THE WAPITI, OR AMERICAN ELK.
I gave their picket ropes a turn around convenient jack pines, and then slipping cautiously back to the tent, got my rifle and returned. I could see nothing strange and sat down beside a log to await developments. In a few minutes I heard a dead limb break. Then there was a rustling in a bunch of tall, dry grass; more snapping of twigs and shaking of bushes. I ascertained that there were several large animals moving toward me and feared it might be a family of bears. I feared it, I say, because it was now so dark that I could not see to shoot at any distance, and knew that if bears came near the horses the latter would break their ropes and stampede. I thought of shouting and trying to frighten them off, but decided to await developments. Presently I heard a snapping of hoofs and a succession of dull, heavy, thumping noises, accompanied by reports of breaking brush, which I knew at once were made by a band of elk jumping over a high log.
The game was now not more than fifty yards away and in open ground, yet I could not see even a movement, for I was looking down toward a dark cañon, many hundreds of feet deep. Slowly the great beasts worked toward me. They were coming down wind and I felt sure could not scent me, but they could evidently see my horses, outlined against the sky, and had doubtless heard them snorting and moving about.
The ponies grew more anxious but less frightened than at first, and seemed now desirous of making the acquaintance of their wild visitors.
Slowly the elk moved forward until within thirty or forty feet of me, when I could begin to discern by the starlight their dark, shaggy forms. Then they stopped. I could hear them sniffing the air and could see them moving cautiously from place to place, apparently suspicious of danger. But they were coming down wind, could get no indication of my presence, and were anxious to interview the horses.
They moved slowly forward, and when they stopped this time, two old bulls and one cow, who were in the front rank, so to speak, stood within ten feet of me. Their great horns towered up like the branches of dead trees, and I could hear them breathe.
Again they circled from side to side and I thought surely they would get far enough to one quarter or the other to wind me, but they did not. Several other cows and two timid little calves crowded to the front to look at their hornless cousins who now stood close behind me, and even in the starlight, I could have shot any one of them between the eyes.
My saddle cayuse uttered a low gentle whinny, whereat the whole band wheeled and dashed away; but after making a few leaps their momentary scare seemed to subside, and they stopped, looked, snorted a few times and then began to edge up again—this time even more shyly than before.
It was intensely interesting to study the caution and circumspection with which these creatures planned and carried out their investigation all the way through.
The only mistake they made, and one at which I was surprised, considering their usual cunning and sagacity, was that some of them at least did not circle the horses and get to the leeward. But they were in such a wild country, so far back in the remote fastnesses of the Rockies, that they had probably never encountered hunters or horses before and had not acquired all the cunning of their more hunted and haunted brothers. After their temporary scare they returned, step by step, to their investigation, and the largest bull in the bunch approached the very log behind which I sat. He was just in the act of stepping over it when he caught a whiff of my breath and, with a terrific snort, vaulted backward and sidewise certainly thirty feet. At the same instant I rose up and shouted, and the whole band went tearing down the mountain side making a racket like that of an avalanche.