My own experience as regards marksmanship was much the same as my experience as regards horsemanship.  There are men whose eye and hand are so quick and so sure that they achieve a perfection of marksmanship to which no practice will enable ordinary men to attain.  There are other men who cannot learn to shoot with any accuracy at all.  In between come the mass of men of ordinary abilities who, if they choose resolutely to practice, can by sheer industry and judgment make themselves fair rifle shots.  The men who show this requisite industry and judgment can without special difficulty raise themselves to the second class of respectable rifle shots; and it is to this class that I belong.  But to have reached this point of marksmanship with the rifle at a target by no means implies ability to hit game in the field, especially dangerous game.  All kinds of other qualities, moral and physical, enter into being a good hunter, and especially a good hunter after dangerous game, just as all kinds of other qualities in addition to skill with the rifle enter into being a good soldier.  With dangerous game, after a fair degree of efficiency with the rifle has been attained, the prime requisites are cool judgment and that kind of nerve which consists in avoiding being rattled.  Any beginner is apt to have “buck fever,” and therefore no beginner should go at dangerous game.

Buck fever means a state of intense nervous excitement which may be entirely divorced from timidity.  It may affect a man the first time he has to speak to a large audience just as it affects him the first time he sees a buck or goes into battle.  What such a man needs is not courage but nerve control, cool-headedness.  This he can get only by actual practice.  He must, by custom and repeated exercise of self-mastery, get his nerves thoroughly under control.  This is largely a matter of habit, in the sense of repeated effort and repeated exercise of will power.  If the man has the right stuff in him, his will grows stronger and stronger with each exercise of it—­and if he has not the right stuff in him he had better keep clear of dangerous game hunting, or indeed of any other form of sport or work in which there is bodily peril.

After he has achieved the ability to exercise wariness and judgment and the control over his nerves which will make him shoot as well at the game as at a target, he can begin his essays at dangerous game hunting, and he will then find that it does not demand such abnormal prowess as the outsider is apt to imagine.  A man who can hit a soda-water bottle at the distance of a few yards can brain a lion or a bear or an elephant at that distance, and if he cannot brain it when it charges he can at least bring it to a standstill.  All he has to do is to shoot as accurately as he would at a soda-water bottle; and to do this requires nerve, at least as much as it does physical address.  Having reached this point, the hunter must not imagine