The odds are of course very much in favour of the human
being, but we may not realise readily the extreme cunning of hunted
animals. The keen sportsman, who rode by my side pointing out the track of
boar or porcupine, showing where animals had been feeding, and judging how
recently they had passed by difference in the marks too faint for my eyes
to see, confessed that he had spent months on the track of a single
animal, baffled over and over again, but getting back to his quarry
because he had with him the mark of the feet as copied when he tracked it
for the first time.
"No boar has four feet absolutely identical with those of another boar,"
he said, "so when once you have the prints the animal must leave the
forest altogether and get off to the Atlas, or you will find him in the
end. He may double repeatedly on his own tracks, he may join a herd and
travel with them for days into the thick scrub, where the dogs are badly
torn in following him, but he can never get away, and the hunter following
his tracks learns to realise in the frenzied changes and manoeuvres of the
beast pursued, its consciousness of his pursuit." In these matters the
trained and confirmed hunter's heart grows cold as the physiologist's,
while his senses wax more and more acute, and near to the level of those
of his prey.
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