On the other hand, it would be well if some of those of our own race, who should know better, would be less ready to call other men butchers merely because they have killed large quantities of game. Everything depends upon the circumstances connected with the slaying. If a man needs and can utilise a hundred antelope, surely he has as good a right to kill them as if he were killing a hundred sheep for market. There are occasions when not only does the hunter’s skill win the regard of savages who value nothing in friend or foe more than real manhood, but it is absolutely necessary to kill game in order to keep a native following in food. Without the hunter’s skill, food would have to be bought or looted from hostile natives, a feud engendered which might end in the shedding of other blood than that of the beasts, and a serious obstacle be thus raised in the path of the pioneers of civilisation and trade.
Our big game sportsmen have made more friends than foes, have always contrived to feed their men, and the very greatest of them have never shed a drop of native blood. Where gallant Oswell or Selous have been, there are no blood feuds against the English to hamper an expedition of their countrymen.
So much for the ethics of Big Game Shooting; as to the practical side of it, let it be said at once that it is impossible upon paper to teach any man to become a successful big game hunter. Upon the hillside or in the forest, with an expert to guide him, with the floating mists to teach him something of the way of the winds, with game tracks or the game itself before him, each man has to learn for himself, and even then he learns more from his own mistakes than from anyone else. To be really successful a man wants so many things; he needs so many qualities combined in his own person. To be a good shot means but little. The man who can win prizes at Wimbledon _may_ be a successful deer-stalker, but it by no means follows that he will be. He has one good quality in his favour, but even that quality varies with the varying conditions under which he shoots. With his pulses steady, his heart beating regularly, his wind sound, his digestion unimpaired, his eyes free from moisture, with the distances measured off for him, and with a bull’s-eye to shoot at, he may make phenomenal scores; but when he has been living upon heavy dampers and strong tea taken at irregular intervals, his digestion may become impaired. When he has toiled all day and come fast up a steep incline at the end of a long stalk, his pulse will not be steady, his sides may be heaving like those of a blown horse, his eye may be dimmed by a bead of sweat which will cling to his eyelash and fall salt and painful into his eye just when it should be at its clearest. The distances are not marked for him, and the atmosphere varies so much at different altitudes, that it is not always easy to judge how far he is from his quarry, and that quarry, instead of being marked in black and white for his convenience, has an awkward trick of being just the colour of the hillside, with an outline which at 200 yards melts into the background and becomes one with its surroundings.