If I had my way, the first act in creating a game refuge should be to insure the survival of the few that remain.  These bears are pitifully wary as compared with their former bold and domineering attitude; they would gladly keep out of harm’s way if only they might be allowed to do so.  It is time, it seems to me, to call a truce to man’s hostility to them, once a foe not to be despised.  Now they are so completely conquered that man owes it to himself not too relentlessly to pursue a vanquished enemy.  When we think of the enormous period of time, involving millions of years, required to develop a creature of such gigantic strength as the California grizzly, so splendidly equipped to win his living and to maintain his unquestioned supremacy—­the Sequoia of the animal kingdom of America—­and when we contemplate this creature as the very embodiment of vitality in the wild life, we shall not wantonly permit him to be exterminated, and thus deprive those who are to come after us of seeing him alive, and of seeing him where his presence adds a fine note of distinction to the landscape, a fitting adjunct to the glacier-formed ravines of the Sierras.

The domestic sheep, which were once the prey of the bears, no longer range in these forests, and so far as the depredation of bears among cattle is concerned, it is of so trifling a nature as practically not to exist.  It would seem that a nation of so vast wealth as ours could afford to indulge in an occasional extravagance, such as keeping alive these few remaining bears; of maintaining them at the public expense simply for the gratification of curiosity, of a quite legitimate curiosity on the part of those who love the wild life, and every last vanishing trait that remains of its old, keen energy.  So far as danger to man is involved by their presence, the experience in the Yellowstone National Park is that there is no such danger; when allowed to do so, they draw their rations as meekly as a converted Apache; if they err at all, it is on the side of exaggerated and rather pitiful humility.

It is mainly with the deer, however, that we are concerned.  It is out of the question for any thinking man who takes the slightest interest in these creatures to stand passively by and permit them to be exterminated.  To prevent such a catastrophe proper measures must be taken.  The hunting community increases with as great rapidity as that with which game decreases.  Where one man hunted twenty-five years ago, a score hunt for big game to-day.  Unfortunately it has become the fashion.  It is a diversion involving no danger and, for those that understand it, but slight hardship.  If people are to continue to have this source of amusement, some well matured and concerted plan must be devised to insure the continuance of game.  Never in the past history of the world has man held at his command the same potential control of wild beasts as now, the same power to concentrate against them the forces of science.  Man’s