The wapiti is the largest and stateliest deer in the world. A full-grown bull is as big as a steer. The antlers are the most magnificent trophies yielded by any game animal of America, save the giant Alaskan moose. When full-grown they are normally of twelve tines; frequently the tines are more numerous, but the increase in their number has no necessary accompaniment in increase in the size of the antlers. The length, massiveness, roughness, spread, and symmetry of the antlers must all be taken into account in rating the value of a head. Antlers over fifty inches in length are large; if over sixty, they are gigantic. Good heads are getting steadily rarer under the persecution which has thinned out the herds.

Next to the bison the wapiti is of all the big game animals of North America the one whose range has most decreased. Originally it was found from the Pacific coast east across the Alleghanies, through New York to the Adirondacks, through Pennsylvania into western New Jersey, and far down into the mid-country of Virginia and the Carolinas. It extended northward into Canada, from the Great Lakes to Vancouver; and southward into Mexico, along the Rockies. Its range thus corresponded roughly with that of the bison, except that it went farther west and not so far north. In the early colonial days so little heed was paid by writers to the teeming myriads of game that it is difficult to trace the wapiti’s distribution in the Atlantic coast region. It was certainly killed out of the Adirondacks long before the period when the backwoodsmen were settling the valleys of the Alleghany Mountains; there they found the elk abundant, and the stately creatures roamed in great bands over Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana when the first settlers made their way into what are now these States, at the outbreak of the Revolution. These first settlers were all hunters, and they followed the wapiti (or, as they always called it, the elk) with peculiar eagerness. In consequence its numbers were soon greatly thinned, and about the beginning of the present century it disappeared from that portion of its former range lying south of the Great Lakes and between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi. In the northern Alleghanies it held its own much longer, the last individual of which I have been able to get record having been killed in Pennsylvania in 1869. In the forests of northern Wisconsin, northern Michigan, and Minnesota wapiti existed still longer, and a very few individuals may still be found. A few are left in Manitoba. When Lewis and Clark and Pike became the pioneers among the explorers, army officers, hunters, and trappers who won for our people the great West, they found countless herds of wapiti throughout the high plains country from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains. Throughout this region it was exterminated almost as rapidly as the bison, and by the early eighties there only remained a few scattered individuals, in bits of rough country such as the Black Hills, the sand-hills of Nebraska, and certain patches of Bad Lands along the Little Missouri. Doubtless stragglers exist even yet in one or two of these localities. But by the time the great buffalo herds of the plains were completely exterminated, in 1883, the wapiti had likewise ceased to be a plains animal; the peculiar Californian form had also been well-nigh exterminated.

The nature of its favorite haunts was the chief factor in causing it to suffer more than any other game in America, save the bison, from the persecution of hunters and settlers. The boundaries of its range have shrunk in far greater proportion than in the case of any of our other game animals, save only the great wild ox, with which it was once so commonly associated. The moose, a beast of the forest, and the caribou, which, save in the far North, is also a beast of the forest, have in most places greatly diminished in numbers, and have here and there been exterminated altogether from outlying portions of their range; but the wapiti, which, when free to choose, preferred to frequent the plains and open woods, has completely vanished from nine-tenths of the territory over which it roamed a century and a quarter ago. Although it was never found in any one place in such enormous numbers as the bison and the caribou, it nevertheless went in herds far larger than the herds of any other American game save the two mentioned, and was formerly very much more abundant within the area of its distribution than was the moose within the area of its distribution.

This splendid deer affords a good instance of the difficulty of deciding what name to use in treating of our American game. On the one hand, it is entirely undesirable to be pedantic; and on the other hand, it seems a pity, at a time when speech is written almost as much as spoken, to use terms which perpetually require explanation in order to avoid confusion. The wapiti is not properly an elk at all; the term wapiti is unexceptionable, and it is greatly to be desired that it should be generally adopted. But unfortunately it has not been generally adopted. From the time when our backwoodsmen first began to hunt the animal among the foothills of the Appalachian chains to the present day, it has been universally known as elk wherever it has been found. In ordinary speech it is never known as anything else, and only an occasional settler or hunter would understand what the word wapiti referred to. The book name is a great deal better than the common name; but after all, it is only a book name. The case is almost exactly parallel to that of the buffalo, which was really a bison, but which lived as the buffalo, died as the buffalo, and left its name imprinted on our landscape as the buffalo. There is little use in trying to upset a name which is imprinted in our geography in hundreds of such titles as Elk Ridge, Elk Mountain, Elkhorn River. Yet in the books it is often necessary to call it the wapiti in order to distinguish it both from its differently named close kinsfolk of the Old World, and from its more distant relatives with which it shares the name of elk.

Disregarding the Pacific coast form of Vancouver and the Olympian Mountains, the wapiti is now a beast of the Rocky Mountain region proper, especially in western Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado. Throughout these mountains its extermination, though less rapid than on the plains, has nevertheless gone on with melancholy steadiness. In the early nineties it was still as abundant as ever in large regions in western Wyoming and Montana and northwestern Colorado. In northwestern Colorado the herds are now represented by only a few hundred individuals. In western Montana they are scattered over a wider region and are protected by the denser timber, but are nowhere plentiful. They have nearly vanished from the Big Horn Mountains. They are still abundant in and around their great nursery and breeding-ground, the Yellowstone National Park. If this park could be extended so as to take in part of the winter range to the south, it would help to preserve them, to the delight of all lovers of nature, and to the great pecuniary benefit of the people of Wyoming and Montana. But at present the winter range south of the park is filling up with settlers, and unless the conditions change, those among the Yellowstone wapiti which would normally go south will more and more be compelled to winter among the mountains, which will mean such immense losses from starvation and deep snow that the southern herds will be woefully thinned.^[5] Surely all men who care for nature, no less than all men who care for big game hunting, should combine to try to see that not merely the States but the Federal authorities make every effort, and are given every power, to prevent the extermination of this stately and beautiful animal, the lordliest of the deer kind in the entire world.

The wapiti, like the bison, and even more than the whitetail deer, can thrive in widely varying surroundings. It is at home among the high mountains, in the deep forests, and on the treeless, level plains. It is rather omnivorous in its tastes, browsing and grazing on all kinds of trees, shrubs and grasses. These traits, and its hardihood, make it comparatively easy to perpetuate in big parks and forest preserves in a semi-wild condition; and it has thriven in such preserves and parks in many of the Eastern States. As it does not, by preference, dwell in such tangled forests as are the delight of the moose and the whitetail deer, it vanishes much quicker than either when settlers appear in the land. In the mountains and foothills its habitat is much the same as that of the mule-deer, the two animals being often found in the immediate neighborhood of each other. In such places the superior size and value of the wapiti put it at a disadvantage in the keen struggle for life, and when the rifle-bearing hunter appears upon the scene, it is killed out long before its smaller kinsman.

Moreover, the wapiti is undoubtedly subject to queer freaks of panic stupidity, or what seems like a mixture of tameness and of puzzled terror. At these times a herd will remain almost motionless, the individuals walking undecidedly to and fro, and neither flinching nor giving any other sign even when hit with a bullet. In the old days it was not uncommon for a professional hunter to destroy an entire herd of wapiti when one of these fits of confusion was on them. Even nowadays they sometimes behave in this way. In 1897, Mr. Ansley Wilcox, of Buffalo, was hunting in the Teton basin. He came across a small herd of wapiti, the first he had ever seen, and opened fire when a hundred and fifty yards distant. They paid no heed to the shots, and after taking three or four at one bull, with seemingly no effect, he ran in closer and emptied his magazine at another, also seemingly without effect, before the herd slowly disappeared. After a few rods, both bulls fell; and on examination it was found that all nine bullets had hit them.

To my mind, the venison of the wapiti is, on the whole, better than that of any other wild game, though its fat, when cooled, at once hardens, like mutton tallow.

In its life habits the wapiti differs somewhat from its smaller relatives. It is far more gregarious, and is highly polygamous. During the spring, while the bulls are growing their great antlers, and while the cows have very young calves, both bulls and cows live alone, each individual for itself. At such time each seeks the most secluded situation, often going very high up on the mountains. Occasionally a couple of bulls lie together, moving around as little as possible. The cow at this time realizes that her calf’s chance of life depends upon her absolute seclusion, and avoids all observation.

As the horns begin to harden the bulls thrash the velvet off against quaking asp, or ash, or even young spruce, splintering and battering the bushes and small trees. The cows and calves begin to assemble; the bulls seek them. But the bulls do not run the cows as among the smaller deer the bucks run the does. The time of the beginning of the rut varies in different places, but it usually takes place in September, about a month earlier than that of the deer in the same locality. The necks of the bulls swell and they challenge incessantly, for, unlike the smaller deer, they are very noisy. Their love and war calls, when heard at a little distance amid the mountains, have a most musical sound. Frontiersmen usually speak of their call as “whistling,” which is not an appropriate term. The call may be given in a treble or in a bass, but usually consists of two or three bars, first rising and then falling, followed by a succession of grunts. The grunts can only be heard when close up. There can be no grander or more attractive chorus than the challenging of a number of wapiti bulls when two great herds happen to approach one another under the moonlight or in the early dawn. The pealing notes echo through the dark valleys as if from silver bugles, and the air is filled with the wild music. Where little molested the wapiti challenge all day long.

They can be easiest hunted during the rut, the hunter placing them, and working up to them, by the sound alone. The bulls are excessively truculent and pugnacious. Each big one gathers a herd of cows about him and drives all possible rivals away from his immediate neighborhood, although sometimes spike bulls are allowed to remain with the herd. Where wapiti are very abundant, however, many of these herds may join together and become partially welded into a mass that may contain thousands of animals. In the old days such huge herds were far from uncommon, especially during the migrations; but nowadays there only remain one or two localities in which wapiti are sufficiently plentiful ever to come together in bands of any size. The bulls are incessantly challenging and fighting one another, and driving around the cows and calves. Each keeps the most jealous watch over his own harem, treating its members with great brutality, and is selfishly indifferent to their fate the instant he thinks his own life in jeopardy. During the rut the erotic manifestations of the bull are extraordinary.

One or two fawns are born about May. In the mountains the cow usually goes high up to bring forth her fawn. Personally I have only had a chance to observe the wapiti in spring in the neighborhood of my ranch in the Bad Lands of the Little Missouri. Here the cow invariably selected some wild, lonely bit of very broken country in which there were dense thickets and some water. There was one such patch some fifteen miles from my ranch, in which for many years wapiti regularly bred. The breeding cow lay by herself, although sometimes the young of the preceding year would lurk in the neighborhood. For the first few days the calf hardly left the bed, and would not move even when handled. Then it began to follow the mother. In this particular region the grass was coarse and rank, save for a few patches in the immediate neighborhood of little alkali springs. Accordingly, it was not much visited by the cattle or by the cowboys. Doubtless in the happier days of the past, when man was merely an infrequent interloper, the wapiti cows had made their nurseries in pleasanter and more fruitful valleys. But in my time the hunted creatures had learned that their only chance was to escape observation. I have known not only cows with young calves, but cows when the calves were out of the spotted coat, and even yearlings, to try to escape by hiding—the great beasts lying like rabbits in some patch of thick brush, while I rode close by. The best hunting horse I ever had, old Manitou, in addition to his other useful qualities, would serve as a guard on such occasions. I would leave him on a little hillock to one side of such a patch of brush, and as he walked slowly about, grazing and rattling his bridle chains, he would prevent the wapiti breaking cover on that side, and give me an additional chance of slipping around toward them—although if the animal was a cow, I never molested it unless in dire need of meat.

Most of my elk-hunting was done among the stupendous mountain masses of the Rockies, which I usually reached after a long journey, with wagon or pack-train, over the desolate plains. Ordinarily I planned to get to the hunting-ground by the end of August, so as to have ample time. By that date the calves were out of the spotted coat, the cows and the young of the preceding year had banded, and the big bulls had come down to join them from the remote recesses in which they had been lying, solitary or in couples, while their antlers were growing. Many bulls were found alone, or, if young, in small parties; but the normal arrangement was for each big bull to have his own harem, around the outskirts of which there were to be found lurking occasional spike bulls or two-year-olds who were always venturing too near and being chased off by the master bull. Frequently several such herds joined together into a great band. Before the season was fairly on, when the bulls had not been worked into actual frenzy, there was not much fighting in these bands. Later they were the scenes of desperate combats. Each master bull strove to keep his harem under his own eyes, and was always threatening and fighting the other master bulls, as well as those bulls whose prowess had proved insufficient hitherto to gain them a band, or who, after having gained one, had been so exhausted and weakened as to succumb to some new aspirant for the leadership. The bulls were calling and challenging all the time, and there was ceaseless turmoil, owing to their fights and their driving the cows around. The cows were more wary than the bulls, and there were so many keen noses and fairly good eyes that it was difficult to approach a herd; whereas the single bulls were so noisy, careless, and excited that it was comparatively easy to stalk them. A rutting wapiti bull is as wicked-looking a creature as can be imagined, swaggering among the cows and threatening the young bulls, his jaws mouthing and working in a kind of ugly leer.

The bulls fight desperately with one another. The two combatants come together with a resounding clash of antlers, and then push and strain with their mouths open. The skin on their necks and shoulders is so thick and tough that the great prongs cannot get through or do more than inflict bruises. The only danger comes when the beaten party turns to flee. The victor pursues at full speed. Usually the beaten one gets off; but if by accident he is caught where he cannot escape, he is very apt to be gored in the flank and killed. Mr. Baillie-Grohman has given a very interesting description of one such fatal duel of which he was an eye-witness on a moonlight night in the mountains. I have never known of the bull trying to protect the cow from any enemy. He battles for her against rivals with intense ferocity; but his attitude toward her, once she is gained, is either that of brutality or of indifference. She will fight for her calf against any enemy which she thinks she has a chance of conquering, although of course not against man. But the bull leaves his family to their fate the minute he thinks there is any real danger. During the rut he is greatly excited, and does not fear a dog or a single wolf, and may join with the rest of the herd of both sexes in trying to chase off one or the other, should he become aware of its approach. But if there is serious danger, his only thought is for himself, and he has no compunctions about sacrificing any of his family. When on the move a cow almost always goes first, while the bull brings up the rear.

In domestication the bulls are very dangerous to human beings, and will kill a man at once if they can get him at a disadvantage; but in a state of nature they rarely indeed overcome their abject terror of humanity, even when wounded and cornered. Of course, if the man comes straight up to him where he cannot get away, a wapiti will fight as, under like circumstances, a blacktail or whitetail will fight, and equally, of course, he is then far more dangerous than his smaller kinsfolk; but he is not nearly so apt to charge as a bull moose. I have never known but two authentic instances of their thus charging. One happened to a hunter named Bennett, on the Little Missouri; the other to a gentleman I met, a doctor, in Meeker, Colorado. The doctor had wounded his wapiti, and as it was in the late fall, followed him easily in the snow. Finally he came upon the wapiti standing where the snow was very deep at the bottom of a small valley, and on his approach the wapiti deliberately started to break his way through the snow toward him, and had almost reached him when he was killed. But for every one such instance of a wapiti’s charging there are a hundred in which a bull moose has charged. Senator Redfield Proctor was charged most resolutely by a mortally hurt bull moose which fell in the death throes just before reaching him; and I could cite case after case of the kind.

The wapiti’s natural gaits are a walk and a trot. It walks very fast indeed, especially if travelling to reach some given point. More than once I have sought to overtake a travelling bull, and have found myself absolutely unable to do so, although it never broke its walk. Of course, if I had not been obliged to pay any heed to cover or wind, I could have run up on it; but the necessity for paying heed to both handicapped me so that I was actually unable to come up to the quarry as it swung steadily on through woodland and open, over rough ground and smooth. Wapiti have a slashing trot, which they can keep up for an indefinite time and over any kind of country. Only a good pony can overtake them when they have had any start and have settled into this trot. If much startled they break into a gallop—the young being always much more willing to gallop than the old. Their gallop is very fast, especially downhill. But they speedily tire under it. A yearling or a two-year-old can keep it up for a couple of miles. A heavy old bull will be done out after a few hundred yards. I once saw a band of wapiti frightened into a gallop down a steep incline where there were also a couple of mule-deer. I had not supposed that wapiti ran as fast as mule-deer, but this particular band actually passed the deer, though the latter were evidently doing their best; the wapiti were well ahead, when, after thundering down the steep, broken incline, they all disappeared into a belt of woodland. In spite of their size, wapiti climb well and go sure-footedly over difficult and dangerous ground. They have a habit of coming out to the edges of cliffs, or on mountain spurs, and looking over the landscape beneath, almost as though they enjoyed the scenery. What their real object is on such occasions I do not know.

The nose of the wapiti is very keen. Its sight is much inferior to that of the antelope, but about as good as a deer’s. Its hearing is also much like that of a deer. When in country where it is little molested, it feeds and moves about freely by day, lying down to rest at intervals, like cattle. Wapiti offer especial attractions to the hunter, and next to the bison are more quickly exterminated than any other kind of game. Only the fact that they possessed a far wider range of habitat than either the mule-deer, the prongbuck, or the moose, has enabled them still to exist. Their gregariousness is also against them. Even after the rut the herds continue together until in midspring the bulls shed their antlers—for they keep their antlers at least two months longer than deer. During the fall, winter, and early spring wapiti are roving, restless creatures. Their habit of migration varies with locality, as among mule-deer. Along the little Missouri, as in the plains country generally, there was no well-defined migration. Up to the early eighties, when wapiti were still plentiful, the bands wandered far and wide, but fitfully and irregularly, wholly without regard to the season, save that they were stationary from May to August. After 1883 there were but a few individuals left, although as late as 1886 I once came across a herd of nine. These surviving individuals had learned caution. The bulls only called by night, and not very frequently then, and they spent the entire year in the roughest and most out-of-the-way places, having the same range both winter and summer. They selected tracts where the ground was very broken and there was much shrubbery and patches of small trees. This tree and bush growth gave them both shelter and food; for they are particularly fond of browsing on the leaves and tender twig ends, though they also eat weeds and grass.

Wherever wapiti dwell among the mountains they make regular seasonal migrations. In northwestern Wyoming they spend the summer in the Yellowstone National Park, but in winter some go south to Jackson’s Hole, while others winter in the park to the northeast. In northwestern Colorado their migrations followed much the same line as those of the mule-deer. In different localities the length of the migration, and even the time, differed. There were some places where the shift was simply from the high mountains down to their foothills. In other places great herds travelled a couple of hundred miles, so that localities absolutely barren one month would be swarming with wapiti the next. In some places the shift took place as early as the month of August; in others not until after the rut, in October or even November; and in some places the rut took place during the migration.

No chase is more fascinating than that of the wapiti. In the old days, when the mighty antlered beasts were found upon the open plains, they could be followed upon horseback, with or without hounds. Nowadays, when they dwell in the mountains, they are to be killed only by the rifle-bearing still-hunter. Needless butchery of any kind of animal is repulsive, but in the case of the wapiti it is little short of criminal. He is the grandest of the deer kind throughout the world, and he has already vanished from most of the places where he once dwelt in his pride. Every true sportsman should feel it incumbent upon him to do all in his power to preserve so noble a beast of the chase from extinction. No harm whatever comes to the species from killing a certain number of bulls; but an excessive number should never be killed, and no cow or calf should under any circumstances be touched. Formerly, when wapiti were plentiful, it would have been folly for hunters and settlers in the unexplored wilderness not to kill wild game for their meat, and occasionally a cow or a calf had to be thus slain; but there is no excuse nowadays for a hunting party killing anything but a full-grown bull.

In a civilized and cultivated country wild animals only continue to exist at all when preserved by sportsmen. The excellent people who protest against all hunting, and consider sportsmen as enemies of wild life, are ignorant of the fact that in reality the genuine sportsman is by all odds the most important factor in keeping the larger and more valuable wild creatures from total extermination. Of course, if wild animals were allowed to breed unchecked, they would, in an incredibly short space of time, render any country uninhabitable by man—a fact which ought to be a matter of elementary knowledge in any community where the average intelligence is above that of certain portions of Hindoostan. Equally, of course, in a purely utilitarian community all wild animals are exterminated out of hand. In order to preserve the wild life of the wilderness at all, some middle ground must be found between brutal and senseless slaughter and the unhealthy sentimentalism which would just as surely defeat its own end by bringing about the eventual total extinction of the game. It is impossible to preserve the larger wild animals in regions thoroughly fit for agriculture; and it is perhaps too much to hope that the larger carnivores can be preserved for merely æsthetic reasons. But throughout our country there are large regions entirely unsuited for agriculture, where, if the people only have foresight, they can, through the power of the State, keep the game in perpetuity. There is no hope of preserving the bison permanently, save in large private parks; but all other game, including not merely deer, but the pronghorn, the splendid bighorn, and the stately and beautiful wapiti, can be kept on the public lands, if only the proper laws are passed, and if only these laws are properly enforced.

Most of us, as we grow older, grow to care relatively less for sport than for the splendid freedom and abounding health of outdoor life in the woods, on the plains, and among the great mountains; and to the true nature lover it is melancholy to see the wilderness stripped of the wild creatures which gave it no small part of its peculiar charm. It is inevitable, and probably necessary, that the wolf and the cougar should go; but the bighorn and white goat among the rocks, the blacktail and wapiti grouped on the mountain-side, the whitetail and moose feeding in the sedgy ponds—these add beyond measure to the wilderness landscape, and if they are taken away they leave a lack which nothing else can quite make good. So it is of those true birds of the wilderness, the eagle and the raven, and, indeed, of all the wild things, furred, feathered, and finned.

A peculiar charm in the chase of the wapiti comes from the wild beauty of the country in which it dwells. The moose lives in marshy forests; if one would seek the white goat or caribou of the northern Rockies, he must travel on foot, pack on back; while the successful chase of the bighorn, perhaps on the whole the manliest of all our sports, means heart-breaking fatigue for any but the strongest and hardiest. The prongbuck, again, must be followed on the desolate, sun-scorched plains. But the wapiti now dwells amid lofty, pine-clad mountains, in a region of lakes and streams. A man can travel in comfort while hunting it, because he can almost always take a pack-train with him, and the country is usually sufficiently open to enable the hunter to enjoy all the charm of distant landscapes. Where the wapiti lives the spotted trout swarm in the brooks, and the woodgrouse fly upward to perch among the tree-tops as the hunter passes them. When hunting him there is always sweet cold water to be drunk at night, and beds of aromatic fir boughs on which to sleep, with the blankets drawn over one to keep out the touch of the frost. He must be followed on foot, and the man who follows him must be sound in limb and wind. But his pursuit does not normally mean such wearing exhaustion as is entailed by climbing cliffs all day long after the white goat. Whoever has hunted the wapiti, as he looks at his trophies will always think of the great mountains with the snow lying in the rifts in their sides; of the splashing murmur of rock-choked torrents; of the odorous breath of the pine branches; of tents pitched in open glades; of long walks through cool, open forests; and of great camp-fires, where the pitchy stumps flame like giant torches in the darkness.

In the old days, of course, much of the hunting was done on the open plains or among low, rugged hills. The wapiti that I shot when living at my Little Missouri ranch were killed under exactly the same conditions as mule-deer. When I built my ranch-house, wapiti were still not uncommon, and their shed antlers were very numerous both on the bottoms and in places among the hills. There was one such place a couple of miles from my ranch in a stretch of comparatively barren but very broken hill-country in which there were many score of these shed antlers. Evidently a few years before this had been a great gathering-place for wapiti toward the end of winter. My ranch itself derived its name, “The Elkhorn,” from the fact that on the ground where we built it were found the skulls and interlocked antlers of two wapiti bulls who had perished from getting their antlers fastened in a battle. I never, however, killed a wapiti while on a day’s hunt from the ranch itself. Those that I killed were obtained on regular expeditions, when I took the wagon and drove off to spend a night or two on ground too far for me to hunt it through in a single day from the ranch. Moreover, the wapiti on the Little Missouri had been so hunted that they had entirely abandoned the diurnal habits of their kind, and it was a great advantage to get on the ground early. This hunting was not carried on amid the glorious mountain scenery which marks the home of the wapiti in the Rockies; but the surroundings had a charm of their own. All really wild scenery is attractive. The true hunter, the true lover of the wilderness, loves all parts of the wilderness, just as the true lover of nature loves all seasons. There is no season of the year when the country is not more attractive than the city; and there is no portion of the wilderness, where game is found, in which it is not a keen pleasure to hunt. Perhaps no other kind of country quite equals that where snow lies on the lofty mountain peaks, where there are many open glades in the pine forests, and clear mountain lakes and rushing trout-filled torrents. But the fantastic desolation of the Bad Lands, and the endless sweep of the brown prairies, alike have their fascination for the true lover of nature and lover of the wilderness who goes through them on foot or on horseback. As for the broken hill-country in which I followed the wapiti and the mule-deer along the Little Missouri, it would be strange indeed if any one found it otherwise than attractive in the bright, sharp fall weather. Long, grassy valleys wound among the boldly shaped hills. The basins were filled with wind-beaten trees and brush, which generally also ran alongside of the dry watercourses down the middle of each valley. Cedars clustered in the sheer ravines, and here and there groups of elm and ash grew to a considerable height in the more sheltered places. At the first touch of the frost the foliage turned russet or yellow—the Virginia creepers crimson. Under the cloudless blue sky the air was fresh and cool, and as we lay by the camp-fire at night the stars shone with extraordinary brilliancy. Under such conditions the actual chase of the wapiti was much like that of the mule-deer. They had been so hunted that they showed none of the foolish traits which they are prone to exhibit when bands are found in regions where they have been little persecuted; and they were easier to kill than mule-deer simply because they were more readily tracked and more readily seen, and offered a larger, and on the whole a steadier, mark at which to shoot. When a small band had visited a pool their tracks could be identified at once, because in the soft ground the flexible feet spread and yielded so as to leave the marks of the false hoofs. On ordinary ground it was difficult to tell their footprints from those of the yearling and two-year-old ranch cattle.

But the mountains are the true ground for the wapiti. Here he must be hunted on foot, and nowadays, since he has grown wiser, skill and patience, and the capacity to endure fatigue and exposure, must be shown by the successful hunter. My own wapiti-hunting has been done in September and early October during the height of the rut, and therefore at a time when the conditions were most favorable for the hunter. I have hunted them in many places throughout the Rockies, from the Big Horn in western Wyoming to the Big Hole Basin in western Montana, close to the Idaho line. Where I hunted, the wapiti were always very noisy both by day and by night, and at least half of the bulls that I killed attracted my attention by their calling before I saw either them or their tracks. At night they frequently passed close to camp, or came nearly up to the picketed horses, challenging all the time. More than once I slipped out, hoping to kill one by moonlight, but I never succeeded. Occasionally, when they were plentiful, and were restless and always roving about, I simply sat still on a log, until one gave me a chance. Sometimes I came across them while hunting through likely localities, going up or across wind, keeping the sharpest lookout, and moving with great care and caution, until I happened to strike the animals I was after. More than once I took the trail of a band, when out with some first-class woodsman, and after much running, dodging, and slipping through the timber, overtook the animals—though usually when thus merely following the trail I failed to come up with them. On two different occasions I followed and came up to bands, attracted by their scent. Wapiti have a strong, and, on the whole, pleasing scent, like that of Alderney cattle, although in old bulls it becomes offensively strong. This scent is very penetrating. I once smelt a herd which was lying quite still taking its noonday siesta, certainly half a mile to the windward of me; and creeping up I shot a good bull as he lay. On another occasion, while working through the tangled trees and underbrush at the bottom of a little winding valley, I suddenly smelt wapiti ahead, and without paying any further attention to the search for tracks, I hunted cautiously up the valley, and when it forked was able to decide by the smell alone which way the wapiti had gone. He was going up wind ahead of me, and his ground-covering walk kept me at a trot in order to overtake him. Finally I saw him, before he saw me, and then, by making a run to one side, got a shot at him when he broke cover, and dropped him.

It is exciting to creep up to a calling wapiti. If it is a solitary bull, he is apt to be travelling, seeking the cows, or on the lookout for some rival of weaker thews. Under such circumstances only hard running will enable the hunter to overtake him, unless there is a chance to cut him off. If, however, he hears another bull, or has a herd under him, the chances are that he is nearly stationary, or at least is moving slowly, and the hunter has every opportunity to approach. In a herd the bull himself is usually so absorbed both with his cows and with his rivals that he is not at all apt to discover the approaching hunter. The cows, however, are thoroughly awake, and it is their eyes and keen noses for which the hunter must look out. A solitary bull which is answering the challenge of another is the easiest of all to approach. Of course, if there has been much hunting, even such a bull is wary and is on the lookout for harm. But in remote localities he becomes so absorbed in finding out the whereabouts of his rival, and is so busy answering the latter’s challenges and going through motions of defiance, that with proper care it is comparatively easy to approach him. Once, when within seventy yards of such a bull, he partly made me out and started toward me. Evidently he could not tell exactly what I was—my buckskin shirt probably helping to puzzle him—and in his anger and eagerness he did not think of danger until it was too late. On another occasion I got up to two bulls that were fighting, and killed both. In the fights, weight of body seems to count for more than size of antlers.

Once I spent the better part of a day in following a wapiti bull before I finally got him. Generally when hunting wapiti I have been with either one of my men from the ranch or a hunter like Tazewell Woody, or John Willis. On this particular occasion, however, I happened to be alone; and though I have rarely been as successful alone as when in the company of some thoroughly trained and experienced plainsman or mountainman, yet when success does come under such circumstances it is always a matter of peculiar pride.

At the time, I was camped in a beautiful valley high among the mountains which divide southwestern Montana from Idaho. The weather was cold, and there were a couple of inches of snow on the ground, so that the conditions were favorable for tracking and stalking. The country was well wooded, but the forest was not dense, and there were many open glades. Early one morning, just about dawn, the cook, who had been up for a few minutes, waked me, to say that a bull wapiti was calling not far off. I rolled out of my bed and was dressed in short order. The bull had by this time passed the camp, and was travelling toward a range of mountains on the other side of the stream which ran down the valley bottom. He was evidently not alarmed, for he was still challenging. I gulped down a cup of hot coffee, munched a piece of hardtack, and thrust four or five other pieces and a cold elk tongue into my hunting-shirt, and then, as it had grown light enough to travel, started after the wapiti. I supposed that in a few minutes I should either have overtaken him or abandoned the pursuit, and I took the food with me simply because in the wilderness it never pays to be unprepared for emergencies. The wisdom of such a course was shown in this instance by the fact that I did not see camp again until long after dark.

I at first tried to cut off the wapiti by trotting through the woods toward the pass for which I supposed he was headed. The morning was cold, and, as always happens at the outset when one starts to take violent exercise under such circumstances, the running caused me to break into a perspiration; so that the first time I stopped to listen for the wapiti a regular fog rose over my glasses and then froze on them. I could not see a thing, and after wiping them found I had to keep gently moving in order to prevent them from clouding over again. It is on such cold mornings, or else in very rainy weather, that the man who has not been gifted with good eyes is most sensible of his limitations. I once lost a caribou which I had been following at speed over the snow because when I came into sight and halted the moisture instantly formed and froze on my glasses so that I could not see anything, and before I got them clear the game had vanished. Whatever happened, I was bound that I should not lose this wapiti from a similar accident.

However, when I next heard him he had evidently changed his course and was going straight away from me. The sun had now risen, and following after him I soon found his tracks. He was walking forward with the regular wapiti stride, and I made up my mind I had a long chase ahead of me. We were going up hill, and though I walked hard, I did not trot until we topped the crest. Then I jogged along at a good gait, and as I had on moccasins, and the woods were open, I did not have to exercise much caution. Accordingly I gained, and felt I was about to come up with him, when the wind brought down from very far off another challenge. My bull heard it before I did, and instantly started toward the spot at a trot. There was not the slightest use of my attempting to keep up with this, and I settled down into a walk. Half an hour afterward I came over a slight crest, and immediately saw a herd of wapiti ahead of me, across the valley and on an open hillside. The herd was in commotion, the master bull whistling vigorously and rounding up his cows, evidently much excited at the new bull’s approach. There were two or three yearlings and two-year-old bulls on the outskirts of the herd, and the master bull, whose temper had evidently not been improved by the coming of the stranger, occasionally charged these and sent them rattling off through the bushes. The ground was so open between me and them that I dared not venture across it, and I was forced to lie still and await developments. The bull I had been following and the herd bull kept challenging vigorously, but the former probably recognized in the latter a heavier animal, and could not rouse his courage to the point of actually approaching and doing battle. It by no means follows that the animal with the heaviest body has the best antlers, but the hesitation thus shown by the bull I was following made me feel that the other would probably yield the more valuable trophies, and after a couple of hours I made up my mind to try to get near the herd, abandoning the animal I had been after.

The herd showed but little symptoms of moving, the cows when let alone scattering out to graze, and some of them even lying down. Accordingly I did not hurry myself, and spent considerably over an hour in slipping off to the right and approaching through a belt of small firs. Unfortunately, however, the wind had slightly shifted, and while I was out of sight of the herd they had also come down toward the spot from whence I had been watching them. Accordingly, just as I was beginning to creep forward with the utmost caution, expecting to see them at any moment, I heard a thumping and cracking of branches that showed they were on the run. With wapiti there is always a chance of overtaking them after they have first started, because they tack and veer and halt to look around. Therefore I ran forward as fast as I could through the woods; but when I came to the edge of the fir belt I saw that the herd were several hundred yards off. They were clustered together and looking back, and saw me at once.

Off they started again. The old bull, however, had neither seen me nor smelt me, and when I heard his whistle of rage I knew he had misinterpreted the reason for the departure of his cows, and in another moment he came in sight, evidently bent on rounding them up. On his way he attacked and drove off one of the yearlings, and then took after the cows, while the yearling ran toward the outlying bull. The latter evidently failed to understand what had happened; at least he showed no signs of alarm. Neither, however, did he attempt to follow the fleeing herd, but started off again on his own line.

I was sure the herd would not stop for some miles, and accordingly I resumed my chase of the single bull. He walked for certainly three miles before he again halted, and I was then half a mile behind him. On this occasion he struck a small belt of woodland and began to travel to and fro through it, probably with an idea of lying down. I was able to get up fairly close by crawling on all-fours through the snow for part of the distance; but just as I was about to fire he moved slightly, and though my shot hit him, it went a little too far back. He plunged over the hill-crest and was off at a gallop, and after running forward and failing to overtake him in the first rush, I sat down to consider matters. The snow had begun to melt under the sun, and my knees and the lower parts of my sleeves were wet from my crawl, and I was tired and hungry and very angry at having failed to kill the wapiti. It was, however, early in the afternoon, and I thought that if I let the wapiti alone for an hour, he would lie down, and then grow stiff and reluctant to get up; while in the snow I was sure I could easily follow his tracks. Therefore I ate my lunch, and then swallowed some mouthfuls of snow in lieu of drinking.

An hour afterward I took the trail. It was evident the bull was hard hit, but even after he had changed his plunging gallop for a trot he showed no signs of stopping; fortunately his trail did not cross any other. The blood signs grew infrequent, and two or three times he went up places which made it difficult for me to believe he was much hurt. At last, however, I came to where he had lain down; but he had risen again and gone forward. For a moment I feared that my approach had alarmed him, but this was evidently not the case, for he was now walking. I left the trail, and turning to one side below the wind I took a long circle and again struck back to the bottom of the valley down which the wapiti had been travelling. The timber here was quite thick, and I moved very cautiously, continually halting and listening for five or ten minutes. Not a sound did I hear, and I crossed the valley bottom and began to ascend the other side without finding the trail. Unless he had turned off up the mountains I knew that this meant he must have lain down; so I retraced my steps and with extreme caution began to make my way up the valley. Finally I came to a little opening, and after peering about for five minutes I stepped forward, and instantly heard a struggling and crashing in a clump of young spruce on the other side. It was the wapiti trying to get on his feet. I ran forward at my best pace, and as he was stiff and slow in his movements I was within seventy yards before he got fairly under way. Dropping on one knee, I fired and hit him in the flank. At the moment I could not tell whether or not I had missed him, for he gave no sign; but, running forward very fast, I speedily saw him standing with his head down. He heard me and again started, but at the third bullet down he went in his tracks, the antlers clattering loudly on the branches of a dead tree.

The snow was melting fast, and for fear it might go off entirely, so that I could not follow my back track, I went up the hillside upon which the wapiti lay, and taking a dead tree dragged it down to the bottom, leaving a long furrow. I then repeated the operation on the opposite hillside, thus making a trace which it was impossible for any one coming up or down the valley to overlook; and having conned certain landmarks by which the valley itself could be identified, I struck toward camp at a round trot; for I knew that if I did not get into the valley where the tent lay before dark, I should have to pass the night out. However, the last uncertain light of dusk just enabled me to get over a spur from which I could catch a glimpse of the camp-fire, and as I stumbled toward it through the forest I heard a couple of shots, which showed that the cook and packer were getting anxious as to my whereabouts.