How hard the conditions are for the hunter no one would believe who has not himself seen the country.  In many places the hills are covered with an almost impenetrable chaparral of scrub oak, buckthorn, greasewood, manzanita, and deer-brush, in which the wary deer have taken refuge.  In and through these, guided sometimes by the tracks of the deer, or encouraged by the presence of such tracks even if he cannot follow them, up steep mountains, exposed to the heat of the sun, in dust, over rocks, and without water, toils the hunter, who accounts himself lucky if, by tramping scores of miles through this sort of impediment, he succeeds, after days of toil, in killing his deer.  Perhaps he has been without fresh meat for a week or a fortnight, and often on short commons; is it to be wondered at that when a shot offers he avails himself of the opportunity even if it be a doe that he fires at?  How can the deer withstand such concentration of fury?

Dr. Bartlett, Forest Supervisor of the Trabuco and San Jacinto Reserves, assured me that the number of licenses to hunt in those two reserves issued annually exceeded, in his opinion, the entire number of deer within their boundaries.

Everyone now is ready to admit that the extermination of the herd of buffalo in the seventies was permitted by a crude, short-sighted policy on our part as a nation, and should we of the early twentieth century allow the remaining deer, elk, mountain sheep, and antelope, the last of the great bears, and the innumerable small creatures of the wild, to be crowded off the face of the earth, we should be depriving our children and our children’s children of a satisfaction and of a source of interest which they would keenly regret.  It would be well if we bore in mind that we stand in a sort of fiduciary relation to the people who are to come after us, so far as the wild portion of our land is concerned, those few remote tracts still untarnished by man’s craze to convert everything in the world, or beneath the surface of the earth, into dollars for his own immediate profit.  He has the same short-sighted policy in his hunting.  He is content to gratify the impulse of the hour without thought of those who are to spend their lives here when we have led our brief careers and have gone to a well merited oblivion, to reap our reward—­

Heads without names, no more remembered.

Let us look this matter squarely in the face.  We are the inheritors of these domains.  It is one of the most precious assets of posterity.  Here, year by year, in steadily increasing proportion, as wisdom more prevails, will men take comfort; and as the comprehension of nature’s charms penetrates their minds will they find content.  One chief satisfaction that every American feels from the mere fact of his nationality is the full assurance in his heart that any measure founded on sound reason and prompted by generous impulse will receive, if not immediate acceptance, at all events eventual recognition.