No one, but he who has partaken thereof, can understand the
keen delight of hunting in lonely lands.
For him is the joy of the horse well ridden and the rifle well held; for
the long days of toil and hardship, resolutely endured, and crowned at the end
with triumph. In after years there shall
come forever to his mind the memory of endless prairies shimmering in the
bright sun, of vast snow – clad wastes lying desolate under grey skies; of melancholy
marshes; of the rush of mighty rivers; of the breath of evergreen forest in
summer; of the crooning of ice – armored pines at the touch of the winds in
winter; of cataracts roaring between hoary mountain masses; of all the
innumerable sights and sounds of the wilderness; of its immensity and mystery;
and of the silences that brood in its still depths,
Theodore Roosevelt “The Wilderness Hunter” (1891)
