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).
