THE GENTLEMEN SPORTSMEN.—­These men are the very bone and sinew of wild life preservation.  These are the men who have red blood in their veins, who annually hear the red gods calling, who love the earth, the mountains, the woods, the waters and the sky.  These are the men to whom “the bag” is a matter of small importance, and to whom “the bag-limit” has only academic interest; because in nine cases out of ten they do not care to kill all that the law allows.  The tenth and exceptional time is when the bag limit is “one.”  A gentleman sportsman is a man who protects game, stops shooting when he has “enough”—­without reference to the legal bag-limit, and whenever a species is threatened with extinction, he conscientiously refrains from shooting it.

The true sportsmen of the world are the men who once were keen in the stubble or on the trail, but who have been halted by the general slaughter and the awful decrease of game.  Many of them, long before a hair has turned gray, have hung up their guns forever, and turned to the camera.  These are the men who are willing to hand out checks, or to leave their mirth and their employment and go to the firing line at their state capitols, to lock horns with the bull-headed killers of wild life who recognize no check or limit save the law.

These are the men who have done the most to put upon our statute books the laws that thus far have saved some of our American game from total annihilation, and who (so we firmly believe) will be chiefly instrumental in tightening the lines of protection around the remnant.  These are the men who are making and stocking game preserves, public and private, great and small.

[Illustration:  THE REGULAR ARMY OF DESTRUCTION, WAITING FOR THE FIRST OF OCTOBER Each Year 2,642,274 Well-Armed Men Take the Field Against the Remnant of Wild Birds and Mammals In the United States.  Drawn by Dan Beard]

If you wish to know some of these men, I will tell you where to find a goodly number of them; and when you find them, you will also find that they are men you would enjoy camping with!  Look in the membership lists of the Boone and Crockett Club, Camp-Fire Club of America, the Lewis and Clark Club of Pittsburgh, the New York State League, the Shikar Club of London, the Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the British Empire, the Massachusetts Fish and Game Protective Association, the Springfield (Mass.) Sportsmen’s Association, the Camp-Fire Clubs of Detroit and Chicago, and the North American Fish and Game Protective Association.

There are other bodies of sportsmen that I would like to name, were space available, but to set down here a complete list is quite impossible.

The best and the most of the game-protective laws now in force in the United States and Canada were brought into existence through the initiative and efforts of the real sportsmen of those two nations.  But for their activity, exerted on the right side, the settled portion of North America would to-day be an utterly gameless land!  Even though the sportsmen have taken their toll of the wilds, they have made the laws that have saved a remnant of the game until 1912.