Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914). Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen. 1904.
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and he rolled over and over like a shot rabbit. Each of my first three bullets had inflicted a mortal wound.”
That was hunting of the kind that calls for a stout heart. When I think of it, there comes to me by contrast the echo of the laugh we had, when he lay with his Rough-Riders at Montauk Point, over my one unlucky experience with a “silver-tip.” I have a letter yet, dated Camp Wikoff, Montauk, September 9, 1898, in which he has scribbled after the business on hand, an added note: “Good luck on your hunt! Death to grizzly-bear cubs.” I can hear his laugh now. I am not a mighty hunter, but I know a bear when I see it—at least so I thought—and when, wandering in the forest primeval, far from camp, with only a fowling-piece, I beheld a movement in the top of a big pine, I had no difficulty in making out a bearcub there with the last rays of the sun silvering the tip of its brief tail—a “silver-tip” then; and likewise my knowledge of the world in general, if not of wood-craft, told me that where the cub was the mamma bear would not be far away. It was therefore, I insist, proof of fearless courage that I deliberately shot
