The wealthy American and Canadian joyously buys a tract of wilderness, fences it, stocks it with game both great and small, and provides game keepers for all the year round.  At first he has an idea that he will “hunt” therein, and that his guests will hunt also, and actually kill game.  In a mild way, this fiction sometimes is maintained for years.  The owner may each year shoot two or three head of his surplus big game, and his tenderfoot guests who don’t know what real hunting is may also kill something, each year.  But in most of the American preserves with which I am well acquainted, the gentlemanly “sport” of “hunting big game” is almost a joke.  The trouble is, usually, the owner becomes so attached to his big game, and admires it so sincerely, he has not the heart to kill it himself; and he finds no joy whatever in seeing it shot down by others!

In this country the slaughter of game for the market is not considered a gentlemanly pastime, even though there is a surplus of preserve-bred game that must be reduced.  To the average American, the slaughter of half-tame elk, deer and birds that have been bred in a preserve does not appeal in the least.  He knows that in the protection of a preserve, the wild creatures lose much of their fear of man, and become easy marks; and shall a real sportsman go out with a gun and a bushel of cartridges, on a pony, and without warning betray the confidence of the wild in terms of fire and blood?  Others may do it if they like; but as a rule that is not what an American calls “sport.”  One wide-awake and well-armed grizzly bear or mountain sheep outwitted on a mountain-side is worth more as a sporting proposition than a quarter of a mile of deer carcasses laid out side by side on a nice park lawn to be photographed as “one day’s kill.”

In America, the shooting of driven game is something of which we know little save by hearsay.  In Europe, it is practiced on everything from Scotch grouse to Italian ibex.  The German Crown Prince, in his fascinating little volume “From My Hunting Day-Book,” very neatly fixes the value of such shooting, as a real sportsman’s proposition, in the following sentence: 

“The shooting of driven game is merely a question of marksmanship, and is after all more in the nature of a shooting exercise than sport.”

I have seen some shooting in preserves that was too tame to be called sport; but on the other hand I can testify that in grouse shooting as it is done behind the dogs on Mr. Carnegie’s moor at Skibo, it is sport in which the hunter earns every grouse that falls to his gun.  At the same time, also, I believe that the shooting of madly running ibex, as it is done by the King of Italy in his three mountain preserves, is sufficiently difficult to put the best big-game hunter to the test.  There are times when shooting driven game calls for far more dexterity with the rifle than is ordinarily demanded in the still-hunt.