The ‘bind hund’ or leash-hound should be trained, as I have said, to be perfectly mute and quiet even when he views elk, and should be taught also to keep close to heel when not required to lead. This latter point is often neglected. It is pleasant to observe the clever way in which a well-broken and steady elk dog will steer his way through covert when in advance, seldom going the wrong side of a tree or bush, and obeying instantaneously the slightest hint of the hand which holds the leader; but I have watched with still greater admiration the extraordinary accuracy with which my Lapp hunter’s dog, Passop, when kept at heel, judges the pliability of any ash-plant or other sapling over which the slack of the leader fastened to his master’s belt is likely to sweep. If it is sure to bend, the dog simply stiffens his neck until the slight strain is past; but if it is too rigid or too much branched, he at once shifts his position from the man’s left knee, close to which he runs, to the right, thus bringing the loop of the slack directly behind the Lapp, who of course avoids the obstacle, and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred there is no check to the progress of the pair. When the slack occasionally catches in a projecting root, stone, or dead branch, he will spring like lightning to one side, or even backwards, and clear it before it is drawn taut. I notice that if a rare mistake does occur and the dog goes the wrong side of a tree, the Lapp, even when holding the leader, will never pass the end round the tree as some hunters do, but always pitilessly compels the dog to dodge back to the proper side and free the line himself. The slightest, almost inaudible, sound with the lips is enough to send Passop to the front full of subdued eagerness, and a turn of the wrist to bring him to heel. It is a treat to witness the way in which, when purposely brought to the brow of a hill, he will calmly squat on his haunches and test the wind for many minutes together, quite motionless except for the slight turn of his head and his incessantly working nostrils. By carefully watching his sagacious countenance, one can almost follow his subtle appreciation of the various odours that are wafted to those delicate organs. It may be that he will at length suddenly rise, and without hesitation begin to lead in a particular direction, in which case it becomes a certainty that there are elk somewhere in that quarter, although they may be still a couple of miles or more away. Again, it may be that this prolonged nasal scrutiny will result in his lying down, and, with studied carelessness, beginning to nibble his foot or lick himself, thereby demonstrating that he has temporarily lost all interest in the wind, whereupon it becomes scarcely less certain that there are no deer within a reasonable distance ahead, and that one must strike into fresh country to find them. When there are no elk about, I have seen this hound very keen, although quiet, on the scent of fox or marten-cat, which few dogs can resist; but in the vicinity of the nobler game he always pays the strictest attention to business, and it is impossible to misunderstand him: quite mute with his mouth, he speaks eloquently with the whole of his body. Some dogs are very untrustworthy, and cause infinite trouble and annoyance by working as impetuously up to the signs of fox or marten, or even capercailzie, as they will to elk spoor. In approaching elk with the stalking dog, before they are actually sighted—when his occupation is, of course, for the moment gone—care should be taken not to advance in too direct a line up wind; the dog should be pulled off now and then to right or left, as the case may require, to guard against any lateral movement on the part of the deer. It will be found that when thus pulled off, the hound will be always trying to swing round and face the wind again, and his movements in this way will, if carefully watched, afford a tolerably sure indication of the actual or quite recent position of the quarry. Any eminence in the right line should be ascended, and the ground in front surveyed from just below its crest; and as elk have a habit of turning abruptly and lying down, or moving to leeward of their former track, every yard of ground on either side must be made as safe as is possible under the circumstances. Elk can, of course, be approached either on the line of their spoor or by the wind alone, in case they have come from the opposite direction, and have not traversed the ground over which the advance is made.
When the hunter is sure that he is close upon the elk and is cautiously ascending a rise for the purpose of examining the country beyond and at his feet, including the opposite slope of the rise itself, there is considerable art in making safe each successive inch—which of course represents according to distance several or many yards—of the fresh ground as it comes into view. The narrow line revealed should be carefully examined with concentrated attention, and as far as possible to right and left. In this way the top of an elk’s horn or the line of his back may be detected before the whole animal is visible. The natural tendency of the eye is to search too much space at once, and to keep on repeating a general gaze, including ground already made safe, instead of fixing an intense one on a fresh and limited area. Where there is much forest or brushwood, field-glasses will be found of the greatest use in searching between the foliage and stems; for in spite of their size elk are astonishingly difficult to detect, even in low covert and by the most practised eye. Moreover, in the shadow of a wood various objects will often bear so strong a resemblance to a motionless elk, that even eyes as keen as those of my Lapp hunter, whose quickness and strength of sight are remarkable, are frequently unable to determine their real nature without reference to the glasses. He always carries a pair of his own.
The stalker at a considerable elevation will often find that, when expecting momentarily to view the elk, he is led to the verge of a very steep slope, forming the side of a ravine or dell, overgrown with trees and brushwood, and not seldom strewn with much dead lumber. On a bank of this nature there frequently flourishes a considerable growth of tall herbage, and of birch and mountain-ash, trees on which the elk delights to feed; the bark of the latter is his especial dainty: I have seen copses in which out of some hundreds of stems there was scarcely one that did not show marks of his destroying teeth. In such a situation—a very common one—it is almost impossible to approach the elk from above. If they are not detected by peering over the bank, the only safe plan is first carefully to examine the farther side of the ravine, and then by making a long circuit to try to gain some high point thereon from which, with due observance of the wind, the hither side may also be inspected. I have known many native hunters, as hasty and impatient as their dogs, blunder down into such a steep thicket and effectually scare the elk before they sighted him. In fact, a judicious use of the many rocky knolls and steep acclivities which rise above the brushwood in the high-level forest of Norway is one of the principal features of stalking, for it is in the copses which clothe the sides of the watered dells and the basins of the mountain tarns that the deer are oftenest found. The main point is to sight the elk without disturbing him, after which it becomes a question of time and patience to get a shot. If he is not at first approachable, you must watch him until he shifts his position, and then try again; it is better to spend the whole day in getting up to a beast than to scare him and have to pass the next two or three days, and possibly more, in finding another. Stalking has the great advantage over loose-dog hunting that one need never be idle; elk when lying down may be frequently approached with great success, and if one is forced to wait until they move, such compulsory idleness is at all events fairly in the day’s work; it has in it the elements of excitement and continual hope, and is far better than merely killing time under a pine-tree or in a hay-house.
Although the stalker will find the high-level beats best suited to his work, he will be at times obliged to exchange their freedom and glorious air for the close monotony of the lower pine wood, especially for those long sombre stretches of it—half level, half slope—which so often lie between the margin of a lake and a range of towering cliff. Here he will find, as a rule, but little undergrowth or brushwood, but from among the moss-coated boulders many a tall, slender mountain-ash will be found springing up and flourishing wherever it can gain sufficient light and air. Such a place is a favourite resort of elk, who are generally aware of some steep pass among the cliffs by which they can regain the higher ground. Supposing the hunter to have settled to his satisfaction that there are deer in such a stretch of wood; supposing him to have found their fresh signs all over it, the bared wood of the ash-saplings showing white and the edges of the bark still bleeding, he has before him a most difficult task in the stalk. This is best effected by advancing in long zig-zags, working from the edge of the water to the highest point where the signs are visible, and vice versâ. This must be done at the slowest possible pace, and with all his senses constantly on the alert. The thickly set stems of the trees will help to conceal him, but they inconsiderately render the same service to the elk. In this way half a mile of ground, taken in a straight line, may perhaps be covered in an hour, and during that time the intense attention must not be, in the slightest degree, relaxed; there must be no hurrying of the cat-like step nor careless planting of the foot, the rifle must be ready and the hand prepared to act on the instant. In this kind of work there is little more physical exertion than in sauntering along Piccadilly, nothing that is productive of muscular fatigue, and yet such is the tension of senses and nerves that, after a long spell of it, I have caught myself yawning with that peculiar tense, rigid yawn which has not the faintest connection with mental boredom, but generally betokens physical exhaustion; and I have seen my hunter—whose responsibility was of course greater than mine—lean and wiry as he is, growing visibly paler and wiping from his brow the dew of anxiety. And then in a moment, when one least expects it, if that can be said of a man who is always expecting it—but the apparent paradox is the strict truth—comes the climax: a glimpse of a huge dark grey mass amongst the dark grey stems of the trees, a momentary sensation of all the columns of all the temples in Egypt having risen to baulk one, and in another second one’s whole soul is concentrated in the effort to find a clear space among that timber labyrinth for the bright bead at the end of the barrels and the ounce of lead which it directs.
The Scandinavian elk has, I believe most unjustly, been branded with the epithet of stupid, probably owing to his uncouth personal appearance, which is certainly not suggestive of a brilliant intellect, nor do I deny that the bull frequently owes his safety to the superior wariness of the cow. But, irrespective of their keen senses of hearing and smell, the great deer will, when they have been scared and become, in some mysterious way, aware that they are being tracked, resort to all kinds of artifices to conceal their huge trail (of the conspicuousness whereof they seem to be painfully conscious), and to baffle and confuse the pursuer. A favourite trick, for example, is to wade or swim for a long distance when the simple route lies along the edge of a tarn or lake; another, to double sharply back at an acute angle and travel for a long way to leeward of their original line before resuming it; a third, to enter a river and work up the bed of it for several hundred yards before actually crossing; a fourth, to travel out of their way along a stony ridge where they leave no footing. I believe myself that these stratagems always originate in the brain of the cow, especially when she has a calf beside her. If they are not invariably successful, chiefly owing to our employment of another animal of equal nose and sagacity, they at least seem to me to exhibit a considerable share of reasoning faculty incompatible with stupidity. I find that my hunter is imbued with great respect for the intelligence of the elk, which he considers as not so far inferior to that of the bear; but of their eyesight he has not a high opinion. Where the lie of the land will admit of it, a forced march may sometimes be executed with great advantage when the elk have turned and are retreating down wind. On the very last day of last season we were following on low ground up wind the spoor of a bull and cow which had caught a glimpse of us, but were not much scared; after trotting for some distance they subsided, as we saw by the tracks, into a walk. But on reaching a spur of rock which jutted into the forest, the extremity of a ridge which ran up to a considerable height, they rounded it and at once turned down wind, thereby placing us in their rear to windward had we continued to pursue them. Without hesitation my Lapp hunter faced about, and after following the back trail for some way under the ridge, began to ascend the slope of the latter in a slanting direction at such a pace that I needed all my forty days’ training to keep up with him. As however I guessed what he was after, there was no need to ask questions, but simply to ‘keep wiring away.’
Stalking elk.
In about five-and-twenty minutes we reached the top of the ridge, which was quite open and mattressed with thick moss, on which we lay down. We are not given to talking much during the chase, and for ten minutes did not say a word. My business was to recover my wind for shooting, and I was content to leave the rest to the Lapp and Passop. I found that we were on the brink of a little cliff, perhaps eighty feet high, immediately under which was a fairly level terrace about a hundred yards broad and covered with birch-trees and brushwood, with a few Scotch firs at intervals; beyond this the ground dropped rather suddenly to the distant landscape. I had forgotten all about my rapid climb when the Lapp gently pressed my elbow and pointed to the left, and in a few seconds I saw the horns and broad back of a bull elk surge up amongst the brushwood. He was walking behind a very small cow who preceded him by five yards or so; we had got well ahead of them, and they were now approaching us down wind and without the slightest suspicion. The cow gave the line to the bull just along the edge of the bank where the terrace ended, and where the trees were thickest; by watching her I could tell where he would appear a few seconds later. Fortunately, just in front of us there was a clear space amongst the branches about as long as an elk’s body, and when the cow filled this gap I got the rifle up, and as soon as the point of the bull’s shoulder crossed the sight pressed trigger. He fell over at once and disappeared, all but one motionless horn, while the little cow danced in towards the cliff until she was close under us, and then made off. We found that the bullet had struck the centre of the base of the neck, and the elk had died so instantaneously that his hind-quarters were still hoisted up by the stem of a young birch against which he had fallen under the edge of the bank. Of course in this case, being fired from above, the bullet penetrated downwards, but in my experience, confirmed by that of others, the neck-shot is with elk always very deadly. Even when hit behind the shoulder they will sometimes travel a considerable distance, but when the lead strikes fairly in the centre of the broad neck, they usually drop within a few yards at the outside. In stalking, owing to the utilisation of knolls and other eminences already mentioned, a large proportion of shots are fired from above. Every big-game sportsman has his favourite battery, but it is as well to remember that the elk requires a heavy blow to knock him over and save the trouble of pursuit, and that the vitality of the bulls is often very great, especially just before the rutting season. When hunting in the low forest and with the loose dog, it is seldom necessary to fire at over a hundred yards, and in every rifle used for elk the fixed backsight and the bead, taken full and quickly, should together give this range. But on the higher and more open ground the shooter must be prepared to accept fair chances at much longer ranges up to, say, four hundred yards. At this distance or thereabouts, anyhow with the corresponding sight up, I have myself been several times successful. Most Englishmen will employ a hunter or attendant, but it is scarcely needful to say that, with thoroughly trained and steady dogs, either style of pursuit may be practised alone. In stalking, the leader may be conveniently fastened round a tree or bush while the shot is taken. The shooter must not be over-sanguine of sport. If he spares cows and very young deer, and gets from four to six bulls during his thirty or forty days’ season, he ought to be more than satisfied.