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.