The hunter, in short, asks for his happiness only to be alone
with what he hunts; the sportsman, after his day's sport, must needs
hasten home to publish the size of the "bag," and to wring from his
fellow-men the glory and applause which he has not the strength and
simplicity to find in the game itself.
But if the true hunter is rare, the union of the hunter and the artist is
rarer still. It demands not only the close familiarity, the loving
observation, and the sympathy, but also the faculty of creation--the eye
which selects what is constructive and beautiful, and passes over what is
superfluous and inharmonious, and the hand skilful to carry out what the
imagination conceives. In the man whose work I am about to consider, these
qualities are developed in a remarkable degree, though it was not until he
was a man grown, and had fought with distinction through the civil war,
that he himself became aware of the artistic power that was in him. The
events of his life, could they be rehearsed here, would form a tale of
adventure and vicissitude more varied and stirring than is often found in
fiction. He has spent by himself days and weeks in the vast solitudes of
our western prairies and southern morasses.
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