The gray squirrel is naturally the children’s closest wild-animal friend.  Surely every farmer boy would like to have colonies of gray squirrels around him, to keep him company, and furnish him with entertainment.  A wood-lot without squirrels and chipmunks is indeed a lifeless place.  For $20 anyone can restock any bit of woods with the most companionable and most beautiful tree-dweller that nature has given us.

The question now is, which will you choose—­a gray squirrel colony to every farm, or lifeless desolation?

We ask every American to lend a hand to save Silver-Tail.

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CHAPTER IV

EXTINCT AND NEARLY EXTINCT SPECIES OF MAMMALS

When we pause and consider the years, the generations and the ages that Nature spends in the production of a high vertebrate species, the preservation of such species from extermination should seriously concern us.  As a matter of fact, in modern man’s wild chase after wealth and pleasure, it is only one person out of every ten thousand who pauses to regard such causes, unless cornered by some protectionist fanatic, held fast and coerced to listen.

We are not discussing the animals of the Pleistocene, or the Eocene, or any period of the far-distant Past.  We are dealing with species that have been ruthlessly, needlessly and wickedly destroyed by man during our own times; species that, had they been given a fair chance, would be alive and well to-day.

In reckless waste of blood and treasure, the nineteenth century has much for which to answer.  Wars and pillage, fires, earthquakes and volcanoes are unhappily unavoidable.  Like the poor of holy writ, we have them with us always.  But the destruction of animal life is in a totally different category from the accidental calamities of life.  It is deliberate, cold-blooded, persistent, and in its final stage, criminal!  Worst of all, there is no limit to the devilish persistence of the confirmed destroyer, this side of the total extinction of species.  No polar night is too cold, no desert inferno is too hot for the man who pursues wild life for commercial purposes.  The rhytina has been exterminated in the far north, the elephant seals on Kerguelen are being exterminated in the far south, and midway, in the desert mountains of Lower California a fine species of mountain sheep is rapidly being shot into oblivion.

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LARGE MAMMALS COMPLETELY EXTERMINATED

THE ARIZONA ELK, (Cervus merriami).—­Right at our very door, under our very noses and as it were only yesterday, a well-defined species of American elk has been totally exterminated.  Until recently the mountains of Arizona and New Mexico were inhabited by a light-colored elk of smaller size than the Wyoming species, whose antlers possessed on each side only one brow tine instead of two.  The exact history of the blotting out of that species has not yet been written, but it seems that its final extinction occurred about 1901.  Its extermination was only a routine incident of the devilish general slaughter of American big game that by 1900 had wiped out nearly everything killable over a large portion of the Rocky Mountain region and the Great Plains.