Their Feeling Was Similar To That Of The Man Who Is Inspired
By The Hunting Instinct In Its Primitive Form, As Described By Richard
Jefferies.
To kill the creatures with bullets at a distance was no
satisfaction to him:
He must with his own hands drive the shaft into
the quivering flesh - he must feel its quivering and see the blood gush
up beneath his hand. One smiles at a vision of the gentle Richard
Jefferies slaughtering wild cattle in the palaeolithic way, but that
feeling and desire which he describes with such passion in his _Story
of My Heart_, that survival of the past, is not uncommon in the hearts
of hunters, and if we were ever to drop out of our civilization I
fancy we should return rather joyfully to the primitive method. And so
in those dark times in the Argentine Republic when, during half a
century of civil strife which followed on casting off the Spanish
"yoke," as it was called, the people of the plains had developed an
amazing ferocity, they loved to kill a man not with a bullet but in a
manner to make them know and feel that they were really and truly
killing.
As a child those dreadful deeds did not impress me, since I did not
witness them myself, and after looking at that stain of blood on the
grass the subject faded out of my mind. But as time went on and I
heard more about this painful subject I began to realize what it
meant.
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