game preserves, it persists among the men who devote the best years of their life to pitting their intelligence against that of the brute creation.  The odds are of course very much in favour of the human being, but we may not realise readily the extreme cunning of hunted animals.  The keen sportsman, who rode by my side pointing out the track of boar or porcupine, showing where animals had been feeding, and judging how recently they had passed by difference in the marks too faint for my eyes to see, confessed that he had spent months on the track of a single animal, baffled over and over again, but getting back to his quarry because he had with him the mark of the feet as copied when he tracked it for the first time.

“No boar has four feet absolutely identical with those of another boar,” he said, “so when once you have the prints the animal must leave the forest altogether and get off to the Atlas, or you will find him in the end.  He may double repeatedly on his own tracks, he may join a herd and travel with them for days into the thick scrub, where the dogs are badly torn in following him, but he can never get away, and the hunter following his tracks learns to realise in the frenzied changes and manoeuvres of the beast pursued, its consciousness of his pursuit.”  In these matters the trained and confirmed hunter’s heart grows cold as the physiologist’s, while his senses wax more and more acute, and near to the level of those of his prey.

That is but a small part of the hunter’s lore.  As his eyes and ears develop a power beyond the reach of dwellers of cities with stunted sight and spoiled hearing, he grows conscious of the great forest laws that rule the life of birds and beasts—­laws yet unwritten in any language.  He finds all living things pursuing their destiny by the light of customs that appeal as strongly to them as ours to us, and learns to know that the order and dignity of the lower forms of life are not less remarkable in their way than the phenomena associated with our own.

To me, the whirring of a covey of sand-grouse or partridges could express little more than the swift passage of birds to a place of security.  To the man who grew almost as a part of the forest, the movement was something well defined, clearly initiated, and the first step in a sequence that he could trace without hesitation.  One part of the forest might be the same as another to the casual rider, or might at best vary in its purely picturesque quality.  To the long trained eye, on the other hand, it was a place that would or would not be the haunt of certain beasts or birds at certain hours of the day, by reason of its aspect with regard to the sun, its soil, cover, proximity to the river or other source of water supply, its freedom from certain winds and accessibility to others, its distance from any of the tracks that led to the country beyond the forest and were frequented at certain seasons of the year.  The trained hunter reads all this as in a book, but the most of us can do no more than recognise the writing when it has been pointed out to us.