“But I mind a feller from Europe, some kind o’ swell, that I was guidin’ out West.  He had crippled a Deer so it couldn’t get away.  Then he sat down to eat lunch right by, and every few moments he’d fire a shot into some part or another, experimentin’ an’ aimin’ not to kill it for awhile.  I heard the shootin’ an’ blattin’, an when I come up I tell ye it set my blood a-boilin’.  I called him some names men don’t like, an’ put that Deer out o’ pain quick as I could pull trigger.  That bu’st up our party—­I didn’t want no more o’ him.  He come pretty near lyin’ by the Deer that day.  It makes me hot yet when I think of it.

“If he’d shot that Deer down runnin’ an’ killed it as quick as he could it wouldn’t ‘a’ suffered more than if it had been snagged a little, ’cause bullets of right weight numb when they hit.  The Deer wouldn’t have suffered more than he naturally would at his finish, maybe less, an’ he’d ‘a’ suffered it at a time when he could be some good to them as hunted him.  An’ these yer new repeatin’ guns is a curse.  A feller knows he has lots of shot and so blazes away into a band o’ Deer as long as he can see, an lots gets away crippled, to suffer an’ die; but when a feller has only one shot he’s going to place it mighty keerful.  Ef it’s sport ye want, get a single-shot rifle, ef it’s destruction, get a Gatling-gun.

“Sport’s good, but I’m agin this yer wholesale killin’ an’ cruelty.  Steel traps, light-weight bullets an’ repeatin’ guns ain’t human.  I tell ye it’s them as makes all the sufferin’.”

This was a long speech for Caleb, but it was really less connected than here given.  Yan had to keep him going with occasional questions.  This he followed up.

“What do you think about bows and arrows, Mr. Clark?”

“I wouldn’t like to use them on big game like Bear and Deer, but I’d be glad if shotguns was done away with and small game could be killed only with arrows.  They are either sure death or clear miss.  There’s no cripples to get away and die.  You can’t fire an arrow into a flock of birds and wipe out one hundred, like you can with one of them blame scatterguns.  It’s them things that is killing off all the small game.  Some day they’ll invent a scattergun that is a pump repeater like them new rifles, and when every fool has one they’ll wonder where all the small game has gone to.

“No, sir, I’m agin them.  Bows and arrows is less destructful an’ calls for more Woodcraft an’ give more sport—­that is, for small game.  Besides, they don’t make that awful racket, an’ you know who is the party that owns the shot, for every arrow is marked.”

Yan was sorry that Caleb did not indorse the arrow for big game, too.

The Trapper was well started now; he seemed ready enough with information to-day, and Yan knew enough to “run the rapids on the freshet.”

“How do you make a ketchalive?”

“What for?”

“Oh, Mink.”