(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.