The Toronto Daily Star
NOVEMBER 3, 1923
In a popular conception Europe is a very overcrowded, overcivilized, altogether decadent place where what shooting is done is committed by fashionably dressed languid members of the aristocracy who shoot hundreds of braces of protected grouse or woodcock driven past them by beaters, between pauses for cups of tea and snapshots by the photographers for the leading illustrated weeklies.
Hunting, to be never confused with shooting under pain of social ostracism, consists of these same popular social figures donning pink coats and remaining in an upright position on top of a horse as long as possible as near as practicable to the rear of a pack of dogs who pursue a fox across the fields and meadows of the loyal and cheering peasantry.
Not so on the continent. Hunting is the great national sport of France, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Czechoslovakia and points east. It is called hunting, “la chasse,” and it means shooting. And there is plenty to shoot. Right now you would have extreme difficulty getting inside of any local train leaving Paris in any direction on Saturday or Sunday because of the thousands of hunters, their shotguns slung over the shoulders, leaving for a weekend in the country.
There is probably more game within twenty miles of Paris, France, than within twenty miles of Toronto, Ontario. There is good deer hunting in Germany, good snipe and plover shooting in the Ruhr, good partridge and rabbit shooting in almost every department of France and dangerous big-game hunting in France, Belgium and Germany.
It is a moot question whether there is any dangerous big-game hunting in Ontario, excluding the skunk and porcupine. The hunter in the woods is in fully as much danger from the moose as though he were stationed in the members’ enclosure at the Woodbine taking potshots at the favorite. The black bear wants just one thing from the hunter, distance. Wolves, I understand, are a tender subject.
But there is scattered all over Europe a really dangerous game animal. He is the wild boar and every year incautious hunters are killed by him. Last year there were two hunters killed in France alone by wild boars. During the war when there was almost no shooting game flourished unchecked all over Europe. One of the best little flourishers of them all was the wild boar.
In some districts, like the wild Auvergne country and parts of the wooded slopes of the Côte d’Or down below Dôle, boars became so numerous that they destroyed crops and were a public menace. One farmer last winter had shot eighteen on his place in less than a year. The nineteenth was a big, chunky, viciously built fellow that the farmer saw out of his window one snowy morning. He took down the old shotgun and fired from the back door. The boar went into a thicket. The farmer followed him and the boar charged with a squealing grunt of rage and bowling the farmer over, savaged him with his tusks. A wild boar’s tusk is like a razor and about three to six inches long. It makes a ghastly wound and once a boar gets a man down it keeps driving into him in an insane rage until the man is dead. The farmer’s wife finally killed the boar.
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A wild boar will weigh up to 200 pounds and ounce for ounce and pound for pound is about as fierce and vicious an animal as there is. It is also one of the very finest things to eat in the world and as “sanglier” and “marcassin,” the latter young boar, is one of the reasons that make Dijon the place that all good eaters hope to go when they die.
An American pal of mine named Krebs decided to go boar hunting. He went down to a little town in the Côte d’Or in the foothills of the blue wall of the Jura where the boars were reported to be tearing up the crops and intimidating the population.
All the hunters in the place turned out. The reputation of the little town, we can call it Cauxonne, was at stake. Speeches were made in the local café. Impassioned appeals. An American had come all the way to Cauxonne to hunt boars. Such a thing. Further, he was an American journalist. If Cauxonne revealed itself as the great boar-hunting center that every citizen assembled knew it to be, Tourists, with a capital T, would flock in from all over the world. What an opportunity! The American must get boars. It was an affair touching the honor, the future, and the prosperity, above all, brothers, the prosperity of Cauxonne. The excitement lasted until well into the night.
Krebs was wakened before daylight. The boar hunters were assembled at the café. They were waiting for him. He arrived half asleep. Inside the café were about twenty men. Bicycles were stacked outside. Hunting the boar was nothing to be undertaken on an empty stomach. They must have a small drink of some sort. Something to warm the stomach.
Krebs suggested coffee. What a joke. What a supreme and delightful joker the American. Coffee. Imagine it. Coffee before going off to hunt the sanglier. What a thing. Drôle enough, eh?
Marc. Marc was the stuff. No one ever started after the wild boar without first a little marc. Patron, the marc.
The marc was produced.
Now marc, pronounced mar as in marvelous, is one of the three most powerful drinks known. As an early-morning potion it can give vodka, douzico, absinthe, grappa, and other famous stomach destroyers two furlongs and beat them as far as Zev beat Papyrus. It is the great specialty of Burgundy and the Côte d’Or and three drops of it on the tongue of a canary will send him out in a grim, deadly, silent search for eagles.
The marc was produced. It passed from hand to hand and from hand to mouth. Cauxonne was practically already famous. They must celebrate. Had not the American all but already shot dozens, nay hundreds, of wild boars? There was no doubt of it. Cauxonne was one of the great tourist centers of France. But had not the terrific slaughter of boars soon to be accomplished destroyed one of her greatest assets? No. It was no matter. Nothing mattered. Another bottle of marc, Patron.
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At nine o’clock in the morning the boar hunters mounted their fleet of bicycles and tore at a terrific clip in a northerly direction out of town. Stragglers and bent and damaged bicycles were found along the road all day. The main body of hunters slept very comfortably in a stretch of woods about four miles north of town, their heads pillowed on their bicycles. Krebs hunted hard all day and shot a large crow. He left for Paris that night, afraid that if he stayed the boar hunters would want to repeat the hunt next morning.
Germany is full of game. In tramping through the Black Forest, I have time and again seen deer, browsing on some little hillside just out of the edge of the forest, or in the evening coming down to drink at a little trout stream way back in the hills. Nearly every well-to-do German with sporting proclivities in the Schwarzwald or the mountainous, forest country of South Germany has one or two staghounds and I have a standing invitation to hunt any fall with Herr Bugler of Triberg.
There are lots of snipe, plover and woodcock all down through the Rhineland and around the Ruhr and good duck shooting along the Rhine in the spring. Last spring, coming down the river from Mayence to Cologne, we passed great rafts of ducks. The British officers in the garrison at Cologne had very good pheasant, grouse and quail shooting in the country within sight of the great cathedral towers.
Switzerland is the home of the chamois. I have never come any closer to the chamois than in the form of a gasoline strainer. He produces a very fine grade of celluloid horn, however, which is used to ornament the alpenstocks that are sold to tourists. So he cannot be regarded as extinct. But as a popular sporting animal he is about on the same plane as the wooden carved bears that are sold in Berne.
There are still chamois but they live very high and far off and are very rarely shot and only then by an expert mountaineer and climber who works with field glasses and a telescope sight. Switzerland is a good game country though. Full of rabbits, big snow hares, partridges and the giant black cock. Black cock, or capercailzie, are a sort of glorified partridge with glossy, iridescent plumage. They are larger than a big orpington chicken, terrific flyers, and live in the forests of Switzerland and nearly all central and western Europe.
Italy is probably the only country in the world where they not only shoot but eat foxes. In the fall in Milan you will see hanging outside the door of the butcher’s shop two or three deer, a long line of pheasants and quail, and one or two red foxes. Everybody who can get a license and get out hunts in Italy. The shooting is probably poorer than in any other country in Europe, because no sorts of birds seem to be protected and all day long in the hills you hear the boom of the black-powder fowling pieces and in the evening see the hunters coming into town with their game bags full of thrushes, robins, warblers, finches, woodpeckers and only an occasional game bird. Next day in the marketplace you can see long lines of songbirds of every sort hung up for sale. Even sparrows are sold.
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To get a license to shoot in Italy you must have a certificate that you have never been in jail signed by the chief of police and the mayor of your hometown. This gave me some difficulty when I first applied for a shooting license. In the Abruzzi, the wild, mountainous part of Italy lying up in the country from Naples, there are still bears. There are wolves too, in the wild wastes of the Campagna, within thirty miles of Rome. It is a safe statement that there will be wolves in Italy long after they are exterminated in Ontario. For the Roman wolves have existed since long before the Christian religion first came to Rome, while less than five hundred years ago the American continent was undiscovered.
Belgium is a good shooting country and the Ardennes forest is one of the greatest wild-boar-hunting parts of Europe.
In the Pyrenees, in the south of France and north of Spain, there is perhaps the wildest country of western Europe. Every year hunters kill dozens of bears in the Pyrenees mountain fastnesses.
What is the reason for the continued existence of game in good numbers in the most highly civilized and well-settled centers of the world while in many of the United States, like Indiana, Ohio and Illinois, game is rapidly being exterminated? It is careful protection, rigidly enforced closed seasons, and the fact of government-owned forests, which are really farmed for timber rather than cut over and denuded of trees. Indiana was once a timber country. So was the Lower Peninsula of Michigan. Today there is hardly a patch of virgin timber in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Michigan deer hunters are already going north into Ontario. Ontario’s supply of game seems inexhaustible. But wait until the steady hunting, the destruction of timber and the forest fires have kept up for fifty years. See the result that has been obtained in the States by the motorcar that allows a party to hunt over a hundred miles where they used to be able to hunt over five. The prairie chicken, one of the finest game birds, has been practically wiped out. Quail have been practically exterminated in many states. The curlew has gone. The wild turkey has gone.
But France will always be a game country. For there are forests in France that were here in Caesar’s time. More important still, there are new forests in France that were not there in Napoleon’s time. Even more important, there will be new forests, a hundred years from now, where today M. Poincaré has looked on only scarred hillsides. And all the forests will be full of game.
The Frenchman likes to hunt. If the game falls off he wants to know the reason why.