CHAPTER XVIII

BIG GAME OF NORTH AMERICA

BY CLIVE PHILLIPPS-WOLLEY

Many statements to the contrary notwithstanding, I venture to assert that, in spite of the evil doings of the ‘scallawag’ and the meat-hunter, there is still quite enough big game in many parts of the American continent to amply satisfy the desires of any reasonable big game hunter, meaning by that term one who is content to work moderately hard in an exquisite climate, free from fever and other Oriental troubles, for a few good trophies every season, and enough meat to keep his camp supplied.

It is undoubtedly true that you cannot any longer kill hundreds of head of big game to your own rifle in one season; it is also true that the game laws of Canada and the United States have somewhat curtailed the liberty of the sportsman; but it is true too that amongst English sportsmen the number of those who would care to shoot down hundreds of stags, &c. in one season is limited, and that not a few of them realise that the game laws of America, though often ill-framed and always badly enforced, are still in the best interests of those whom they control. There are, of course, mistakes in every code of laws. For instance, it is a mistake I think to protect sheep absolutely in Colorado, while wapiti are not similarly protected; for sheep are now more numerous there than wapiti, are much less easily obtained by the meat-hunter, and are less profitable to him when he has obtained them.

Still, if the Americans would enforce their own laws as rigidly against the native meat-hunter who makes a profit out of shooting as against the alien who pays for his sport, I think no one could justly complain.

Of course the buffalo has disappeared, and the antelope is not as plentiful as he was, while some of the old shooting grounds dear to the memories of the fortunate hunters of twenty years ago have been very much shot out. This is true; but it is also true that if the successors of the Williamsons, Buxtons, Jamiesons, and others of an earlier day would display as much enterprise as those gentlemen did before them, they would probably find fairly good sport still.

The man who follows another to an old shooting ground, getting there by a well-cut trail, or even by railway, to find camps made and the country thoroughly surveyed, naturally does not get as good sport as the ‘first man in,’ and does not deserve it.

An old friend, whose reputation as an Indian sportsman stands as high as any man’s, told me that, though the old grounds were certainly a good deal shot out in India, he knew that close to them were other grounds unvisited which were almost as good (if not quite as good) as the old ones, and this he proved by sending a subaltern nephew off an old route for a very short distance into a country usually passed by, with the result that he got almost as good sport in the nineties as his uncle had had in the sixties.

So it is in America to-day. One man follows another, as sheep follow their leader, and if you trust to guides they will, of course, take you to the places they know from experience, an experience which has been obtained at considerable cost to the game of the district.

As I write I am reminded of an excellent example of that of which I am writing. There is in British Columbia a certain Irish baronet, a most excellent sportsman, who has probably had better sport with cariboo and grizzly than anyone else in the country. His two favourite grounds are now overrun by his followers, but in the year that _he cut the trail to his_ cariboo ground (it took him several days) he had excellent sport, and in Alaska he did so well with bear that next year a friend and myself found that all the skin-hunters in the country were on Sir Richard’s tracks. Of course we went elsewhere. So it is always. On the grounds which you find for yourself you may get excellent sport: on the grounds found for you by other people you have hardly a right to expect it.

Before dealing then with the game list of North America in detail, let me say to the intending sportsman, Don’t be discouraged by every evil report: go and see for yourself: if possible get a hint as to where game is likely to be and then look for a country yourself, not slavishly following your predecessors or entirely depending upon men whom perhaps you don’t know very well to present a stranger with an accurate chart of the best hunting grounds they are acquainted with, the way to which they have discovered by their own hard work.

As in everything else in life, so it is in sport: if you want to get anything worth having, you have got to earn it yourself in one way or another.

There is no royal road to success in the mountains, but there is the old road still for the self-reliant and adventurous who don’t stick to old trails and the railroad, and there is still plenty of game, for those who know how to seek it, in Colorado, British Columbia, Washington Territory, Ontario, Alaska, and even in parts of the province of Quebec. So much I dare personally guarantee.

I. PANTHER (_Felis concolor_)

[Illustration: Puma (_Felis concolor_)]

The American Panther (_Felis concolor_) is a beast of many _aliases_ but of few virtues. He is the ‘painter,’ ‘catamount,’ ‘mountain lion,’ ‘cougar,’ ‘Californian lion,’ or ‘puma’ of early American legends; but, in spite of his many high-sounding titles, he is a mean, sneaking beast, hiding in dense timber by day, stealing or destroying more sheep in one night than he can eat in six months, affording no sport to anyone, and very little profit even to the fur dealer. Those who hunt the panther generally hunt him with dogs, and no dog is too small for the work, for the American lion will tree before a terrier and let himself be shot by a boy with ‘bird-shot.’ I am not traducing the beast, for I have myself hunted him with terriers in the States. But let an American authority be heard upon the question. A book was published in 1890 called ‘Big Game of North America,’ to which several well-known authorities contributed, such as Caton, Van Dyke, and Fannin. The authority referred to, however, is not one of these three, but a Mr. Perry, who maintains that the American lion is not a cowardly animal, and cites in support of his contention six or seven instances in which panthers attacked human beings unprovoked. In the first instance (p. 413) the ferocious animal was defeated and driven off by an heroic boy of twelve armed with an empty brandy-bottle. In the second case a blue-jacket who had deserted from Esquimault and ‘found his way through the woods until he rested under the domain of the starry flag,’ killed the panther which attacked him there by a ‘gladiatorial thrust’ with a spade (p. 415). The third and fourth of Mr. Perry’s pugnacious panthers behaved somewhat differently--one followed a gentleman, the other followed a lady, and in both cases showed the human beings somewhat marked attentions, licking their hands, gazing ‘intently’ into their eyes, and tearing off most of their clothes, but nothing more. The fifth panther was caned by a gentleman from Snohomish, and the sixth was stared out of countenance and put to flight by someone from Brownsville, whom the panther had knocked off his horse; but it was reserved for another hero from Snohomish to perform the marvellous feat of catching a panther on the wing (‘as it was passing in the air’) with ‘his left arm round its body just behind the forelegs.’ Of course, having got his grip, the gentleman from Snohomish thumped the head of that poor panther with his gun-barrels till it died. In this Homeric struggle the victor lost nothing but the tail of his night-shirt.

Now, no doubt all these stories are quite true, and they undoubtedly prove great courage in someone, but not, it seems, in the panther; so that in spite of Mr. Perry I am obliged to accept the general opinion upon this subject as the correct one, backed as it is by a statement just made to me by Mr. John Fannin, the curator of the British Columbian Museum--an accepted authority in the American press upon such matters, and an ‘old timer’ who has had many opportunities of observing this beast--that he had never come across a well-authenticated story of a panther showing fight to (much less attacking) a man. From Mr. Fannin I obtained the measurements of the largest panthers out of the twenty-five or so which have been sent to him in late years to be skinned. The longest of these was a male from the mainland of British Columbia, killed on the Frazer river, which measured 8 ft. 2 ins. from the tip of the nose to the tip of the tail. The largest killed upon the island and sent to my friend was also a male which measured 7 ft. 3 ins. One hundred and fifty pounds is the weight of a large panther as given by Mr. J. E. Harting, in some notes published by him upon American mammalia, and I have no doubt that this is about what an average male would weigh, but I am only judging by my eye, and not from any accepted record of the actual weight of any particular beast.

The panther’s food consists of small game of all kinds, deer, and more especially sheep and pigs, and other farm produce. In nine cases out of ten the panthers which are killed are found near a sheep ranch, and it is notorious that the men who get panthers are not hunters, explorers, or men on a survey party where only wild game is likely to be found, but rather farmers and others who have stock to look after near a settlement.

It may be that in Montana and Wyoming the panther grows larger and is more courageous than he is on the Pacific coast; but even there he is held in some contempt by the mountain-men who know him. He has a habit, it is said, of following a belated hunter to camp howling in the most diabolical manner, but he never proceeds to extremities.

Some idea of the number of these beasts upon Vancouver Island and in British Columbia generally may be derived from the fact that the British Columbian Government paid bounties for the scalps of seventy-two in 1892, all but two, I believe, having been killed upon the island.

II. THE GRIZZLY (_Ursus horribilis_)

Mr. Sclater, the Secretary of the Zoological Society of London, writes me that the best naturalists only recognise three species of bears in North America, namely: the Grizzly (_Ursus horribilis_), the Black Bear (_Ursus americanus_), and the Polar Bear (_Ursus maritimus_). My correspondent adds that ‘a lot of varieties and sub-species have been made, but not upon any certain characters.’ Among these varieties and sub-species may, I suppose, be reckoned _Ursus Richardsonii_, the Alaskan grizzly, as well as a whole host of bears, best known to Western trappers as cinnamon bears, silver-tips, roach-backs, bald-faces, and range bears.

Luckily for me, the question of species is one for naturalists rather than for sportsmen to decide; the claim to rank as a distinct species appearing to rest rather upon a beast’s anatomy than upon his outward appearance and manner of life.

[Illustration: Dead grizzly]

Having studied bears with some care and under favourable circumstances in more than one portion of the globe, I incline to the belief that the different species cross almost as freely as do different breeds of dogs; and certainly it seems probable that upon the North American continent all the different varieties owe their origin to the grizzly or the black, or to a union between the two. In this view I am supported by such a practical field naturalist and sportsman as Dr. Rainsford, as well as by a number of the best hunters and trappers whom I have met, and by certain very significant facts. Dr. Rainsford alludes to the first of these facts in his admirable article upon the Grizzly Bear in ‘The Big Game of North America.’ He says: ‘I myself have shot three young bears going with one sow, one almost yellow, one almost black, and another nearly grey. I have seen ordinary black bears, with year-old grizzly cubs, shaped differently from the mother, unmistakably owing both their shape and colour to the parentage of the male grizzly.’ This is the evidence of Dr. Rainsford, and I have heard similar statements as to the occurrence of different coloured cubs in the same litter, not once but a score of times, from Indians and white men who had passed their lives in the mountains; and I have round me in my house at the present moment a number of skins of bears killed by myself, which, if colour be any criterion as to species, represent almost as many species as there are skins.

But if anyone wishes to judge of the futility of trying to ‘place’ a bear by his colour, he should visit the drying-yard of our principal merchant in furs, here in Victoria. In that yard on a sunny day, when the bear skins are laid out to air, he will see skins of every shade between black, white, and red, all collected from a comparatively limited district, and all shading so gradually into one another, that you cannot yourself decide where the smoky grey of the true grizzly has changed into the reddish brown of the cinnamon, or where that has become dark enough to be considered a rather brownish black.

As it is with the colour so it is with the shape of the beasts, and with the shape and colour of their claws. The typical grizzly should be higher at the shoulder, somewhat shorter in the back, and generally more massive than the black bear. He should be so high at the shoulder as to appear almost humpbacked, whilst his head should be heavy and massive, broad between the ears, short in proportion to its size as compared to the head of the black bear, sharp at the snout, and somewhat flat behind the eyes; the whole expression of the head being as unmistakably pugnacious and dangerous as the expression of the long shallow head of the black bear is weak and inoffensive. As most people are aware, naturalists rely for purposes of identification more upon the shape of a bear’s skull than upon any external characteristics, and for that reason I have inserted here an engraving from a photograph of two skulls placed side by side, the larger one being that of a medium-sized grizzly bitch (or sow) from Alaska, the other that of a very large black bear (male) from British Columbia.

[Illustration: Black bear, Grizzly bear]

As far as the general expression of the beast goes, it seems to me that that is no better guide than his colour, for even amongst grizzlies I have in one trip come across one specimen with a head as full of vice as a viper’s, and another as mild as a Chinese cook’s. It is true that the sexes differed; the mild face naturally belonging to the lady.

As to the claws again, the typical Californian grizzly should have extremely long flat claws of a bony whiteness--claws obviously meant for digging and not for climbing; while the genuine black bear should have claws to climb and fish with, sharply curved, small and dark coloured.

But here again the characteristics are not constant. The Alaskan grizzly (if it is a true grizzly) has claws far too arched or curved to be typical; whilst in colour, all those which I have seen were a light brown or slate colour growing white towards the tips. A bear shot by me in the Hope Mountains is a good illustration of the strange varieties which sometimes arise from crosses between black bear and grizzly. This little fellow would have weighed about 350 lbs. live weight, and was a full-grown bear when killed. His head was a typical black bear’s as far as shape went, and he had not a distinctly marked ‘lift’ or hump at the shoulder; his claws were very light coloured (almost white); his face and shoulders were a rich straw colour, fading into a very light grey towards the rump, whilst his arms, belly, cheeks and ears were a deep rich brown, almost black in places.

The Indians said he was a grizzly; the trapper who was with me called him a cinnamon; a friend who wished to belittle my bear said he was only ‘a rum-coloured black and a little one at that.’ I only venture to suggest that he was ‘very much mixed.’

But perhaps I have already said too much upon this point, and I will therefore only pause to add this significant fact. No cinnamon or other similar variety seems to be found where both black and grizzly do not exist together. For example, upon Vancouver Island, no grizzly has ever been heard of, no cinnamon has ever been reported, but black bears swarm. The same, I believe, may be said of the island of Anticosti, and elsewhere. In habits bears differ, of course, considerably, and yet even here the points in which they resemble one another are more numerous than those in which they differ.

All bears appear to be omnivorous, but the grizzly is said to be more of a flesh-eater than _Ursus americanus_. Perhaps he is. No doubt he dearly loves to gorge himself upon a carcase, and he does occasionally kill a weak beast or a young one for himself; but like his cousin he is a great vegetarian, grubbing up roots and devouring berries by the gallon. But a black bear is not by any means a total abstainer from meat diet, more especially if that meat be pork; indeed, if the pig needs killing, and the farmer neglects to play the butcher, the mild-mannered gentleman in black will not be slow to do the killing and help himself.

To furnish an exhaustive or even adequate list of the things upon which bears feed is by no means an easy task, but it is so essential to success that a man should know where to look for his game (game always being where its food is) that this must be attempted.

Let me begin at the beginning of the bear’s year. As most men know, all bears on this continent (except, perhaps, the Polar) lie dormant during the winter. The den, as a rule, is at the head of one of the hundred gulches which seem to radiate from a common source amongst the snow peaks, the grizzly and the cinnamon choosing their lairs at a higher altitude than the black bear.

The road to a grizzly’s den, as I remember it, is generally up a snow-slide, through a dense belt of noisy brush, which the weight of the winter’s snow has laid as a thunderstorm lays ripe wheat; and above this belt, under a sheer bluff, sheltered from the wind and hidden by the snow, lies the den itself.

Up here, mist and snow, a few stunted pines, and the sleeping bear have the world to themselves from November to April, the exact date of the bear’s retirement to winter quarters, as well as of his reappearance above ground, depending somewhat upon the seasons. This much, at any rate, seems to be generally admitted amongst mountain men--that, some time in November bears begin to ‘hole up,’ the black bears being first and the grizzlies following a week or two later; whilst in spring the grizzlies are up and out before their ‘softer’ cousins.

When they first come out of their dens both bears feed entirely upon vegetable matter, even the grizzly being too weak to wander round to look for the carcases of beasts which have perished during the past winter. This he becomes strong enough to do a week or so later, but at first he is every bit as sorry a spectacle as _Ursus americanus_ under similar conditions, being almost too weak to stand, and sitting down to groan and wag his old head from sheer exhaustion after every few yards he walks. If at this time the weather looks unpropitious, both bears not infrequently come to the conclusion that it is not yet time to get up, and therefore turn in for one more nap.

In early April (that is, on first leaving their dens) both _Ursus americanus_ and _Ursus horribilis_ frequent the river bottoms to feed upon the rank herbage which grows there; and a little later find food very much to their taste in the young mountain grass which springs wherever the snow leaves the hill-sides bare.

It is in April that the hunter gets some of his best chances at bear, for if he be lucky enough to find one of the earliest of these mountain pastures, and patient enough to watch it for a few days, he is almost certain of his reward.

At this time, too, a bear is worth killing, for his hide is at its very best when he leaves his winter quarters, though it deteriorates very rapidly as summer advances.

Towards the end of April (in an average year) when the bear has purged his system with a diet of mountain grasses, Nature provides him with somewhat stronger food, in the buds of the olali bushes (service berry, &c.), in the roots of the wild parsnip, and a little later in the catkins which come upon the willows. Later still (in May), when the woods begin to swarm with ticks and other insects, the bears follow the snow in its retreat to the high places, finding at its very edge great patches of golden lilies (_Erythronium giganteum_) and the small pinkish blossom of _Claytonia carolineana_ (Indian potato), both blossoms springing from bulbs of which bears are as fond as the Indians, with whose women folk the former not seldom clash in their morning operations in these wild potato fields.

But to find the bear feeding either upon bulbs or grasses, or any stronger meat, the hunter must be out early and up late, for bears are reasonable beings, rarely if ever feeding grossly at midday, but breakfasting at dawn and dining after dark.

Indeed, bears are more or less nocturnal in their habits, and this is especially true of grizzlies, who, when much hunted, become purely nocturnal in their feeding and in their wanderings.

I know a country (the name of it I prefer to keep to myself for a year or two yet) which appears to be a high tableland, densely timbered and full of caribou, and from this innumerable gullies and clefts lead down to lower levels, where, at the bottom of steep canyons, are piled rock and stone slide, and débris of dead pine wood. There are opens among the pines at the top, and here in snow-time, if you leave a caribou carcase for a couple of days, you will find plenty of bear-tracks going to and fro. Every day the number of them increases, until it seems to you that the place must be alive with grizzlies; but you will never see one of the track-makers by day. The bears here have been a good deal hunted, and have become as cunning as monkeys, coming up from the gullies at night but vanishing like spectres at the first peep of day. It was here that a friend of mine killed and left a mule deer, hanging its head up in a tree hard by, to be called for on some future occasion. When that occasion came, the head was missing, and was found a little further on, laid with the carcase and carefully covered up with moss and sticks and snow.

This, of course, is a common trick of the grizzly’s, but it was quaint of this particular beast to gather up the fragments so carefully. By the way, whilst I am on the subject of ‘carcases,’ I may as well say that it is not my own experience that grizzlies are very gluttonous feeders, upon flesh at any rate. Indeed, it seemed to me that a deer’s carcase lasted some bears whom I have known almost as long as it would have lasted an ordinary camp Indian. I knew, for instance, of a mule’s carcase in the spring of 1892 which served as an attraction to four bears (two black and two grizzlies) for at least a fortnight in the Kootenay country.

But to come back to the bear’s menu. About the same time that the _Erythronium_ is in bloom, black bears feed freely upon a plant called ‘arpa’ by our British Columbian Indians (_Heracleum lanatum_) upon skunk cabbage, and upon a plant which Professor Macoun has kindly identified for me as _Peucedanum triternatum_.

What the black bear eats from choice, the grizzly will eat from necessity; so that if there are no carcases about, and few or no bulbs in the country, the hunter may expect to find _U. horribilis_ making the best of ‘arpa’ and skunk cabbage. As the season advances, the bear changes his diet somewhat, and before his great autumn harvests of fish, fruits and nuts, we find him tearing up rotten logs for ants and beetles, turning over boulders for the larvæ which lie below them, digging up yellow jackets’(wasps, &c.) nests for the sake of the grubs inside, and occasionally burrowing in the hill-sides for marmots or ground hogs.

The bear’s season of plenty begins with the ripening of the first fruits on the flats by the river bottoms, when those who care to shoot game out of season may find some sport in killing both varieties of bear as they wander over the sand bars of Alaskan rivers, looking for fruit and a cold bath to allay the irritation of their bald and mangy-looking hides.

The berry season in British Columbia begins at midsummer, and from that time until late in the fall there is always plenty of bear food in the woods: raspberries (which bears love beyond all things), currants, gooseberries, soapberries, service, wine, salmon, bil- and black-berries, strawberries, choke-cherries, and a score of others, whose flavour I can remember but whose names I never knew.

I have never seen, except in the Caucasus, such a land for wild fruit as British Columbia. Compared with it, Colorado, for instance, is a most unfruitful country; but, to make amends, Colorado abounds in acorns and pine nuts, of which there are few, if any, in British Columbia. Where the acorns are, there will the bears be also, but acorns are an uncertain crop, failing utterly one year and abounding another.

By the way, just before the acorn crop comes in, the silver-tips of Colorado seem to devote a good deal of their time to digging in woodland bogs, but whether they dig for roots or insects I am not sure. In Alaska, in British Columbia, and all along the Pacific Coast the bear’s _bonne bouche_ is kept until nearly the end of the year. In spring the ‘tyhee’ salmon (_O. chouicha_) turns up the streams, and a few of this ‘run’ stay all through the season; later on come the humpies (_Onchorhynchus gorbuscha_), and of these, the Indians say, none return to the sea. In October, then, in Alaska and elsewhere, the glacial streams, tributary to the main rivers, are full of these misshapen salmon, crimson and purple, and patched with all manner of vivid leprous patches, their dorsal fins frayed and rotting as they swim. The streams stink of them; your paddle strikes one which is already broken up and drifting seaward; others, swollen with decay, are standing, tail upwards, on the river bottom; whilst others, driven by some strange madness, diseased and dying, still struggle up the shallows towards the glacier.

At this time of year, the dense woods of grey and mildewed pines and prickly devil’s club, which crowd down to the river’s edge, are full of bears; the mud flats between forest and stream are pitted with huge tracks (I have measured many 12 ins. by 9 ins.), and the filthy gorged American eagle sits puking and moping with ruffled feathers among cleaned back bones and rejected heads and tails of humpies, left over from the grizzlies’ last meal.

And here, at the end of their year’s feeding, it seems appropriate to say something of the weight to which grizzlies attain, and the size to which they grow. Like human beings, they seem to fatten most in a civilised or domestic state, the great grizzly of San Francisco having really attained to the enormous weight of 1,500 lbs.,[15] presumably upon hog food. It is said that the Californian grizzly grows larger than any other, but I doubt whether he much exceeds the Alaskan in size, and I am absolutely certain that all the largest grizzlies have grown to their fabulous proportions in the whisky-scented atmosphere of Western saloons. ‘If you will hear them,’ as the ‘boys’ say, 2,000-lb. grizzlies are quite common, and ‘as big as a bull’ is but a mild way of describing nine bears out of ten shot by them.

As a matter of fact, I am by no means prepared to doubt all their stories. There are unquestionably some exceptional monsters met with now and again, but too many of those instanced have been described merely from the impression made on the hunter’s mind by the sight of a gigantic track which has spread in soft snow or mud. The largest grizzly of which I have had anything like trustworthy information in my own wanderings was shot in Alaska, at English Bay, Kodak Island, by Mr. J. C. Tolman, now Customs officer at Wrangel. As Mr. Tolman allows his name to appear, and as he enjoyed an enviable reputation for veracity among men who had known him for years, I give the dimensions of his big bear as he gave them to me, extracted from notes made in his diary at the time at which he killed him. The bear was killed only a few miles from a settlement, and was actually weighed, turning the scales at 1,656 lbs. dead weight not cleaned; his hide when freshly skinned measured 13 ft. 6 ins. from nose to anus; from ear to ear he measured 13 ins.; from poll to nose, 20 ins.; the length of the hind-foot was 18 ins., and the breadth of the forefoot 12 ins. He was killed by a single shot in the head from a Winchester rifle.

The largest bear which I have myself shot was also an Alaskan, but infinitely smaller than the above; still, even this bear gave four strong men all they could do, with a rope round her neck, to drag her, when dead, down a sloping mud bank into a canoe laid over on its side to receive her. Her forearm, when skinned, measured 23 ins., fair measurement, the tape being stretched as tight as it would go. The Indians put this bear at from 1,000 to 1,500 lbs., and I dare say she really weighed nearly 800 or possibly 900 lbs., but I am no judge of an animal’s weight, and had no means of weighing her. I have myself measured skins in Mr. Boscowitz’s store at Victoria (also brought down from Alaska) which measured 9 ft. 10 ins. from end to end, but then some 6 ins. must be allowed for on all American skins, as they are skinned up the hind legs in such a way as to give quite that length of hide beyond the anus. Of course, too, a skin may be so laced and strained upon its frame in skinning as to stretch it a good deal beyond its natural dimensions.

In Colorado the bears appear to be mostly silver-tips, and if you can rely upon the verdict of the local hunters whom I met (and I have no reason to doubt their word) a Colorado silver-tip weighing 600 lbs. would be a big bear.

The stories of the ferocity of _U. horribilis_ owe something to the vivid imaginations of hunters and the sombre surroundings in which they meet their prey; but there can be no doubt that on occasion this bear will face a man (or men), and fight with intense ferocity. As a rule, like all bears, the grizzly will run rather than fight, and very rarely attacks without provocation, but when surprised near a carcase, when cornered, when wounded, or with cubs, _U. horribilis_ is apt to be dangerous. I know of a good many deaths due to bears under such circumstances, and only last year (1891) a very well-known meat-hunter in Colorado was attacked in green timber by a silver-tip and regularly worried by him, although the man had a companion with him, and had not even seen the bear until he was charged. I have myself seen the marks of this bear’s teeth in the leg and forearm of my old guide, who explained the unprovoked attack by saying that the bear had supped on a carcase poisoned for coyotes, and was ‘feelin’ pretty mean from belly-ache’ when found. The Alaskan grizzly has a peculiarly bad reputation among the Indians in that country, who upon dry land can hardly be induced to face ‘Hoots’ or ‘Noon,’ as they call the grizzly and cinnamon. Most of the skins sent to Wrangel are those of bears strangled in nooses, like big rabbit-snares, which are set in their paths, or else of bears shot down by men on snow-shoes in the deep snow of early spring, or shot on the river banks from a canoe. Here it is as well to say that I know of two instances in which grizzly bitches have, when hunted, deserted their cubs, and left them up a tree at the mercy of the hunters; but this is, of course, unusual. As a rule, grizzlies are distinctly ‘ugly’ when they have young with them, and will defend them to the last. However, _with_ cubs or without, a man with a good rifle and a steady nerve need never let a bear go in the open. In thick brush there are times when caution is better than courage. As I write, a picture comes before my eyes of a willow swamp, high up on the head-waters of a mountain stream in the States. An old guide of mine is on the edge of the timber watching, whilst the brush swings and rattles, and an unseen form shakes down the yellow leaves and fills the gulch with her growls. It is only a bitch silver-tip, who has got the man’s wind and is trying to collect her cubs; but, although it is exasperating to stand while the old lady makes her escape up the gully, there is nothing else to be done. If she does not mean to face the open, none but a greenhorn would attempt to go to her when she was ‘fighting mad,’ in bush too thick to walk through, and in places over six feet high. All the old authorities talk of grizzlies rising to an upright position on closing with a man, but I have never met a man who had seen anything of this habit, although I have known more than one man who has been struck down by a bear. I have myself come suddenly upon a grizzly, and seen him rise and face me in the position I refer to, but he did not stop in that position long enough for me to dismount and fire, and I am convinced that his only object in rising upon his hind legs was to get a better view of the intruder, not to attack him.

There is no doubt that a bear’s sight is his weak point. In bright moonlight I have had one walk past myself and another man in the open at forty yards without seeing us; but if his sight is indifferent, he has the ears of a hare and the nose of a caribou, and this is especially the case with the black bear, whose timidity has possibly somewhat sharpened his senses.

That grizzlies do not climb, except as cubs, appears to be true; not that it matters much to the hunter, as anyone will allow who gets his friend to give him 100 or 150 yards’ start and then tries to ‘tree’ in time to escape him. The right tree never grows in the right place, and climbing in a hurry sounds easier than it is. It will be found that most men can run 100 yards in less time than they can choose their tree and climb it to such a height that their _feet_ are ten feet above the ground. A bear, too, travels faster even than a frightened man on the flat. If you are charged, the best thing you can do is to stand fast and go on shooting; and if there are two of you, and both of one mind, and _not standing too close together_, there should not be much danger; but better than that is to take pains about your first shot: or go close to your bear and shoot him in the head or neck, as the natives do. If you hit him in either of these places, you can kill him at once with an ordinary Winchester (45·90); whilst if you are using a Paradox or a big English Express, a shot ranging forward from behind the shoulder or (with a solid bullet) through the shoulder is good enough.

Don’t shoot at a bear above you unless you are sure of killing him; a wounded beast will almost always come down hill and may take you on the way; and don’t shoot at a bear in the brush as if you were ‘browning’ a covey of partridges; nor follow a wounded bear into thick covert unless you are well insured, about to be married, or at the end of your ordinary resources for supporting your family.

Opinions vary as to the comparative ferocity and vitality of the different species, but perhaps individuals vary at least as much as species. I have known a black bear take a bullet from an English rifle fired by me point blank into her chest at ten paces, and then turn and _gallop_ uphill for 200 yards before dying; and I have known a two-year-old black bear take three bullets, scattered indiscriminately over his back by my friend’s Paradox (12-bore), and then turn and charge like a hero. He charged the wrong man, though, and got shot in the head for his impudence.

To finish these remarks, and convey, if possible, some idea of hunting the grizzly, let me take a leaf from my note-book, kept in Alaska in the autumn of 1891, whilst hunting with my friend Mr. Arnold Pike.

Nature has a way of always suiting her creatures to their environments, but none of her creatures are more exactly suited to their surroundings than _U. horribilis_. Savage and silent and grey as the grizzly is, the forests and waters amongst which he chooses to dwell are more grim, more savage, and more forbidding than himself. The part of Alaska in which we were hunting in 1891 appears to have escaped from that process described in Genesis by which the waters which were above the firmament were divided from the waters which were under the firmament. On the Stickeen river there is no firmament. As a rule, a damp darkness broods upon the face of the deep, and the waters which should be above touch and mingle with the waters which should be below. There is no dry belt between the bottom of the sea and the roof of heaven, at least in that district which lies between Wrangel and Telegraph Creek, in the month of October. We were out for forty days and forty nights, and I cannot swear to more than three and a half moderately fine days in that time: a fine day in Alaska being one in which you wear oilskins and gum boots, and go to bed in a dry shirt; whilst on a wet one you wear gum boots and oilskins, and go to bed to dry your shirt. The river Stickeen runs its rapid course between dank forests, grey at the top with mildew, and hung with dark mosses, in which the devil’s club forms an impenetrable undergrowth, and even the pines are thorny. The pace of the river is such that you make as much in one day, drifting down it, as you made in five pulling and poling up it; and your camping-grounds are of necessity upon barren sandspits, for nothing but a bear could force its way into this timber. In this land no gentle things live: there are no deer, no small birds, no squirrels, no sunlight--nothing but a few wolves, a stray seal, which comes whistling up on the tide in the grey of the morning, great flights of Canada geese, and dying salmon. All along the course of the main river are the mouths of its ice-fed tributaries, little streams of greenish-blue water, rising in a glacier and fringed with narrow strips of glacial mud, upon which a rank growth of _Equisetum_ (horse-tail) flourishes. These banks are the hunting grounds, and the number of huge tracks upon them, as well as the _débris_ of half-eaten salmon, proclaim that there is no scarcity of game; but if the hunter would get a shot he must haunt them at all unseasonable hours, when winds are most chill, and nature is at her gloomiest: for ‘Hoots’ only creeps out upon the creek’s edges with the first shadows of the night, and vanishes from them with the earliest rising mists of morning.

In this land it was that one evening we pitched our tents upon a sandspit, cut wet brush in the rain to make our bedding for the night, and then, tired with a hard day and dispirited by weeks of failure, stepped once more into the canoe and paddled for all we were worth up and across the stream to the mouth of a salmon creek.

Once in the green water, pipes were put out, conversation ceased, Pike and I laid down our paddles and took up our rifles, and only the Indian worked, the canoe gliding up the still waters without a sound.

At the mouth of the stream, a few flashing shadows beneath the water attracted our Indian’s attention, and a few quick thrusts with his spear provided us with enough fresh salmon to last us for a day or two. A blow or two with the axe silenced them, and again the canoe stole up stream, the men in it noting fresh tracks upon the banks, and peering into the shadowy woods, which grew darker and more impenetrable every minute.

Once or twice on our way up stream the canoe ran aground, and all hands had to get out to push their craft through the sands (quicksands as often as not) into which we sank over the tops of our waders.

But these are small matters. Pike sitting with one leg dangling over the side, always ready to jump out, seemed rather to like it--it reminded him of days among the ice near Spitzbergen--and all of us had long since become amphibious.

At last the stream ceased to be navigable even for our shallow craft, which we beached upon certain muddy shallows, among stunted bushes and dead equisetum, and our watch began. All round us stretched the swamp, and above it rose the densely timbered hills, while far above them again towered the triple peaks of snowy Sacoclè. For an hour and a half no one stirred, though our fingers were numb, and we were too cold to feel cold. A good Siwash (Indian) won’t move a muscle for hours, nor sneeze, nor cough, nor do any of the hundred and one things which no one ever wants to do except upon such a vigil as this. For an hour and a half the rain went on, the darkness deepened, and the silence became intense, broken only by the occasional splash of a ‘humpy’ who had run himself aground, and could not get off again into deep water.

At last Jim came to the conclusion that no bears would come that night, and as a glance at our sights proved to us that we should probably miss them even if they came, we signalled him to push off, and in a minute the canoe was again fleeting over the waters in breathless silence, the thin line of forest seeming to glide by us while we stood still. An Indian in the bows was looking out for ‘snags ahead’ or shallows, and for my part I had played this game so often before that I had given up hope, and was dreaming of other things. All at once the canoe was violently shaken from stem to stern. ‘D---- the fellow,’ I muttered, ‘I suppose he has run aground,’ and I went on dreaming. Again the canoe trembled under me, and this time I remembered that this was to be the signal for game ahead. At the same moment I noticed that the Siwash’s face was working, and his hands were drawing his Winchester from its case, when my friend crept up to him, and made him understand that if he fired it would hurt him more than the bears, and then at last I saw _them_. Until then the Indian’s body had been in my way, but now they were in full view, standing almost up to their shoulders in the stream, still as stone images in the dark shadow of the overhanging bank, their heads turned over their shoulders looking in our direction, and the long silvery ripples running from their legs down stream. It was lucky for me that night that I carried a Paradox, with which a man can shoot at short ranges as if he were snap-shooting at rabbits in covert, for I had to stand up to get a clean shot, I had not a second to lose, and the canoe rocked horribly under my feet. The big beast of the two fell to my first barrel, sinking where she stood, while her mate got my second barrel in the back as he scrambled up the bank, making good his escape for the moment into the dense scrub.

[Illustration: STANDING STILL AS STONE IMAGES]

I don’t suppose that the whole incident, from the find until we began to fish up my bear, took a minute, and yet into that minute was crowded a third of the reward for forty days of hard work, short commons and general misery. Is the game worth the candle? I think it is, but I don’t want to persuade any man to be of my way of thinking, nor do I want to convey the impression that all bear hunting is necessarily as grim and miserable as it is in Alaska. But in places where bear hunting is easy, bears are getting scarce (at least, grizzlies are), for their hides bring a good price and there is a bounty upon their scalps as well. The result is that more bears are trapped in one year than would be shot in five under ordinary circumstances. For instance, two brothers whom I know killed thirty-five bears in 1890 within a radius of eighty miles of their cabin. Of course, this sort of thing cannot last.

It seems a pity, as, whether you hunt him among the mists and storms of an Alaskan autumn, or watch for him by a hill at the edge of some dark canyon, until even the bird _chiquetta_ stops her noisy little song, and the outlines of all objects become indistinct and moving, _Ursus horribilis_ is better worth hunting than any other beast, except perhaps the bighorn, in all America.

P.S.--Since writing this, Sir George Lampson has kindly furnished me with the length of eleven American grizzly skins in his warehouse at one time--87, 89, 90, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 101 and 103 ins. respectively. On the day these particulars were furnished I myself put the tape over a grizzly skin in Sir George Lampson’s possession which measured 9 ft. from the eyes to the tail.

III. BLACK BEAR (_Ursus americanus_)

I have said so much incidentally about the black bear while writing of his congener the grizzly, that I have very little left to say of him in the proper place. A recent American authority describes this bear’s habitat as being confined nowadays ‘to some portions of the various ranges of mountains south of the St. Lawrence river, the Great Lakes, and (east of the Mississippi river) to parts of those portions of the Mississippi river and its tributaries which are yet unsettled,’ and to ‘the dense thickets of the Colorado, Trinity, and Brayos rivers.’ Colonel G. D. Alexander should have bethought him of those countries west of the Rockies (Alaska, British Columbia, Washington Territory, Vancouver Island, and Oregon) which are at present the principal stronghold of _Ursus americanus_; and as I am informed the chief source from which the fur-traders draw their supplies of black bear skins. Unfortunately for the black bear, the price of his hide has gone up lately in the fur market. Ten years ago $15 was a long price to pay for a bear’s skin; this year a trader out here paid as much as $35 for one. Whatever the ultimate result of this rise in value may be, the immediate consequence of it has been to show the world what a vast number of bears can be killed in America if they are wanted.

Here are some statistics of recent crops of bear in America which speak for themselves.

The Hudson Bay Company, of course, draws _all_ its supply of hides from this continent, and I am assured that the same maybe said (with scarcely any allowance for Russian, Norwegian, Indian, or other skins) of the great firm of C. M. Lampson & Co. These two firms collected in 1891 and offered for sale in 1892 no fewer than 29,081 bear hides, to which enormous total the Hudson Bay Company contributed 11,027 hides.

Some idea of the proportion of black to other skins at these sales may be obtained by looking at the Hudson Bay Company’s lists for 1891, in which we find 11,414 black, 1,875 brown, 253 grey, and 130 white bear skins offered for sale.

[Illustration: ‘When Spring in the woods’]

There can be little doubt, then, that there were plenty of black bear in America in 1890 and 1891; and, in spite of the immense harvest of hides which is annually gathered in, I venture to prophesy that until Alaskan river bottoms and the dense timber districts of Vancouver Island, Oregon, and Washington Territory are cleared and ready for the plough, there will be plenty of bear left for those who care to look for them. Here on Vancouver Island and on the north-west coast of British Columbia black bears are especially plentiful, one of our great fur-dealers (Mr. Boscowitz) having taken in over 1,000 hides last year, whilst I see by a newspaper (‘Colonist,’ Dec. 6, 1892) that at Sumas in the New Westminster District (one of our best farming districts) seven bears have lately fallen to one rifle and three to another; and I am well convinced that a salmon-canning friend of mine told me the truth when he asserted that about dawn, one day during the great annual salmon run, he saw seventeen black bears at one _coup d’œil_, feeding along the bank of one of the northern rivers of British Columbia.

But it must not be inferred from these facts that every tenderfoot who comes along will run up against bears the first time he goes in search of them. On the contrary, an old friend of mine (every inch an English sportsman) has been out in this country for twenty-five years, travelling from time to time all over the province, and has never yet seen a bear alive in the woods. The reason is simply that my friend uses a shot-gun, and doesn’t look for bears; and if you want to see these beasts you must look for them at the right time and in the right place, and even then be thankful if you see more than their fresh tracks, for Nature has given them noses as keen as the nose of a caribou, and ears which are always on the alert, as well as an impregnable sanctuary in the dense timber and tangled woodfall of their native forests. To those who live upon the Pacific coast the black bear is an animal to be thankful for, affording as he does an excuse for carrying a rifle when spring is in the woods; when the cedar swamps smell heavy with the musk of the skunk cabbage, and are lit in their green darkness by stray beams of May sunshine; when _Cormus Nuttalli_ is white with blooms as big as the palm of a man’s hand, and underfoot all is bright with the red and orange of columbine and ‘Indian pink,’ or white with the delicate petals of the dog violet. To me the black glossy hide beneath my feet always brings back memories of spring-time, either here on the island, or on the mainland by the Frazer, where the beautiful olalis are smothered in white blossom, and where the great yellow swallow-tails and plum-coloured Camberwell Beauties sail and sun themselves upon the stone slides round the lake.

But though the black bear affords an excellent excuse for bolting out of town in spring-time, it cannot be said that he is a very sporting beast. He hasn’t got an ounce of ‘fight’ in him, and stalking is of course impossible in such districts as those which he frequents. Even ‘still hunting’ is very nearly useless in such timber as exists on this coast; so that unless you use hounds to hunt him with, your best chance of meeting _Ursus americanus_ is to take a canoe and paddle quietly up untravelled streams, where fish are plentiful, or where in autumn the berry bushes grow thickly. In spring you may get a shot by watching woodland swamps where the skunk cabbage grows, or hill-sides when the Indian potato is ripe, but you are nearly as likely to have your chance if you are out early upon the best trail in the country, which runs near such feeding places, for the black bear appreciates a good road as much as a man does, and always uses one when he can.

In Eastern America the black bear is principally hunted with hounds, and even here a good dog which will tree a bear is useful; but my own experience of such sport has been, that in nine cases out of ten the hounds’ music ceased just as I had done the hardest mile on record up hill and over fallen timber, and the hounds themselves turned up ten minutes later, meek and dejected, their muzzles full of porcupine quills, which they evidently expected me to pull out for them.

Most of the skins sent in to Victoria from Alaska are taken by trapping (by noose, gin, or deadfall), or by hunting with dogs, between the time the bears leave their dens and the time the snow leaves the river bottoms. It is a short season and an uncertain one, but I am assured by those who have tried it, that for a man who is a good goer upon snow-shoes, it is excellent fun whilst it lasts. The dogs used for bears are of every breed and combination of breeds, but perhaps the best are collies. It does not require a big dog or a powerful dog for the work, for no dog is big enough to close with, whilst any dog is big enough to frighten, a black bear. I remember upon one occasion seeing three dogs, two small Pomeranians and a cross-bred setter, run a two-year-old black bear to bay on the ford of a river. The dogs had to swim, but by standing up the bear could rest upon firm ground, and keep his arms and jaws free for fighting above water.

The bear had already received a shot in the stomach before the dogs tackled him, but when they ran him to bay he seemed strong and well. Neither dogs nor bear took any notice of me, though I was standing up to my knees in the water of the ford within a few paces of them; and in five minutes the fight was over without interference on my part. At first the bear cuffed the dogs as they swam up to him, as a man might cuff who knew nothing of hitting out from the shoulder, and once he took the big dog in his jaws and went right under with him. However, the setter came up smiling, and shortly afterwards poor old Bruin was floating down stream, his head under water, and the dogs tugging with impunity at his flanks. I suppose that this bear weighed less than 200 lbs.

Captain Baldwin in his excellent book on the game of Bengal describes two kinds of bears: _U. labiatus_ and _U. tibetanus_; and almost everything that he says of the Indian black bear would apply equally well to _U. americanus_ (even to his weakness for yellow raspberries), except that _U. labiatus_ appears to fight upon occasion, whereas _U. americanus_ is hardly ever known to fight even in self-defence, and has never, as far as I know, been accused of making an unprovoked assault upon a human being.

Baldwin seems to have been somewhat surprised when he discovered that the Indian black bear fed upon carrion. No one in America would be surprised at anything which _U. americanus_ considered good for him. I have seen a cub take rotten melon, a piece of meat, a cake of chocolate, a plug of T. & B. tobacco, and the end of a half-smoked cigar for breakfast. Being a true American, the cub naturally showed a preference for the plug of T. & B., but none of the other things came amiss to him. In a wild state a black bear will eat any garbage, putrid fish, dead animals, or anything else which comes in his way. In fact, the poor black bear is in all his tastes and habits a thorough hog: a pig without a pig’s pugnacity.

As a rule he is a lowland beast, living in swamps and river-bottoms, but I have seen him once or twice even in a mountain sheep country, probably crossing over the divide from one river-bed to another. It is well for him that he generally eschews the open, for once out of the timber everything which has eyes must see him. A man may mistake a burnt log for a bear, but no man could mistake a bear for a burnt log. The intense blackness and gloss of a bear’s coat is not thoroughly appreciated until you see it contrasted with other objects which you are accustomed to call black.

Where the sportsman runs any chance of seeing tracks of both black and grizzly in one and the same piece of country, it is as well to be able to distinguish the one from the other.

It is not easy to do this, but, as a general rule, if the ground on which the track is made is soft, you should be able to see the long _cuts_ made by the grizzly’s claws, as contrasted with the little holes made by the points of the black bears. I am talking now of the forepaws, and it will be remembered that the claws of the black are much arched, and therefore only touch at the tip, whereas the grizzly’s claw is flat and should touch almost along its whole length.

Again, there is no doubt that the heel of the grizzly is much broader and squarer than that of the black bear, which makes a very narrow impression, even upon soft clay.

Like the grizzly, the black bear varies greatly in size and weight. On Vancouver Island I am inclined to think that the average black bear would not weigh 300 lbs.; but no doubt there are many exceptional bears, even upon the island, which greatly exceed that weight; and I have myself seen an old male upon the mainland which, if I am any judge of weight, was not an ounce less than 500 lbs., and probably weighed more; while there are from time to time black bear skins in the warehouses of Mr. Boscowitz, the principal fur-dealer in Victoria, which would measure nearly 9 ft. from end to end (if allowance were made for the mask beyond the eyes), and 6 ft. from side to side below the arms.

In 1891 I measured in this store a black bear’s skin which did not seem unduly stretched, the length of which was, to the best of my recollection, 8 ft. 6 ins. from eyes to tail, or 8 ft. 10 ins. as measured.

Amongst the skins for sale by Messrs. C. M. Lampson & Co., at their small summer sale, June 12, 1893, at which I was told that the black bear skins were small, I measured one skin 93 ins. from eyes to tail, and one of the employés of the house assured me that a black bear skin measuring 8 ft. 6 ins. was not uncommon.

Before leaving the subject of bears altogether, I should like to refer to an extraordinary skin which I saw among Mr. Boscowitz’s consignments from the upper country last year. In size this skin is considerably larger than the average bear hide; the colour of it is white, with a few straw-coloured patches (little more than a few hairs in each) on the head and about the rump. The paws and claws of the animal were attached to the skin, and from the jaws and skin of the head I should imagine that the beast had a long shallow head like a black bear’s, though the skin is more like the skin of a Polar in summer season, _except that_ whereas other bear hides are of hair, this is distinctly woolly, more like the fleece of a sheep than the hide of a bear.

I am informed that this skin was sent to Mr. Rowland Ward’s. The bear was killed on one of the inlets of the north-west coast, and is the only one of the kind ever seen in our British Columbia fur market.

IV. BISON OR BUFFALO (_Bison americanus_)

In writing of big game in North America, it is impossible to write for more than the immediate present. That which was ten years ago has already ceased to be, and it is probable that the conditions, both of game and country, will change almost as much in the coming decade as they have done in that which has just passed.

Ten years ago, as I travelled along the Northern Pacific Railway line, the skin-hunters were at work in the neighbourhood of Glendive and Little Missouri, and I had an opportunity of killing my buffalo like my predecessors. Unfortunately for me, I agreed with Colonel Dodge’s plainsmen in ‘scarcely considering the buffalo game.’ Now the herds are gone, and neither I nor any other man will see the prairies again ‘all one vast robe.’ All that remains of the vast herds which used to roam ‘over the whole of the Eastern United States to the Atlantic Ocean, and southward into Florida,’ are two or three half-domesticated herds (one which was Colonel Bedson’s and one in the Kootenay country among the Flat-head Indians), and a small band of wild beasts, protected by the United States, in the Yellowstone Park. ‘Forest and Stream,’ January 29, 1892, puts this last herd at about 400 head, with an increase of 100 head per annum. West of Winnipeg the buffalo paths are still visible, worn deep in the grey prairies by millions of passing feet; but the herds have gone, and the men and beasts who lived upon them. All that is left are a few piles of bleaching bones and a few weather-worn skulls, and even these have almost all been gathered and turned into dollars by the manure manufacturer and the trophy-monger. In this practical money-grubbing age it does not do to lament the good old days, unless you want to be laughed at; but it is hard, nevertheless, to look on the ocean of grassland when the spring flowers are coming, and not regret the great waves of animal life which used to sweep over it. Such evidence as I can offer as to the mode in which the buffalo was hunted must of necessity be hearsay evidence, collected, however, at first hand, principally from an Indian confined, at the time I saw him, at the Stony Mountain Penitentiary, and from a white skin-hunter, whose last hunts were conducted in 1880, 1881 and 1882, in Montana and North Dacota.

A white skin-hunter’s ‘outfit’ of the most modest kind consisted in those days of one hunter carrying a Sharp’s rifle (with bullets weighing 500 grains), two skinners, and an extra man for camp work and odd jobs.

During the rutting season (from July 20 to September 16) the buffaloes all ran together, but during the rest of the year the old bulls kept together, apart from the cows and young bulls. Except during the rutting season, the bands were comparatively small--from 20 to 200--led, if consisting of cows and young beasts, by an old cow. In hot weather the bands would lie quiet during the heat of the day, but in windy weather they would keep travelling all day against the wind, feeding as they went. As soon as the herds had been found the hunter would begin operations, shooting at long ranges, and keeping out of sight as much as possible. The first beast shot was the leader of the band, and as often as the band seemed to have selected another leader he, too, had to be dropped in his tracks. Without a leader, and with no enemy in sight, the remainder of the herd would generally become confused, and allow the hunter to shoot down a large number ‘at a stand,’ as he called it. Having killed as many as he could, the hunter left the carcases where they lay, his assistants coming to skin them the next day. Fifteen head a day was, so my informant stated, a fair average for one man to kill and two to skin, although in the fall of 1880 and spring of 1881 he and his party averaged twenty-four heads per diem.

The best shot was low down behind the shoulder, about ten inches from the brisket. A ball placed there would penetrate the lungs, and, after a few plunges, the beast would drop and die.

The price of all the blood shed by the skin-hunters may be summed up briefly as 2 dollars 75 cents each for ‘leather hides’--i.e. hides of old bulls all the year round and young beasts during the summer season--and 3.50 cents for ‘robe hides.’

My informant told me that if it would pay him he thought that he could still find buffalo on the northern tributaries of the Saskatchewan, east of the Rockies, as some friends of his, trapping ‘away back’ in 1886, had seen plenty of them, though the difficulty of bringing the robes out had prevented their shooting any.

The last buffalo killed by a white man to my own certain knowledge was shot by Mr. Warburton Pike far away to the North, near the Great Slave Lake, when out after musk ox.[16]

Some idea of the number of the buffaloes in early days may be gathered from the well-attested fact that the pioneer settlers often drove through the herds for days and days with buffalo in sight all round them all day long, as well as from the statistics collected by Colonel Dodge, in his ‘Plains of the Great West.’ That author states that, from information furnished to him by the Atcheson, Topeka and Santa Fé Railway Company, he concludes that not less than a million and a half were killed in the States from 1872 to 1874.

Colonel Dodge mentions a mountain buffalo as a variety of the common buffalo, and Mr. J. E. Harting, in some remarks published originally in the ‘Field,’ alludes to a beast of the same class, which he calls ‘Zacateca.’

The Zacatecas, of which specimens were exhibited at the American Exhibition of 1887, inhabit the mountainous regions of Northern Mexico; they are smaller than the buffalo, are hornless, and have tails more like the tails of yaks than like those of the common buffalo, who by the way is, properly speaking, a bison (_Bos americanus_). I have taken the liberty of calling him a buffalo because in his native haunts he has been so called, and as such he will go down to posterity in the legends of those great plains which know him no longer.

The Wood Buffalo and the Mountain Buffalo appear to be almost, if not quite, identical with the common type of _B. americanus_, from which they differ only in habitat, in the quality of their coat, and in that they are of somewhat smaller size than their kinsmen of the plains.

[Illustration: Colonel Bedson’s herd of buffaloes]

A better idea of the appearance of the subject of these remarks may be obtained by a glance at the illustrations than could possibly be given by any amount of descriptive writing, the illustrations having been drawn by Mr. Whymper from photographs of the pure-bred beasts in Colonel Bedson’s herd, taken by Lady Alice Stanley, and by a photographer at Winnipeg, Manitoba.

An idea of the size of a buffalo bull may be conveyed by the fact that, in 1889, one of the bulls in Colonel Bedson’s herd was estimated at 2,000 lbs., and a much smaller beast, a half-bred bull, was killed, which dressed without the head 1,100 lbs. This was a four-year-old, by a buffalo bull out of a Durham cow.

P.S.--Since writing the above, I have spent a season with an old-time buffalo hunter, who confirmed all the statements made to me by others; and added that, as an instance of the numbers killed by individuals, he himself accounted for 3,500 head in four years, whilst a friend of his, A. C. Myers, killed 4,200 buffaloes in the Pan Handle Country, in Texas, in one year, ‘about the time Hayes was President.’

My old friend S. W. explained to me why men used such a gigantic weapon as the ‘old reliable’ Sharp, which used to weigh 16 lbs. and upwards, although the bullet was but a small one.

[Illustration: ‘A pile of buffalo bones’]

In buffalo shooting, he said, you had often to fire a deuce of a lot of shots one after another; the weather was hotter than ‘the hottest part of the hot place,’ and as you were shooting at long ranges, if the barrel got hot, a sort of mist would get between your eye and the sights, which helped the buffalo somewhat. Besides, where shooting was your trade, you didn’t want to get your shoulder ‘kicked’ at every shot; and as for the weight of your rifle, that didn’t matter to you, for your pony packed it.

V. THE BIGHORN (_Ovis montana_)

[Illustration: A group of bighorn]

To a man who loves the hill-tops, where the winds blow keen and pure over the red gold of sun-dried grass and the deep blue of snow-fed tarns, there is no game in America to compare with the bighorn of the Rocky Mountains. Other beasts may hide away in the dense timber of Oregon, Washington Territory, and Vancouver Island; other beasts may sneak out only at dusk and dawn, but the gallant bighorn still lives out in the open, trusting for safety to the grey-faced ewes who watch over him, or to his own marvellously keen sight and scent. In spite of this, the man who kills a 16-in. ram generally deserves his good luck, for there is no beast better able to take care of himself than an old bighorn, nor any more difficult to stalk. Where he lives the wind seems never still, and never constant in any given direction; at night it strains at the hunter’s tent-rope and makes his fire roar and blaze like a mad thing, and in the morning it curls round the hill-tops and heralds the stalker’s coming from every quarter. It is the fashion in books of sport to describe the haunts of _Ovis montana_ as being ‘the highest, raggedest, and most forbidding mountain ranges.’ Nothing could be further from the truth than this, if the statement is intended to be general. Sheep are undoubtedly sometimes found in difficult and even dangerous places, but to describe sheep shooting as anything like ibex or chamois hunting is pure folly. The first sheep it was ever my good fortune to see was in the Bad Lands, on an eminence not 200 ft. above the level of the Northern Pacific Railway line, and the last I shot in 1892 was not 1,000 ft. above the level of the Frazer. As a rule, sheep in early autumn keep to the bald knolls above the timber-line (where patches of snow still linger), seeking refuge when disturbed in the abrupt rock faces with which the hills abound. When the snow comes they retire to the edge of the timber, sheltering among the juniper bushes and stunted balsams from the early winter storms. Later on, when the deep snows have covered all their upland pastures, the sheep come down to the benches immediately above the river, retiring at midday to the canyons which lead to the first ridges. On the Frazer river in late November and early December all the sheep of the district are down by the river; indeed, one ram which I shot in 1892 was first sighted feeding in the middle of a small band of cattle on the flat. But winter is not the time for sheep hunting, nor the flats above the river the proper places to hunt them in. To enjoy sheep shooting to perfection a man should leave the Pacific coast in September, pass through the belt of water meadows and pine forests, where the pink fireweed contrasts vividly with the grey stems of the pines and the soft green of the ferns, and through the country of sage brush and rolling yellow bluffs. From this point his road will lie steadily upwards, over the rolling prairie, through belts of green timber where the deer swarm in winter, and then by thread-like trails over side-hills and stone-slides along the course of some tributary of the Frazer, until at last a great yellow cone, patched here and there with snow, rises clear above the timber-line in front of him. This is sheep-land, the land of the roaring wind (Skulloptin), but it will take him a good long day to reach it, and both he and his horses will be dead tired by the time they stop to camp. At first a sheer rock wall rises from the river; on the top of the rock is a bench of golden grass, and then again there is a sharp ascent and another bench of grass. Finally the ladder of benches is lost in the forest, which goes climbing away uphill in resolute fashion until towards nightfall the hunter reaches the land of stone-slides and burnt timber, and passing through that comes out upon the edge of the sheep downs, where the stream becomes no more than a succession of small pools amongst the moss, and the only trees still left are dwarfed, stunted, and twisted into all manner of forms by the violence of the mountain winds. If the sun has left the landscape when the hunter first sees it, the effect is weird and cheerless. The great brown wastes above, the soft silent mosses underfoot, the trees huddled together in little groups as if for mutual support, the hanging fringes of blackened beard moss, all help to accentuate the bleakness of the land over which the mountain wind sobs or shrieks. But in the morning all changes as if at a magician’s word. The skies are cloudless, the sunlight dances on snowfield and streamlet, and even the grey stems of the trees are beautiful when contrasted with the ruddy orange of the Indian pinks at their feet--better than all, the hunter’s lungs are filled with air which acts on him like champagne, and on the skyline, as likely as not, he sees the great white sterns of half a dozen sheep feeding quietly on their way back to their sleeping ground. By ten o’clock at latest those sheep will lie down, and then where they lie down they will stay, motionless as the grey rocks they lie amongst, until nearly four o’clock, their eyes apparently open the whole time and fixed steadily upon the _nearest skyline_. Generally, sheep will choose a little sheltered meadow at the foot of a small glacier, lying down in the very middle of it, each old ram with his head turned in a different direction, and each with his eyes fixed on a different skyline. When sheep have chosen such a position as this, the only thing to be done is to lie and watch them until they move away to some more accessible country. Many a time have I lain like this waiting until first one old ram and then another rose, stretched himself, and then lay down again for another forty winks. It is very exasperating, but when at last the whole band gets upon its legs and feeds slowly over a ridge from behind which it is possible to stalk them, verily you have your reward.

As illustrative of the nature of the country in which sheep west of the Rockies are killed, I have seen a well-known British Columbian rancher ride up to a band of ewes in the highlands of the Ashnola country, _galloping_ after them until within range, then dismounting and killing two out of the band. This was in early autumn, and in what I consider the easiest country I have ever seen; in winter, of course, when the snows are heavy on the mountains, the sheep come right down on to the flat, by the edge of the Frazer river. Indeed, in the winter (end of November 1890) I found a fair-sized ram feeding amongst a band of cattle, and killed him before he had put a hundred yards between himself and them. Another recent statement to which I must take exception is that ‘a man who can find a band of ten or fifteen (sheep) after a week’s riding and climbing is a fortunate man.’ Sheep extend from the Missouri to Alaska, and whatever their numbers may be east of the Rockies, they are certainly plentiful enough west of that range. In Cassiar they are very numerous, and along the banks of the Frazer I have in one season (1889) seen one band of seventy, one of sixty, and on another occasion, late in the fall, a friend of mine and myself came upon an immense band feeding in little bunches of fifteen and twenty, aggregating, I should think, at least 150. I did not and could not count them, but should imagine my estimate was absurdly within the limit. M. D. and I took them at first sight for strayed cattle from a neighbouring ranch. Later on we met a portion of this band going uphill, and watched them file past us, within twenty yards of us, each beast coming up on to a little mound immediately below our ambush, pausing for a moment to look downhill, and then making place for the next. In this procession the barren ewes led, the ewes and lambs came next, and the rams brought up the rear, with the biggest ram, for whom we were waiting, last of all. But though the Frazer River country contains plenty of sheep, neither this country nor Alaska seems to produce such fine heads as are found east of the Rockies. A 16-inch head (honest measurement) is an exceptionally good head for British Columbia. Let those who doubt this statement tape their trophies and judge for themselves. East of the Rockies larger heads are not uncommon; the largest of which I have any accurate information having been bought at Morley by my friend Mr. Arnold Pike. This head measured 17.25 ins. round the base of the horn, being, therefore, considerably bigger than the fine heads exhibited by Messrs. F. Cooper and H. Seton Karr in the American Exhibition. The record sheep head, according to Ward’s excellent book, is 41 ins. in length and 17¼ in circumference.

Of course, there are stories of heads which measure far more than this--of giant heads with two twists to the horns; but they are never seen, although, like most sportsmen, I have myself once seen a head, which I did not secure, that will haunt me until my shooting days are done.

[Illustration: Mr. Arnold Pike’s great ram]

There is a tiny sheep district very far up in the mountains at the head of one of the Frazer’s tributaries to which my Indian guide alone knew the trail. He had blazed it three years before, and burnt some timber whilst he was up there, in order that another year the sweet grasses which would spring in the _brulé_ might attract plenty of deer to this his private hunting ground. From the bald top of Siyah, as I prefer to call this ground, we could see the great hills round the Frazer rolling down fold upon fold into their river-beds, their sides red-brown in the sunlight, a rich dark purple in the shadows. We were lying on the very highest ground, spying into a hollow below us in which a solitary sheep was feeding. ‘Yoharlequin,’ muttered the Siwash, ‘it is a ewe.’ Just as he spoke we both crouched close to the ground, though we were safe enough even from a bighorn’s marvellously all-seeing eyes, for at that moment five more sheep walked slowly into sight. There was no doubt as to the new-comers. We were looking upon the finest bit of sheep ground I had ever seen, and the five were worthy of it. There was one enormous ram, two which would have satisfied any man, a fourth such as I had often killed before, and a small fellow.

Everything seemed to favour us at first. The little glacier at the head of the dark gulch had sent a snow-stream tearing through the hollow, and this had cut a deep course up which we could sneak unseen. I suppose the water must have been bitterly cold, but we crawled through it for ten minutes without so much as noticing that when we had to come down to our knees the icy current ran into our trousers pockets, and though the wind blew off the glacier it was welcome, because for once it was right in our teeth. In the middle of the gulch was a big mound, and 240 yards from this (I measured the distance afterwards) stood the glorious three. Unless we could have burrowed, no man could have crept closer unseen, so that from this point I had to fire. But why tell the story, and what is the good of trying to instruct others when I so often break every rule myself? Three things I did on that day which I ought not to have done, and I paid the penalty for my folly. First, I took my Indian with me on the stalk, and, of course, at the critical moment he flurried me with his accursed ‘Shoot, shoot!’ He knew what the ram was like upon which I was trying slowly to draw a bead. Then I took two rifles with me upon that trip, and shot sometimes with one, sometimes with another. The result was that I shot badly with both, and knew nothing of either of them. Lastly, when I had missed or only wounded the big ram, I lost my head, and instead of waiting until the beasts should pause for a moment to look back, I fired three fluky shots at them ‘on the run.’ Not until the big beasts were behind a piece of rolling ground did I realise what a fool I had made of myself, and then, as we wanted meat badly, I took a quiet steady shot at the little ram which had hung behind, and killed him neatly at a good 400 yards--a shot which under ordinary circumstances I should never dream of attempting.

After waiting for awhile we followed the wounded beast, hoping that as we had given him time he would lie down and afford us a chance of another stalk. But, as the Indian said, ‘there was no lie down in that ram.’ He could only go very slowly (at a walk), but he could keep going, and over the ground to which he took us we could do no more.

We tried everything that we could think of to circumvent him, but it was no good. When the dusk was falling I got my last view of his great white quarters, lurching slowly over yet another ridge. He was evidently bound for a far country, and had no intention of stopping until he reached it; I was limping almost as badly as he was, and was far more ‘done.’ I had left a nasty piece of rock and ice behind me to recross on my way to camp, I had not a notion how far I had come, where my Indian was, or which was the nearest way to my camp, so with a heart full of bitterness I turned back, vowing to track him on the morrow and stay with him as long as he stayed in British Columbia.

But then I knew only that he was a very big ram. When I stood beside the beast which the Indian and myself had taken for a two-year-old at most, and taped his horns at 14½ ins., I had a better idea what the beast must have been like beside which this fair ram had seemed a pigmy. Of course, that night enough snow fell to hide the tracks of a mammoth! I try sometimes to console myself with the reflection that after all he was probably only a 16- or, at most, 17-in. ram, but it won’t do. I know better. From blood-stains upon the rocks (my Indian had my glass) I am pretty sure that I shot through the withers the first time, and probably hit him very far back with one of the others.

It is an extraordinary thing that though sheep so often turn and bolt _downhill_ when merely frightened, a wounded ram, especially a big one, will struggle on higher and higher as long as life and the possibility of ascending lasts.

I have noticed the same habit in Caucasian _tûr_; but, of course, my experience may be exceptional.

Sheep rut in October, but the season varies somewhat in different localities, being a little later in some than in others. However, in a good sheep country the hunter may be pretty sure of hearing the hollow clang of the horns of fighting rams some time in October, and, at least, he may be sure that in that month he has the best chance of coming across the really big beasts, which, his Indian will tell him, retire during the rest of the year to the very highest peaks. This I doubt myself, as I have always tried the highest ground, and never done any better there with the big rams than elsewhere. My own belief is that all the sheep frequent the open tops in July and August, when the grass is fresh where the snow has but recently disappeared; that in September they come down nearer the timber, and even into it, in search of sweeter feed than that which the sunburnt tops afford; that during this time the old rams are away by themselves hiding in the bush; and that in October, when the uplands have been revived by the late autumn rains, the ewes seek the hill-tops again, and the amorous rams follow the ewes.

But at whatever season you seek the bighorn, remember that he is very easily driven away, that all his senses are exceptionally keen, and that from his vantage ground above he incessantly watches the valley beneath. Therefore, if you are changing camp, do not arrange matters so as to arrive in a new country, which you intend to hunt, about nightfall, or if you do, reduce the chopping which has to be done to a minimum; don’t light big fires, and let those you light be as much hidden as possible from the ridges upon which you expect to find game. If possible, it is better to get to a fresh shooting ground so early that you can do a day’s hunting before there is any necessity for cutting timber or lighting a fire.

As it is not easy to weigh large game in camp, and as I am no believer in guess-weights, I shall not attempt to estimate the weight of a bighorn ram; but, bearing in mind that the _O. montana_ is one of the most compactly built animals in the world, the curious in such matters may form an approximate idea of the beast’s weight from the following measurements of a 16-in. ram, which I took myself within an hour of his death. Measuring him as he lay, this ram was 3 ft. 6 ins. from the root of his tail to where the neck is set on to the shoulder; his girth under his forelegs was 3 ft. 9 ins.; and his height, as nearly as I could get it, 3 ft. 2 ins. at the shoulder.

VI. THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN GOAT (_Haploceros montanus_)

[Illustration: Rocky Mountain goats]

The Rocky Mountain Goat may, like other animals, vary in its habits a good deal in different localities. In British Columbia, which appears to be peculiarly its home, I am bound to say that it appears to be the biggest fool that walks on four legs. I am aware that some authorities upon sport, whose opinions deserve consideration, differ from me upon this point, but living as I do at present amongst British Columbians, I am not afraid of being contradicted by local sportsmen when I aver that there is no wild animal easier to stalk than _Haploceros_. There are many men out here who, after having killed their first few heads, will have nothing more to do with goat hunting, regarding it as unworthy the name of sport. I remember well one old goat which I stalked in the Bridge River country. The beast was a very big one, and was first seen feeding upon a bare hillside. He was on one side of an amphitheatre, we were on the other. Between us lay over half a mile of rattling shale and moraine, and there was no cover for a mouse. However, there was nothing else to hunt, and the goat was the largest I had ever seen, so with my Indian behind me I began the stalk. I am confident that any other beast would have seen us before we had gone a hundred yards; we slipped and fell, we rattled the stones about, and the whole thing was so ludicrous that I had to sit down and laugh more than once; but in spite of all this I got within forty yards of the poor stupid brute, who had been looking in our direction in a puzzled way for the last ten minutes, and felt thoroughly ashamed of myself when I put an end to his doubts with a bullet. To give an idea of the tameness of these brutes, I took six or seven photographs of goats in one day last year with a very elaborate photographic apparatus, the photographs unfortunately being destroyed before they could be developed, when the whole apparatus, together with my guide, went rolling down a steep incline almost into the Bridge River.

Though not worth stalking, these goats are quaint beasts and worth watching. As a rule, they live where nothing else would care to, on precipitous rock faces overhanging a stream where no grass grows, and where there is very little even to browse upon. Just at dawn you may see them crossing a wall of rock high above your camp in single file, or wending their way slowly from their feeding grounds to the timber patches in which they lie all day. They are very local in their distribution and very conservative in their habits, infesting one small mountain in great numbers and never seeming to stray into the neighbouring heights. Day after day they appear to seek the same feeding grounds, and retire to the same lairs, with a punctuality which would be becoming in a postman. Their meat is so poor that Indians will hardly eat it, and the market value of their hides is only 3_s._ 6_d._ to a tourist. They occupy only such localities as other beasts would despise, and altogether seem somewhat justified in the mute protest of their wondering regard when attacked, which seems to say as plainly as dumb beasts can speak, ‘Surely you are not going to meddle with us; we, at least, are beasts of no account.’ To obtain a good specimen head their haunts ought to be visited as late in the year as possible, as the coats are not so white or the beards so long in early autumn as they are in November, and a goat’s head without the long patriarchal beard is a poor affair. They abound all over British Columbia, especially in such places as Bute Inlet, and I have even seen them on the islands in the Straits of San Juan, from which I am inclined to infer that they had swum over from the mainland. An old billy which I shot girthed 56 ins. round the chest after he had been skinned, and the longest horns of which I have any record measured 11½ ins. from base to tip. The accompanying plate gives a better idea of the queer old-world appearance of the Rocky Mountain goat than any word-painting of mine could do. In old days, the Indians used to make blankets of their fleece, but the industry appears to be nearly dead, now that English blankets have become cheap and plentiful in British Columbia, so that there appears to be no reason why the white goat should not be allowed to remain unmolested for many years to come. I have seen _Haploceros_ in Alaska as well as in British Columbia, and expect that my friend Mr. John Fannin, curator of the British Columbian Museum, is right in inferring that the goats go as far north as the mountains do. The skin, measured by Mr. Fannin, and mentioned in his article upon goats in the ‘Big Game of North America,’ is far and away the largest I have ever heard of, a skin 5 ft. from horns to tail, by 40 ins. from side to side, being an exceptionally large one, whereas Mr. Fannin’s large skin measured 7 ft. by 4 ft. 10 ins.

The track of the goat is not unlike that of a large bighorn ram, but squarer and blunter.

VII. THE PRONGHORN ANTELOPE (_Antilocapra americana_)

[Illustration: Antilocapra americana]

The scheme of these volumes does not allow for a full and detailed account of the shooting of every variety of game found in each country. It may therefore suffice to say of this antelope that it may be killed as any other antelope is killed, either by stalking, the shots being taken as a rule at long ranges, or by coursing. There are very few parts of America, if any, in which the antelope has been so little hunted as to allow the old ruse of flagging (i.e. of attracting them within range by the exhibition of strange objects which arouse their curiosity) to be practised with success. Ten or fifteen years ago, antelope might be seen from the windows of almost every train running west of Chicago, but now their range is vastly curtailed, and though a few small herds may still be found in most of their old haunts, they are not really abundant except in Texas, in the neighbourhood of the National Park, and in Assineboia, where in 1893 I saw two considerable bands in April from the carriage windows of the Canadian Pacific Railway train.

In Texas, a friend who was there in November 1892 wrote me: ‘There seems to be plenty of antelope round here, as they are frequently brought into town, sometimes by the cartload to be shipped.’ In California antelopes have been almost exterminated, and the same may be said of Oregon, whilst in Colorado the districts in which they occur are not numerous, nor even in these does the beast exist in any numbers, except where it has been preserved. It seems likely that the pronghorn will be the next of the American mammals to disappear before the arms of the white man. Like the buffalo, the antelope is a dweller on the plains, seldom seeking refuge either in the timber or in the high mountains, although he is found at a very considerable altitude on the high tablelands near Gunnison, Colorado, for example (6,000 to 7,000 ft. at least above sea level). The season for antelope shooting should be from August to the middle or end of October, after which time the oldest of the bucks will have shed the shell-like covering of their horns. The rutting season lasts for about six weeks, beginning in September and ending in October. The pronghorn, though an inhabitant of the great plains, is not a wanderer as most denizens of such countries are, but seems to attach himself to a certain district, and to remain there or near there until his tribe has been exterminated. For instance, there is a small band which may be seen almost any day in winter within a few miles of one of the big cities of Colorado. The band grows smaller year by year, but it never alters its winter quarters in consequence of man’s persecution. The pronghorn has, moreover, other enemies to contend against besides man and his Winchester, the great eagles of the North-West occasionally taking toll from the herds. An instance of this was seen by Mr. A. Pike in Colorado last year, when the buck, after dodging the eagle’s attacks for some time, escaped into some brush; but such attacks are said by the plainsmen to be fairly frequent and often successful.

[Illustration: A herd of pronghorns]

Mr. Rowland Ward gives 15¾ ins. as the length of the longest horn of the pronghorn within his knowledge.

VIII. THE DEER OF AMERICA

Judge Caton, an authority upon the deer of his own country, describes eight well-defined species as inhabiting the North American continent. These are the wapiti (_C. canadensis_), the moose (_C. alces_), the woodland caribou (_C. tarandus_), the Barren Ground caribou (_C. tarandus arcticus_), the mule deer (_C. macrotis_), the Columbian black-tailed deer (_C. columbianus_), the Virginian or white-tailed deer (_C. virginianus_), and a little-known beast called by Caton _C. acapulcensis_.

With the last-named a sportsman is likely to have very little to do, as its range is extremely limited and its size insignificant (‘weight from 30 to 40 lbs., height 24 ins. at the shoulder, and length from the end of the nose to the root of the tail 44 ins.’; cf. Caton’s ‘Deer of America,’ pp. 121, 122), whilst its antlers, though quaint, are hardly worth taking as a trophy. Caton gives a cut of the antlers of a full-grown buck of this species. Of the originals of that cut Caton says that they measure in length 7 ins. and 3 lines, in circumference above the burr 2 ins., and that they are more palmated than the horns of any other American deer except moose and caribou. For further information on this deer the reader is referred to Caton’s work, which should be in the library of every man interested in natural history. Of the other seven species of American cervidæ there is much to be said, and little space left to say it in.

(1) MOOSE (_C. alces_)

[Illustration: The record head]

Of all deer extant to-day, the moose is the largest. Of all earth’s animals, except perhaps old _Haploceros_, he bears most plainly still the impress of Nature’s ’prentice hand when she made things huge and roughhewn, and had no time to polish her work and smooth off the corners. Evolution does not seem to have affected the moose, for to-day he wanders along that great chain of lakes from the Arctic to the Atlantic, from the mouth of the Mackenzie River to the St. Lawrence--a survival of the earth’s dawn rather than a commonplace nineteenth-century deer. All sorts of stories are told as to his weight and size. Caton, who is always careful not to exaggerate, puts the weight of a bull moose at from 700 to 1,400 lbs., and his height at 6 ft. at the withers. The largest pair of horns of which we have any authentic record (the cut is from a photograph of them) measures in span 66 ins. (or 5 ft. 6 ins.) from tip to tip, but a recent writer in an American work upon sport and natural history (Mr. Hibbs) describes a moose which he saw dead in the Teton Basin, whose antlers spanned 8 ft. 6 ins. from tip to tip, making an arch when inverted under which a man ‘slightly stooping’ could walk. This Titan of the Tetons stood, ‘_without his legs under him_, 15 hands high,’ so that, allowing for the fact that a moose has, according to Caton, ‘very long legs, to which he is indebted for his great height,’ he must have stood in life, _with his legs under him_, from 8 to 9 ft. high at the withers. This seems rather tall, even for a moose from the Rocky Mountains. As before stated, this great deer ranges from the Arctic Ocean to the St. Lawrence, and in spite of the persecution of man still abounds as far east as the provinces of Quebec and Ontario; is reported to exist in large numbers on the head-waters of the Clear Water River, in Idaho; is found in Montana and Wyoming, and flourishes exceedingly in the North-Western portions of British Columbia as well as in the adjoining territory of Alaska.

[Illustration: MOOSE AT HOME]

With great wisdom the Legislatures both of Canada and the States have taken the moose under their protection, but the great deer would be in no danger of extermination even if the law had overlooked him, as he has haunts still remote, and except in deep snow can take very fair care of himself; indeed, even as lately as 1887 I could have killed seven bull moose in six days’ hunting in Ontario had I been butcher enough to do so, whilst in 1891 I saw two canoes (big freight canoes) come down loaded with magnificent moose horns from a district where almost the only residents are a few Siwashes (Indians) and some Chinese miners! Where Chinese kill game, game must be fairly plentiful still.

Although as big as a haystack, the moose is not quite as easy to hit, nor is he everybody’s ‘meat.’ His favourite haunts are the dense thickets round lakes and about river-bottoms, the dark balsam groves, hardwood hills, and brulé patches of Ontario, and wherever the lily pads, moose wood, swamp maple, alder bushes, coarse grasses or mosses upon which he feeds are most luxuriant.

By some strange fatality, wherever things are most convenient for the moose they appear to be least convenient for the hunter. The scrub over which the moose looks without raising his ugly head closes over and drowns the unfortunate biped who tries to follow him; the fallen trees and huge logs which the moose takes comfortably in his stride must be climbed by the hunter, and yet, in spite of his size, when the big bull has answered your call and has come crashing through the alder and swamp tea to within twenty yards of you, he is likely enough to halt in the shadow, detect the fraud, and steal away without a sound.

Like other deer, the moose seems slow to identify objects with his eyes, but there is no doubt about the keenness of his other senses. If it pleases him to answer your call, though his answer may be all but inaudible to you, you need not call again unless you like. Through a mile of brush which to you appears a pathless tangle he will steer straight to the square yard from which your call came, unless a bough should scrape against your overalls or a tiny puff of wind carry the faintest suggestion of your presence to him. If either of these things happen, the moose will make up his mind without stopping to think. In addition to the keenness of his senses the bull moose is credited with considerable pugnacity when pursued and ‘cornered,’ and he undoubtedly is a bit of a strategist, choosing his couch, for instance, invariably in such a position as to command the country all round. The Indians, when following a moose’s track, will, oftener than not, keep describing a succession of semicircles, so that, instead of walking in the bull’s tracks, they cut them from time to time. This is done to outwit the bull, who, they say, when he means to lie down will turn aside and walk back parallel to his trail, and lie down with his head towards his back tracks, so that either his eyes or his nose must give him warning of anyone who attempts to follow him.

There are three principal methods of hunting the moose besides the foul practice of snaring him with a loop in his run ways or of butchering him in his yards (i.e. in those camps and feeding grounds which moose stamp out for themselves in the deepest snows of winter). The favourite method (in Canada, at any rate) is ‘calling,’ a birch-bark horn being used night and morning to imitate either the cry of the bull or of the cow, and so lure a would-be mate or rival (as the case may be) to his ruin. September is the season of the rut in Lower Canada, and during the earlier part of this season the bull seems nearly beside himself with rage and unrequited passion, wandering constantly in search of a mate or a rival, and filling the woods with hoarse calls or hoarser challenges. About one man in a million is clever enough to mimic these calls, and if you are lucky enough either to be that man or his employer, you may take advantage of the moonlight and lie out behind some log or bush watching the skyline and listening while the half-breed (it will probably be a French half-breed) grunts and roars upon the horn, imitates the thrashing of the bull’s antlers amongst the alder-bushes. Experts disagree as to the amount of skill required to call a moose. Some say that any noise is good enough when he is really on the war-path, that the chopping of an axe or the bray of a donkey will ‘fetch’ him; others again affirm that the nicest accuracy is necessary in imitating every call, and I am bound to admit that, though I have never met a man who had seen a moose drawn to his ruin by the sound of chopping, I have more than once known that a moose owed his life to the fact that my overalls were made of a peculiarly harsh material from which the brush in passing managed to elicit a very penetrating sound.

If all goes well with the caller, it may be that at last he will hear, faint and far off, a hoarse response from the depths of the swamp below him, a response repeated from time to time, and growing each time nearer, until at last, if he can hear anything but the beating of his own heart, he will hear the scrub crunched under the foot of the advancing monster. As long as all goes well, the quiet night betrays the bull’s every movement to the hidden man, almost as clearly as if the hunter could watch the whole play with his naked eyes. Now the bull comes crashing up from the swamp through the alder-bushes, now he is standing listening half in doubt as to whether to come on or go back, but the half-breed is prepared for the emergency. Good as he is, he dare not try a call at such close quarters, but he strikes the horn against the scrub and the bull comes on again, thinking that he has heard the rattle of his enemy’s weapons.

When at last, with strangely little warning it seems to you, and much closer to you than you had expected, that monstrous form looms up against the half-light, remember to _look at its shoulder_, and try not to merit my Indian’s reproof to me when a bullet went six inches too high--‘All same again, you allus look at the horns instead of the bull, cap.’

Moose calling has almost every attribute of true sport. To succeed, a man must know the habits of his quarry and have admirable opportunities for studying them; if he ‘calls’ himself, he must have an excellent ear and be a perfect mimic, and for him the morning and the evening, moonlight and the grey of dawn, lend their beauty to the beauty of the silent woods. But for some men, ‘calling’ hardly gives the man enough to do. To these men I recommend still hunting over the hardwood hills about the time of the first snowfall, when there is enough snow to track in, with a good French Canadian half-breed as a guide. To my mind there is hardly any better sport on earth than to follow the great tracks through the new-fallen snow, through woods beautiful beyond all description with the beauty of a Canadian winter, over hardwood hills, and through patches of brulé, and then down into a bed of frozen willows, silvered by the frost, and jewelled by the sun, through swamps of tea-bush off which the frost falls in showers of crisp scales, until late in the afternoon you run up to your beast in a heavy grove of balsam, looking intensely black against the blinding purity of the snow. But for this sport you want young limbs and strong ones, and the wind and endurance of a temperate and clean liver. You want these for any sport worth the name.

There is yet another way of hunting moose, when the snows are down and the crust upon them is strong enough to bear a man on snow-shoes, but not strong enough to carry the moose. Of course, all the odds are against the animal, but still this is exciting sport, making tremendous demands upon the man’s endurance; and it is moreover when pursued in this way that the moose is said to turn ‘ugly’ and sometimes hunt the hunter. Provided that a man only kills old bulls, and not too many of them, I see no objection to this form of pursuit. The percentage of men who can run to within shooting distance of a bull moose when trying to escape through his native forest, even when the snow is at its worst for the bull, will never be very great, and the excitement of the sport must be intense. I have never yet had a chance of trying it.

Even when a man is in the best of luck, what he generally has to shoot at, and that in a hurry, is not a beast 8 ft. high, weighing 1,400 lbs., standing broadside on in the open, but a small piece of brown passing between the boles of the pine-trees in deep shadow, one or two hundred yards off. The Indian may tell him that what he sees is a moose. Nine men out of ten would not have discovered the fact for themselves.

(2) THE WAPITI (_C. canadensis_)

The creatures of the nineteenth century are the children of the earth’s old age. The days of the giants are over, and the days of the pigmies are upon us. When our naked forefathers were armed only with bows and arrows, there were elk in Ireland whose antlers spanned 11 ft. from tip to tip, and even in the more recent days of the Hudson Bay musket, there were (so men say) wapiti in Wyoming whose antlers when inverted formed arches under which a six-foot man might pass without stooping.

Alas! there are no such wapiti nowadays, and indeed, although there are scores of men in the States who will assure you that they have themselves walked under such arches, it is very hard to believe that they are not mistaken, in the face of the fact that a _four-foot man_ could not walk under the largest head known to be in existence at the present moment, though the longest wapiti head in the American Exhibition of 1887 (belonging to Mr. Frank Cooper, and numbered 89 in the catalogue) is described as measuring 62½ ins. along the back of the beam from base to tip of the longest tine, with an expanse between the antlers of 48½ ins.

[Illustration: WAPITI IN THE EMERALD PASS, B.C.]

It is not easy, either in America or elsewhere, to find a head (dead or alive) which will beat this by an inch in any direction; and yet, if this head were inverted, no _four-foot man_ could walk without stooping under the arch so made. During several years spent in wandering about Canada and the States, I have heard again and again of gigantic wapiti heads; I have even met men who own such trophies, and have actually bought them for $500, the money to be paid when the ‘head’ was delivered. Unfortunately, my cash was never claimed, and I confess that I never expected that it would be, yet some of the trophy-owners wanted money ‘in the worst way.’

But though the ‘bull elk’ of to-day is neither as large as the Irish elk nor as the ‘elk’ of pioneer legends, he is still a magnificent beast, not quite as big as the moose and not carrying a very much larger head on the average than the Caucasian stag; but still, take him all in all, he is the grandest stag left on earth. To an unscientific eye, the wapiti differs from the Scotch red deer in three points only: he is larger of course, his antlers as a rule lack the cup peculiar to the Scotch royal, and his call in the rutting season is a whistle, whilst the red deer’s is a roar. His range in America is still a wide one, although the encroachments of civilization are driving him ever further and further back into that dense timber of which he is always too fond. It is this love of the timber which has enabled the wapiti to outlive his old comrade the bison, and will probably enable him to survive the antelope, which seems likely to be one of the next animals wiped off the face of the great American continent. In the mountain forests of Wyoming and Montana, of Idaho and Colorado, wapiti are still fairly plentiful; in California, I have heard that there are a good many in the red-wood districts, though of this I have no certain knowledge; but there is no doubt that the home, _par excellence_, of the wapiti to-day is in the dense timber of the Olympian range, in Washington Territory, in Oregon, and to a certain extent in Vancouver Island, British Columbia. In the early part of this century there were wapiti on the mainland of British Columbia, and their bones may still be found pretty frequently in the Chilcotin country; but the animals themselves are said to have been exterminated by the Indians or starved to death during an exceptionally severe winter sixty or seventy years ago. Be that as it may, there are no wapiti on the mainland of British Columbia to-day, nor are there anywhere (unless it be in the fastnesses of the Olympian range) any vast herds of this splendid beast such as we read of in the books of the pioneer sportsmen of the North-West. For this change for the worse we have to thank the meat-hunter, the skin-hunter, and the ranchman about equally, although perhaps the advent of cattle does more to drive deer out of a country than anything else. As an example of what _was_ as compared to what _is_, I may cite the case of my old camp man, Sam Wells, who, when the Union Pacific Railway was being built to the west of Cheyenne, killed, in his capacity of meat-hunter to the construction party, 84 antelope, 24 elk, and 18 deer during one autumn; whereas this year, in the best bit of country known to him in Colorado, our camp was many days without meat, and myself and my friend were looked upon as exceptionally fortunate in having secured three good heads (wapiti) in three weeks’ hunting. It is fair to add that the country hunted, although comparatively little disturbed, was very near to a good-sized town.

It is said that before the advent of the white man the wapiti frequented the plains, where the rich bunch grass helped to build up the enormous antlers of which we hear so much and see so little. Nowadays men and cattle have driven the wapiti from the bunch-grass plains, and he has become almost entirely a denizen of the dense timber districts.

In Colorado, where I hunted wapiti in 1892, we found our game in the timber at an elevation of 10,000 ft. above sea level, but I have shot them in equally dense timber on Vancouver Island at little above sea level. Speaking broadly, the habits of the wapiti and of the Scotch red deer are identical, except for the former’s detestable predilection for timber. About the beginning of September the ‘bull elk,’ as all Americans insist on calling him, has rubbed the velvet off his antlers, and ten days later these antlers are dry and hard and fit for fighting. The rubbing, or ‘fraying,’ is generally done against the stem of a quaking asp or young green pine, the wapiti never using a dry stick for his rubbing-post. As soon as his horns are dry, the bull begins whistling or bugling, this whistling being kept up until about the middle of October. I am inclined to think that the whistling (i.e. the rutting) season varies a good deal in different districts according to the seasons and the altitude at which the bulls find themselves. In Colorado in 1892 we heard the first whistle on September 16th, and the last about three weeks later; and although our old guide considered 1892 an exceptionally early season, I fancy that from the middle of September to the middle of October may be looked upon as the ordinary rutting season of _Cervus canadensis_.

There is nothing about the wapiti more characteristic or more striking than his whistle, a call wild enough and weird enough to harmonise with the savagery of the beast’s surroundings. I have never yet met a man who could imitate the whistle or even adequately describe it; but if I must attempt to give some idea of it, I should say that it was a long flute-like sound, sometimes rising and falling, and ending more often than not in two or three hoarse, angry grunts. Like the Scotch red deer, the wapiti carries his horns until March, my friend Mr. Arnold Pike having seen two old bulls with good heads on the 29th of March of this year. In Colorado, as in Vancouver Island, each band of wapiti seems to confine itself pretty closely to a particular district, never moving more than twenty or thirty miles from one place, but travelling on occasion from one side to another of its domains with a rapidity which is exasperating to the hunter who has to follow with a pack train. Early in September the principal food of the wapiti appears to be the pink-flowered fireweed (_phlox_), which grows in rank luxuriance amongst the burnt timber; and later on, when the frost has nipped the tops of the young elder bushes, these seem to attract a good deal of the great deer’s attention. But _Cervus canadensis_ is a somewhat promiscuous feeder, all grasses and most weeds and bushes seeming to be included in his list of things to be eaten. The young tops of the quaking asp, of the willow, and of a low creeping shrub locally known as elk weed, all seem favourites in their season.

On such food as this the wapiti grows to prodigious proportions, of which the following measurements, supplied by Mr. Andrew Williamson, give the best idea. Mr. Williamson killed sixteen bulls in one season in Colorado in 1878, of which the largest measured 9 ft. from the tip of the nose to the tail, stood 17 hands at the shoulder, and girthed 6 ft. 8 ins. round the heart. The average measurements of eight out of the sixteen bulls were as follows: Length from nose to tail, 8 ft. 5 ins.; height at shoulders, 16 hands and ⅝ in.; girth round the heart, 6 ft. 1 in. Compare these measurements with those of the largest racehorse on record, and you get some idea of the size of the wapiti, though even then the figure which you will conjure up will be small compared with the apparition which sometimes confronts a Western hunter upon the skyline, or to a ‘bull elk’ at bay with his head down, his bristles up, and his eyes glaring angrily at the insignificant collie yapping round him. The average length of the antlers of Mr. Williamson’s bulls is given as 53 ins., and the span of these antlers, measured _inside_ the beam, as 44 ins. As to the weight of a wapiti, it is unfortunate that the man who kills one has very rarely any apparatus at hand for weighing his prize; and even Mr. Caton, the great American authority upon the _Cervidæ_ of North America, gives neither measurements nor weights of full-grown bulls.

In his work upon the deer of America, this writer mentions a bull once in his possession which when killed, as a _five-year-old_ weighed 900 lbs. live weight; and adds that ‘as the elk grows till he is eight or nine years old, he (this bull) would, had he lived to his full age, have attained to the weight of 1,000 or 1,100 lbs.’ Colonel Dodge, in his ‘Plains of the Great West,’ puts the weight of an average ‘elk’ at only 500 lbs., although he qualifies this by adding that one has been killed which weighed 800 lbs.; while Mr. Andrew Williamson, in his ‘Sport and Photography in the Rockies,’ guesses the weight of his big bull at 1,200 lbs. But most of this is guesswork. The nearest approach to an accurate record of weight in my possession is taken from a statement made to me by an old Western meat-hunter in whose truthfulness I have every confidence. This man told me that the hind-quarters of the largest bull he ever killed (‘and I cut ’em off pretty high up,’ he added) weighed, when taken into town, a little over 400 lbs. From this it would appear that the live weight of the whole animal could not have fallen far short of Mr. Williamson’s estimate of the weight of his big bull.

In spite of the fact that no large areas of food pasture are known on Vancouver Island, the wapiti found upon it do not, in point of size, fall far short of those upon the mainland of the American continent. I have myself, at the head of the Salmon River on this island, shot a bull which measured rather over 16 hands and 1 in. at the shoulder, and appeared to be a heavy stag for his size. Indeed, if the wapiti of Vancouver Island vary at all from deer of the same species on the mainland, it is in their antlers, which have always seemed to me to be peculiarly heavy in the beam and narrow in the span, whilst amongst them I have more than once noticed specimens having cups similar to those of a Scotch royal: a somewhat remarkable fact, as this formation is exceptionally rare amongst the wapiti on the mainland of America.

To anyone who has read this chapter thus far believing what he read, it must appear that _Cervus canadensis_ is as fine a game animal as the heart of a hunter could desire. But I have only presented hitherto the fair side of the picture; of course it has another. The wapiti is superb, but his habits are beneath contempt. While the gallant mountain ram lives out on the open hill-tops, staking his life boldly upon the keenness of his own senses, the great ‘bull elk’ sneaks about in the shadows of the densest timber he can find just below the edge of the sheep ground, pottering about the beds of mountain streams, poking his head noiselessly through the thickets of willow round the parks, picking his way gingerly over chaotic windfalls of burnt timber, and dozing by day on the top of some woodland ridge which a shadow in moccasins could hardly reach unheard.

But ‘what’s the good of gassing?’ as old Sam Wells would say. Come away to my camp in Colorado and see the bull elk for yourself. And first let me warn you that here in his own land, _Cervus canadensis_ is ‘elk,’ or ‘bull elick’ on occasion, but never wapiti. The ‘boys’ don’t know what a wapiti is; never ‘heerd tell on him’ as like as not. _Cervus canadensis_ is, of course, the wapiti of the naturalists and a few thousand Englishmen and scientific gentlemen, just as the buffalo is the bison of the same well-informed circle; but to sixty or seventy millions of white men these beasts are elk and buffalo, now, henceforth, and for ever. The ‘boys’ round camp are rude enough to say that ‘_they_ know what a bull elk is, and if they don’t, who the ---- does?’ and as I hate arguing (where arguments are sometimes six-chambered), it may be as well to call _Cervus canadensis_ by his local name for the next few pages.

Our camp, then, is pitched at an altitude of nearly 10,000 ft. above sea level, on the edge of a great park or ‘open’ of rank yellow grass, through which a mountain stream twists and turns. Years ago, before Sam Wells cleared them out, beavers had dammed this stream, and the park stills owes a good deal of its richness to their operations. Above the park in a great circle the dark ranks of the pine-trees close in; whilst above them again rise the bare ridges and strangely castellated tops of the ‘divide.’

In the early summer the elk may have wandered upon those bare ridges (their tracks prove it, and a natural desire to avoid their insect tormentors accounts for it), but they are not upon those ridges now. As the rutting season approaches the elk come down from the high places, and in September every one of the forty or fifty beasts which live all the year round in this little district is within that dark belt of timber, worse luck to it!

Since June there has been no rain in the State of Colorado, nor can even the most sanguine of us see any promise of rain to come in the crystal clear vault above us.

By day the sun is hot enough to make men sit about in their shirt-sleeves, but by night the frost makes us draw our blankets closer, and almost wish for another pair. It is perfect weather for picnicing in the woods, but it is impossible weather for still hunting.

Between them, sun and frost and mountain air have made the woods dry as a chip and crisp as a biscuit. The woodland solitudes are more noisy than Chinatown at New Year: the leaves rattle like dead men’s bones, and the twigs seem to explode like fire-crackers under your feet.

But it is September; the hunter’s moon has begun, and now and again, just about dawn or towards evening, there is a hollow whistle from the depths of the pine forests, followed by a succession of hoarse choking grunts. This is the love song of the great bull, and for the moment he is careless of rustling leaves and snapped twigs, and, being in love, is as great a fool as a biped under similar circumstances. Nor is love the bull elk’s only excuse for imprudence just now. In summer the great woods are still, but for the hum of insect life; in winter they are still as death; but now, in late autumn, they are full of sounds. Winter is coming, and everything that has breath is busy laying in stores for the approaching snow-time. All day long there is a rattle among the brush as creatures bustle through it; all day long the great fir-cones come thumping down from the pine-tops, while the squirrels who are gathering them chatter and swear at one another with the vigour and bitterness of rivals in business. Chipmunks, engaged in the same work of harvest, skip like long-legged streaks of light along the logs, and the short-tailed grey rats are as busy as either squirrels or chipmunks. As you cross the hillside, your foot sinks deep into the light soil, for the earth is full of little tunnels, and every tunnel is choked with garnered pine-cones; whilst in the high places amongst the rocks you come now and again upon a miniature haystack, neatly cut, and made of dried Alpine flowers and grasses, prepared for winter use by one of Nature’s invisible workers.

As you lie upon the hillside in the warm sun at noon, with the timber all below you and a good day’s work behind you, you will have time to note these things; but just now, though the stars are still visible, you should not be ‘foolin’ around camp’ any longer, if you want to get a shot at a bull before sundown.

It is no good pleading that you have toiled for a fortnight and seen nothing; that your limbs ache, your clothes are torn to rags, and your hands and feet wounded by the beastly dead timber. Such heads as bull elk wear in Colorado can only be earned nowadays by early rising, long patience, and honest hard work; so off with you, while the rime is on the sage brush, in spite of the temptation to stop until Sam has cooked just one rasher of sow-belly. The first crossing of the brook, before you are a hundred yards from camp, will effectually wake you up and make you step out, unless you want to ‘freeze solid,’ for the stepping-stones at this early hour are coated with ice, and neither courage nor caution, neither moccasins, nails, nor even sand, can save you from a cold plunge. Great Cæsar’s ghost! how cold it is; and how warm even the woodland bogs strike after that running water!

Here, within half a mile of your camp, is the first sign of elk; a great wallow made in the marsh late yesterday evening, and running from the wallow is a trail, well beaten, which leads, as you know, by a very circuitous route to that bare patch of red mud where the elk lick for alkali. But we have no time to follow the trail to-day, more especially as the elk seem to leave the lick before dawn. Our hunting-ground is in a belt of burnt timber very near the top of the divide, and to reach it in time we must climb straight up one ridge after another without staying to look for trails and easy places. From camp the belt of timber looks as if it lay upon a smooth, gently rising hillside. Once within it, you learn that the belt is composed of densely timbered ridges rising one behind another like waves in a choppy sea, and as you toil through and over these ridges, you wish, if you are an ordinary man, that you had never heard of elk.

Everywhere the trees crowd one another for light and breathing room, but so long as they are standing (unless they are young green pines) a man may walk at ease among them. It is when fire and wind have swept through them and left them in chaotic tangles upon the ground that the trouble begins. Then it is that the elk hunter has to rival the squirrel or Blondin, tacking from point to point along the pine logs, now straining every muscle to get a grip on the slippery trunk of a pine which offers a bridge uphill across the prone carcases of its fellows, now manfully suppressing an oath as his feet slip and he sits down inadvertently upon the ‘business end’ of a rampike.

For an hour, perhaps, or two, there is little or no change in your work. Your road may lie through dense green timber at one moment, through half-lit mossy glades at another, and the next through hollows full of burnt timber, amongst which the elk tracks are thick, and the pink fire-flower blooms; but it is always uphill work, and almost always in places where still hunting is impossible. Now and again there is something to cheer you up and encourage you to make fresh exertions. Now it is a great track like a deer’s, but larger and blunter; now it is the stem of a young quaking asp with its bark hanging in ribbons, which makes your heart beat quicker; or perhaps it is only the freshly nibbled buds of a young elder bush. There is no doubt that there are elk about, and a good many of them, and as you stretch in vain to reach the scars upon the quaking asp, you realise that there are big bulls among them; but what is the use of the biggest bull if you are never to see him within two hundred yards? Once to-day you heard a bough break several hundred yards below you, and a few minutes later you saw the warm lair from which an elk had stolen away; but you never saw him, never even heard him, until he was well out of range.

‘Hang the luck!’ you mutter; in another hour the wind that rises about noon will get up and then the odds will be doubled against you. Will the luck never change? Well, yes. Just as you are deciding for the twentieth time that you never will hunt elk again, there is a long hollow whistle among the pines below you. The whistle is faint and far off, and if you had not been sitting down and at rest you would never have heard it. You have, as a matter of fact, failed to hear two or three similar whistles during the morning--whistles which a better woodsman would have heard, and which even you would never have missed had you taken Sam’s advice and gone slow, ‘settin’ down once in a while to listen.’

You are not likely to see a motionless stag when you are scrambling through the brush, or to hear a bull’s stealthy tread upon the trail, or his distant call, whilst you are forcing your way through a barricade of burnt timber.

Well, luck, which after all counts for more in hunting than all the skill and experience of the best hunter--luck has favoured you at last, and there the whistle comes again, and directly after it another, followed this time by deep, hoarse grunts, so deep and hoarse and so close to you that, as Sam puts it, ‘your hair almost lifts your cap off your head.’ That last bull was within five hundred yards of you, and there can be no doubt about his size. Creeping forward, you look cautiously over the brow of a little ridge on to a flat, where amongst the black, burnt stems of the dead pines the tall jungle of fireweed is vivid with every shade from fresh green to royal purple, scarlet, and orange, and even as you look, without a sound, a great head is pushed out from a bunch of quaking asp. For what seems to you an age the cow stares straight at you, and then, when you are almost in despair, moves quietly into the open followed by her calf. In another moment the bull appears on the cow’s trail, without any display of that caution shown by her. There are others, you think, still in the timber, and a gleam of brown moving between the pine stems convinces you that you are right; but there is no doubt that this is the master bull of the herd, and you fairly catch your breath at the sight of his vast antlers.

As he stands there, sounding again his weird, unearthly challenge, you realise that you are looking upon one of Nature’s masterpieces set in a fitting frame. When your finger presses the trigger it will destroy the picture, and yet if you hesitate much longer all your labour will be lost, and you will have no royal trophy to remind you of this day, when the good rifle is rusting with disuse and your limbs are stiff with old age.

For my part, if I could get a camera which would do good work at a hundred yards, I would rather press a button than a trigger. However, like the rest of us, the bull must die some day; if you don’t kill him there is a ‘prominent citizen’ somewhere who made a pile in hardware, who will give a hundred dollars for those splendid antlers, and the bar-tender in the same city (a gentleman ‘way up in the Order of the Elks’) will give five dollars apiece for his tushes, so that, after all, you may as well fire the shot and take the spoils yourself.

For a moment the woods ring with the report; the other elk vanish like the figures of a dream, but the bull stands unflinching, as if he had neither heard the shot nor felt the sting of the bullet.

A little shiver creeps over him, and he seems to draw himself together. A moment he stands a royal figure amongst the grey mosses of his native forest, above his head a haze of golden aspen leaves, like drops of pale gold in a sea of deep amethyst, and then he staggers and crashes down amongst the giant pines lying dead like himself athwart the forest floor.

The sport is over; there is nothing left to do but butcher’s work; the forest which a moment ago seemed full of moving forms is empty and still again--and are you quite sure that there is no reproach in the silence? It seems almost a pity that sport must end in the death of such a noble victim.

[Illustration: Abnormal palmated wapiti head]

The largest wapiti head of which I have been able to obtain trustworthy dimensions belongs to Messrs. Schoverling & Daly of New York. This head measures in length along the beam, 64 ins. (left) and 65 ins. (right); its greatest width is 48 ins. The circumference of the beam is 7⅝ ins. It is a head of 14 points. A cut of an abnormal wapiti head from Boseman is here given, and it is perhaps worth mentioning that this apparent tendency to become palmated is not rare in the horns of wapiti. An exceptionally fine head in the possession of Mr. G. B. Wrey is a good instance of this tendency and has also the remarkable girth of nearly 9 ins. in the beam. The beast was, I believe, killed in Montana.

(3) WOODLAND CARIBOU (_C. tarandus_).

[Illustration: 1, Woodland caribou; 2, Barren Ground caribou]

If we except _C. canadensis_, the woodland caribou comes next in size to the moose, amongst American _cervidæ_. Luckily I have been able to obtain some accurate measurements of a bull caribou, taken while the beast was still in the flesh by a man who knew the value of precision. This bull, killed in 1890 by Mr. John Fannin, measured from the nose to the root of the tail 6 ft. 7 ins.; stood 4 ft. 5 ins. at the shoulder, and 4 ft. 7 ins. behind the saddle on the rump; his girth just behind the forelegs was 5 ft. 1 in., and the length of his neck (measured along the top) was 1 ft. 5 ins. His weight was never accurately ascertained, but a fair estimate would be 400 lbs. live weight. These dimensions seem to me to give a better idea of this long, low, heavily-built beast than any which I could pen, but I freely confess that one of them comes as a surprise to me. I should never have imagined that a caribou stood higher behind than he does in front, but I know my authority too well to doubt his accuracy in such a matter. Our British Columbian caribou is reputed to grow larger than the caribou of Eastern Canada, and those heads which I have seen in the east were certainly not nearly as fine as heads which I have seen out here. It is said, too, that the British Columbian caribou is darker in colour than his eastern cousin: a bull killed here in September is nearly as black as a bull moose, and a cow set up in the British Columbian Museum is even blacker than the bull. This seems worth noting, as Caton says of _C. tarandus_, ‘the colour lighter than any of the other deer.’ The head figured is from a photograph of one killed in British Columbia, and may be considered fairly typical, except perhaps that it is too symmetrical, and that the ploughs are too even. As a rule, one plough is large and much palmated, whilst the other is a mere spike. A large British Columbian caribou head measured 3 ft. 6 ins. in length, 3 ft. in span, and 6 ins. in circumference above the big tine, but I have no record of any exceptional head. As most men know, both male and female caribou have antlers, but the antlers of the cow are light and insignificant compared with those of the bull. The antlers are clear of velvet some little time before the rut, which begins in British Columbia when the first snow begins to fly (in September) in those high upland districts which the caribou inhabit.

The two or three haunts of this deer known to me in British Columbia are all similar in character, lying very high at the top of the timber-line, where dark groves of balsam and other conifers, hung with immense quantities of beard moss, alternate with open glades of yellow swamp grass. The snow in these districts remains unthawed in the timber till late in May, and begins to fall again about the middle or end of September, but the exposed tops of the rolling highland above the timber are said to be free from snow a little earlier than the timber. In early summer the caribou frequent these high grassy downs, lying close to the large patches of snow left in the hollows, seeking as far as may be to avoid that pest created for their special annoyance, the caribou fly. Later on, in August, the caribou are hard to find, having left the hills and sought (so the Indians say) the seclusion of the densest brush to rub off their old coats, clean and burnish their antlers, and generally make ready for the rut. The best time to hunt the bulls is in the rutting season, when they are a little less cautious than usual, and when there is generally a good ‘tracking snow’ to help the hunter, who requires all the help he can get in his match with the keenest-scented beast on earth. Dull-witted the caribou may be, and I very much doubt whether his eyes are any better than a man’s, but his nose is, as our neighbours say, a ‘holy terror.’ I have seen a caribou allow a man to walk almost up to him in very thin covert, and have had his congener, the Spitzbergen reindeer, walk straight _back to me_ when I crouched (after ‘jumping’ him) to see what I was. I shot him at ten paces to save myself from being run over by the inquisitive fool. The last caribou shot by friends of mine out here were killed by the lazy one of the party, while satisfying an inordinate appetite at the unreasonable hour of midday, and in camp. Captain L., like an honest hunter, was scouring the hills; Major P. was feeding contentedly in camp. L., of course, never got a shot during the expedition, but three caribou walked up to lunch with P. and were shot.

But if the eyes of caribou are not very trustworthy, their ears are about as good as the ears of other forest beasts, and their noses are matchless. I have known a herd strike the track of a man in the snow a day old, and turn as if their noses had touched hot iron; and once a caribou has satisfied himself that there is a man about, he will not stop travelling for half a day; good feed won’t tempt him, deep snow won’t stop him, snow-shoes can’t catch him--in fact, the hunter had better look for another, and keep on the right side of him when he finds him.

Caribou feed upon very much the same food as the moose, browsing for the most part, and depending largely during the depth of winter upon beard moss and other lichens for support. Caribou hunting in British Columbia is sufficiently fascinating in itself, but for some of us it has an added charm from the fact that the best chance of getting a grizzly occurs when the bones and offal of two or three of these deer are lying about in the upland forest. Where the caribou are, there also are the grizzlies, in British Columbia at least; and the man who revisits a caribou carcase after a few days’ absence is likely enough to find big tracks going in front of him, and a big, bad-tempered beast suffering from a surfeit of venison lying not far from the body.

Mr. Rowland Ward mentions a head 60 ins. long, with a span of 41⅛ ins., having 15 tines on the one side and 22 tines on the other.

(4) BARREN GROUND CARIBOU (_C. tarandus arcticus_)

Almost all that I know of the Barren Ground Caribou (_C. tarandus arcticus_) has been derived from the writings of my friend Mr. Warburton Pike, who has enjoyed exceptional opportunities of studying this beast recently in its native haunts, the barren lands of Upper Canada. According to him, the Barren Ground caribou is about one-third smaller than its woodland cousin. This seems fairly conclusive, coming from a man who has seen and shot so many Barren Ground caribou as Mr. Pike has.

The range of this beast is, according to my authority, ‘from the islands in the Arctic Sea to the southern part of Hudson Bay, while the Mackenzie river is the limit of its average western wanderings.’

The Barren Ground caribou appears to rut at about the same season as the woodland variety, and masses up into those huge herds known locally as ‘la foule’ for its winter migration southwards, late in October. A month later the males and females separate, the latter beginning to work their way north again as early as the end of February; they reach the edge of the woods in April, and drop their young far out towards the sea-coast in June. The males stay in the woods until May and never reach the coast, but meet the females on their way inland at the end of July; from this time they stay together till the rutting season is over, and it is time to seek the woods once more. The horns are mostly clear of velvet towards the end of September, and are shed by the old bulls early in December.

As to hunting this beast, Mr. Pike says in his ‘Barren Ground of Northern Canada,’ ‘It is no hard matter to kill caribou in the open country, for the rolling hills usually give ample cover for a stalk, and even on flat ground they are easily approached at a run, as they will almost invariably circle head to wind and give the hunter a chance to cut them off.’

(5) MULE DEER (_C. macrotis_)

[Illustration: Typical mule deer

(_C. macrotis_)]

To my mind the best deer we have in North America for sport is the beast whose head is here represented, _C. macrotis_, the mule deer of British Columbia and the naturalists, and the Black-tail of Colorado and elsewhere in the States. More than any other of his kin in this country, _C. macrotis_ haunts the open uplands, the largest bucks being found oftener than not right up by the little snow patches, in and on the edge of the sheep land, or if not there, then in the small patches of starved and moss-grown forest at the top of the timber range. Thanks to his predilection for high places and the open, it is often possible to stalk _C. macrotis_ in ‘old country’ fashion, instead of crawling about after him in choking timber as a man must after _C. columbianus_ or almost any other American deer; but to get mule deer a man should rise early in order to see them moving up to their beds for the day.

The mule deer ruts about the middle of October, his horns being clean as a rule about a fortnight earlier, although I have seen a big buck very high up (10,000 ft.) in Colorado who had not _begun_ to rub in the third week of September.

One of the writers in a recent book on American big game speaks of the _whistling_ of this deer during the rutting season; but though I have spent many seasons amongst mule deer, in British Columbia and elsewhere, I have never yet heard them whistle, nor heard any mention of this habit from the natives or white hunters. However, I am not prepared to say that they do not whistle.

[Illustration: Abnormal head of mule deer]

More than any other American deer with which I am acquainted, _C. macrotis_ migrates with the seasons, passing in large numbers from his summer feeding grounds on the uplands to the green timber districts of the lower country. This migration seems to begin with the first heavy snows, but it is not an invariable rule, for I have seen big bucks in the Chilcotin country, nearly as high up as they could climb, at the beginning of December, with snow a foot deep and the thermometer 10° below zero. There is no deer in the country, I fancy, whose antlers are subject to such great variation as those of _C. macrotis_. The pair figured on p. 419 is typical, although distinctly above the average in size (25½-in. span); another pair (obtained by Mr. H. A. James in Colorado) had 41-in. span, but the abnormal head figured on p. 420 is that of a mule deer, and it has no fewer than 59 points in place of the ordinary 10 points. This stag was killed in British Columbia. I have also seen another pair, old and thick and covered with well-marked pearls, with no tines at all except at the top. The average weight of a male mule deer is about 200 lbs., though they sometimes run much larger, individuals having been killed weighing as much as 250 and 300 lbs.

Some idea of the number of these deer in British Columbia may be gathered from the fact that in one district I have had a chance of killing seventeen separate stags in an hour’s still hunt, whilst one settler in the Similkameen country fed his hogs on deer-meat through a whole winter.

(6) THE WHITE-TAIL (_C. virginianus_)

Of the White-tail or Virginian deer I have very little to say. Every quality which a deer ought not to possess from a sporting point of view this exasperating little beast possesses in the most highly developed form. He lives very often in close proximity to men, and seems to have caught some of their cunning. His habitat is from the Atlantic to the Pacific, his haunts are in river bottoms, in choking, blinding brush, and his habits are beastly. No one need ever expect to _stalk_ a white-tail. If you want to get one, you must crawl about in places where the big boughs swing back and lash you across the eyes, where the rampikes catch in your clothes or rise up under your feet and trip you more cleverly than a professional wrestler, where hidden logs break your shins, and every other device of inanimate Nature is found to obstruct and annoy you with what seems almost live personal malice. After a long course of such sport as this, after having become dumb because you have no more ‘swear words’ left to say, after having grown sick of hearing that abominable ‘thump, thump,’ which means that you have jumped another buck without seeing him, you may catch a glimpse of a waving white tail going over the logs, and if you are a good wing-shot with a rifle you may get the beast which wears it, but the betting is you won’t; or you may some day be astounded by the sight of a creature, apparently about as big as a good-sized jack rabbit, _close to you_, sneaking along under the brush, with its head craned forward, intent on escaping observation. If you move to fire, that sneaking beast will at once convert itself into the white-tailed timber jumper you have seen once or twice before.

[Illustration: The White-tail’s haunt]

Let me be honest to the little beast. On nearly every occasion _C. virginianus_ has got the best of me (I never hunted him with dogs or torches, or any other such abomination, and never mean to), but once on a red-letter day I caught a big buck of his kind dreaming on a hardwood hill. He was two hundred yards off, and though the bullet from my Express broke his foreleg, he jumped ‘at a stand’ a log by his side over which I could not look, though I stand nearly six feet in my boots, and gave me an hour’s excessively hard work before I killed him. I should think that about 150 lbs. would be the extreme weight of the largest bucks of this variety when cleaned, but there are stories of exceptionally large white-tail bucks in the Okanagau district of British Columbia, and the heads which come from that country are certainly very fine. Mr. Rowland Ward gives 27⅛ ins. as the length and 19 ins. as the span of the best head of this deer known to him.

(7) THE BLACK-TAIL (_C. columbianus_)

Although not quite so exasperating an animal as _C. virginianus_, this, the common deer of Vancouver Island, of the islands all along the Pacific coast from Victoria to Alaska, and of the Pacific slope generally, is desperately fond of thick timber and the deep jungles of noisy sal lal bush. In size _C. columbianus_ is considerably smaller than the mule deer: a buck which would weigh 175 lbs. would be a big buck for Vancouver Island, and I am not aware that the deer of this island are smaller than those of the mainland. But if _C. columbianus_ is small, he is at least abundant. A week from the date of writing this, a friend of mine and myself saw fourteen deer in two days’ still hunting within a drive of Victoria, and a grateful memory of my dinner reminds me that the venison of a yearling buck hung for one week is as good meat as any Esau ever brought home to Isaac. In 1892 a couple of half-breeds sold over eighty bucks in Victoria in two months, and in 1893 the same two (excellent shots and woodsmen) are reported to have killed twenty-two deer in one day. But to hunt deer or anything else upon Vancouver Island a man must be a born woodsman. Where the deer are thickest the woods fairly swallow a man up: every rolling hill is exactly like its neighbour, high peaks are scarce and landmarks very few.

Fortunately the island deer are not as wary as the white-tail, and will generally stand to gaze for a moment after having jumped from their lair amongst the sal lal. Early in the season the neighbourhood of swamps is the likeliest place to find deer, but during the rutting season (middle of October) the old bucks seem to keep to the higher grounds. Like other deer, the black-tail browses on all manner of shrubs and deciduous trees, and, unfortunately for farmers, has a decided weakness for growing crops.

The largest head I have seen was shot in 1892 near Cowitchan Lake, Vancouver Island. It measures along the beam from skull to extreme point 21 ins., and in span it is 19 ins. from tip to tip. A typical head appears in the illustration on the next page.

Mr. Rowland Ward records a head of this deer measuring 28⅝ ins. in length, with a span of 26 ins.

[Illustration: Guanaco

C. paludosus, C. columbianus]

NOTE ON CENTRAL AND SOUTH AMERICAN BIG GAME

There is no lack of game either upon the Pampas or in the forests and along the river-beds of Central and South America, but as yet very few English sportsmen appear to have visited either the seas of grass or the luxuriant tropical forests of Patagonia, Paraguay and the Amazon. Admiral Kennedy, indeed, in his recent book, ‘Sporting Sketches in South America,’ is, I fancy, the first sportsman pure and simple who has visited these regions and described the sport to be found therein, and it is to be regretted that even he has not had the luck to secure specimens of all the principal beasts known in the country. Others have, of course, written of the Amazon and of the Pampas, but they have been naturalists, who cared more to secure a new mouse than mere trophies of the chase, however fine.

According to Admiral Kennedy, the game list of South America includes the guanaco, five kinds of deer, the ostrich or rhea, the jaguar, puma, tapir, wild cattle, and the wild pig. The last two species are, of course, representatives of domestic animals which have become wild, but, unless report belies them, there are wild cattle in the world (e.g. in the Galapagos Islands) which are as well worth hunting as the biggest buffaloes.

The jaguar, though a much larger beast than the puma (identical with the panther of the West), appears to be anything but a sporting beast, haunting river jungles and dense swamps, and being unable, according to Mr. Hudson (the ‘Naturalist on La Plata’) to hold his own even against his smaller cousin, the puma, who is described by the same authority as a ‘bold hunter,’ invariably preferring large to small game, which he kills as a tiger does, by dislocating the neck. The puma is, according to the same authority, a persistent persecutor of the jaguar. Both Mr. Hudson and Admiral Kennedy seem agreed that the puma is a very dangerous enemy to the guanaco, and a scourge to everything living upon the Pampas, except man and the gama (_C. campestris_), which protects itself as the skunk does, by its unpleasant smell. Mr. Hudson’s stories of the strange affection of the puma for man, although calculated to excite incredulity at first, coincide somewhat strangely with some of the Western stories of the panther (or puma) already narrated; but it must be borne in mind that the panther of the West does attack man in a few rare instances, according to the evidence of Mr. Perry.

Of all the beasts in South America Admiral Kennedy writes most enthusiastically of the guanaco, an animal nearly allied to the camel, weighing about 180 lbs., abundant from the Rio Colorado to the Straits of Magellan, and affording good sport to the stalker.

But a beast which carries no ‘head,’ which, according even to its admirers, ‘neighs like a horse’ when giving warning of danger, and ‘quacks like a duck’ when alarmed, seems to one who knows neither guanaco nor ciervo a very unattractive creature compared with the really fine deer, _C. paludosus_, which is found upon the Chaco of Paraguay and in the Argentine Republic. This deer somewhat resembles the red deer of Scotland, but grows to large dimensions. The horns figured are from some in the British Museum.

Besides the ciervo, South America boasts, according to Admiral Kennedy, of four other species of deer, the gama (_C. campestris_), a beast rather larger than the Scotch roe deer, common all over the Pampas, the ghazu vira or swamp deer, the ghazu colorado, and the venadillo. It is a pity that some enterprising sportsman does not devote a year or so to sport in South America. Jaguar and ciervo (to say nothing of the possibility of bagging deer almost unknown to his brother sportsmen in England) should be bait enough to tempt some one to more thoroughly investigate the sporting possibilities of South America.

For a fuller knowledge of South American game beasts, the reader is referred to Admiral Kennedy’s book, and to Mr. Hudson’s ‘Naturalist on La Plata.’

[Illustration: Musk ox]

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