Classic Poem

Braves! that go out with your guides and gold and the polished tube of steel,
Playing safe with the hunting-pack, the trap and the prism-glass;
Slaying the Moose or the Silver-tip, e'en as you pause and kneel
Loosing the power that ye wield for shame. . . .
So do our monarchs pass.

Not for the hunger of babes ye hunt; for mother or aged sire;
Not to the Red Gods offering the blood of your lust to kill;
Not with the strength of your brawn and thew matching the fury-fire
Of the beast that fights for the life it loves; nay! but with sneaking skill

Ye speed the sting of the spreading slug, giving your lust a name;
Sport! to shatter the buoyant life, to sever the liver thread!
Then ye stand with a gun in hand, grinning your pictured shame;
" See at my feet the mighty thing that I, yea, that I struck dead! "

When ye have toiled on the foot-worn trail till the hunger-pinch is keen;
When ye have stood as a man with men earning your wage through strife
Of the outland ways, ye have fair excuse to kill — an the kill be clean;
Then, perchance, will the vaunt be lost in fostering life with life.

Sport! to slay with no cause to slay — not even the pride of hate!
Courage? then stand to an even chance, facing a foeman's gun
Out in the open, eye to eye, for Honor of Kin or State,
Oh, ye who slink in the woven blind seeking to kill — for fun!

Would that ye lay by the wounded thing that crawls to the brush to die;
Would that ye knew the biting pain and that lingering thirst of hell,
Writhing down to the darksome pit as ye vainly implored the sky,
Asking It if there once was God that made ye and loved ye well!

Perhaps, when the Hand that fashioned all shall strike, and the earth be dumb
Out of the dim and the voiceless vast — back to their own again —
Herd and band and the mated beasts, fearless and free, shall come,
Knowing naught of the ancient fear of a tribe that were named as men.