SASKATCHEWAN.—­This is another of the too-liberal provinces having no real surplus of big game with which to sustain for any length of time an excess of generosity.  I am told that in this province there is now a great deal of open country around each wild animal.  And yet, it cheerfully offers two moose, two elk, two caribou and two antelope per season to each licensed gunner or sportsman.  The limit is too generous by half.  Why throw away an extra $250 worth of game with each license?  That is precisely what the people of Saskatchewan are doing to-day.

And that antelope-killing!  It should be stopped at once, and for ten years.

YUKON.—­This province permits the sale of all the finest and best wild game within its borders,—­moose, elk, caribou, bison, musk-ox, sheep and goats!  The flesh of all these may be sold during the open season, and for sixty days thereafter.  Of the species named above, the barren ground caribou is the only one regarding which we need not worry; because that species still exists in millions.  The Osborn caribou (Rangifer osborni), can be exterminated in our own times, because it is nowhere really numerous, and it inhabits exposed situations.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XXXVIII

PRIVATE GAME PRESERVES

Primarily, in the early days of the Man-on-Horseback, the self-elected and predatory lords of creation evolved the private game preserve as a scheme for preventing other fellows from shooting, and for keeping the game sacred to slaughter by themselves.  The idea of conserving the game was a fourth-rate consideration, the first being the estoppel of the other man.  The old-world owner of a game preserve delights in the annual killing of the surplus game, and we have even heard it whispered that in the Dark Ages there were kings who enjoyed the wholesale slaughter of deer, wild boar, pheasants and grouse.  If we may accept as true the history of sport in Europe, there have been men who have loved slaughter with a genuine blood-lust that is quite foreign to the real nature-loving sportsman.

In America, the impulse is different.  Here, there is raging a genuine fever for private game preserves.  Some of those already existing are of fine proportions, and cost fortunes to create.  Every true sportsman who is rich enough to own a private game preserve, sooner or later acquires one.  You will find them scattered throughout the temperate zone of North America from the Bay of Fundy to San Diego.  I have had invitations to visit preserves in an unbroken chain from the farthest corner of Quebec to the Pacific Coast, and from Grand Island, Lake Superior to the Gulf of Mexico.  It was not necessarily to hunt, and kill something, but to see the game, and the beauties of nature.