Every appliance and assistance that money can buy, the modern sportsman secures to help him against the game.  The game is beset during its breeding season by various wild enemies,—­foxes, cats, wolves, pumas, lynxes, eagles, and many other predatory species.  The only help that it receives is in the form of an annual close season—­which thus far has saved in America only a few local moose, white-tailed deer and a few game birds, from steady and sure extermination.

The bag limits on which vast reliance is placed to preserve the wild game, are a fraud, a delusion and a snare!  The few local exceptions only prove the generality of the rule.  In every state, without one single exception, the bag limits are far too high, and the laws are of deadly liberality.  In many states, the bag limit laws on birds are an absolute dead letter.  Fancy the 125 wardens of New York enforcing the bag-limit laws on 150,000 gunners!  It is this horrible condition that is enabling the licensed army of destruction to get in its deadly work on the game, all over the world.  In America, the over-liberality of the laws are to blame for two-thirds of the carnival of slaughter, and the successful evasions of the law are responsible for the other third.

[Illustration:  TWO GUNNERS OF KANSAS CITY Who Believe in Killing all That the Law Allows.  They are not so Much to Blame as the System That Permits Such Slaughter. (Note the Pump Guns)]

[Illustration:  WHY THE SANDHILL CRANE IS BECOMING EXTINCT Nineteen of Them Killed as “Game” by Three Gunners.  Note the Machine Gun.]

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.