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)
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.
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.
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.
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).
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)
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.
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.
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.
Guanaco
C. paludosus, C. columbianus