. Does all this sound as if game was depleted? It is if you follow the beaten trail, just as depleted as it would be if you tried to hunt wild turkey down Broadway, New York; but it isn't if you know where to look for it. Believe me--though it may sound a truism--you won't find big game in hotel rotundas or pullman cars.