Page 214 - Our Vanishing Wild Life

192 OUR VANISHING WILD LIFE
their goal! As spoil-sports, those Russian officers were the champions of the world.
Seven hundred miles southeastward of the Altai Mountains of western China, guarded by the dangerous hostility of savage native tribes, there exists and awaits the scientific explorer, according to report, an undis- coveredwildhorse. TheBicoloredWildHorseisblackandwhite,and joy awaits the zoologist or sportsman who sees it first. Evidently it will not soon be exterminated by modern rifles.
The Impenetrable Forests.—Although the mountains of central Asia will in time be cleared of their big game,—when by hook and by crook the natives secure plenty of modern firearms, —there are places in the FarEastthatweknowwillcontainbiggameforeverandaday. Take the Malay Peninsula, Borneo and Sumatra as examples.
Mr. C. William Beebe, who recently has visited the Far East, has described how the state of Selangor, between Malacca and Penang, has taken on many airs of improvement since 1878, and sections of Sarawak Territory are being cut down and burned for the growing of rubber. Despite this I am trying to think that those developments menace the total volume of the wild life of those regions but little. I wonder if those tangled, illimitable, ever-renewing jungles yet know that their faces havebeenscratched. Whitemenneverwillexterminatethebiggame of the really dense jungles of the eastern tropics; but with enough axes, snares, guns and cartridges the natives may be able to accomplish it!
In Malayana there are some jungles so dense, so tangled with lianas and so thorny with Livistonias and rattan that nothing larger than a catcanmakewaythroughthem. Therearethousandsofsquaremiles so boggy, so swampy, so dark, gloomy and mosquito-ridden that all men fear them and avoid them, and in them rubber ctdture must be impossible. In those silent places the gaur, the rhino, the Malay sambar, the clouded leopard and the orang-utan surely are measurably safe from the game- bagsandmarketgunnersoftheshootingworld. Itisgoodtothinkthat there is an equatorial belt of jungle clear around the world, in Central and South America as well as in the old World, in which there will be little extermination in our day, except of birds for the feather market. But the open plains, open mountains, and open forests of Asia and Aus- tralasia are in different case. Eventually they will be "shot out."
China, all save Yunnan and western Mongolia, is now horribly barren of wild life. Can it ever be brought back? We think it can not. The millions of population are too many ; and except in the great forest tracts, the spread of modern firearms will make an end of the game. Already the pheasants are being swept out of China for the London market,andextinctionisstaringseveralspeciesintheface. Onthewhole, the pheasants of the Old World are being hit hard by the rubber-planting craze. Mr.Beebedeclaresthatowingtotheinrushofaggressivecapital, the haunts of many species of pheasants are being denuded of all their natural cover, and some mountain species that are limited to small areas are practically certain to be exterminated at an early date.