Being a member of the British Ornithologists' Union he knew all the regular egg-collectors, and soon obtained the best information where various species were to be found. Each year as April came round he packed his bag and, occasionally accompanied by some local enthusiast, he went to all the best resorts of rare birds in England, Scotland, the Orkneys, Asia Minor, Spain, Hungary, Holland, and Iceland.
Thus in 1897 he commenced the egg-hunting season by going to Smyrna in February with the intention of taking the nests of the large raptorial birds which there breed very early in the year. The point he made for was the Murad Dagh, a range of mountains in the interior of Asia Minor, where he knew the short-toed, golden and imperial eagles, and the black and griffon vultures nested. He also had some hopes that he might secure one of the big stags before they dropped their horns. On his journey he suffered much from the cold in the mountains, and was also at first unsuccessful in finding any of the big stags, who seemed to have been hunted out of the range. He saw three fine stags but did not succeed in finding one of those which he had wounded. He then returned to Smyrna and went into the Maimun Dagh again. Here he took the eggs of black vulture, griffon vulture, short-toed eagle and lämmergeier. Getting tired of this range he went on to the Ak Dagh, where he took one golden eagle's nest, three griffon vultures' eggs, and two of black vultures. He also shot a young red deer, with which was a fine old stag that had just dropped its horns. He returned to England in March.
In England he commenced his nesting operations in April by hunting Thatcham Marsh (near Reading) for water-rails' nests, and took two. Then he went on to the Scilly Isles for sea-birds.
He says, in a letter to me: "I am going to Brabant if I can obtain a permit from the Dutch Government to collect a few eggs, and after that to Scotland, where I shall remain until it is time to leave for America." In Scilly, he says: "I got eggs of the Greater and Lesser Black-backed Gulls, Herring Gull, Manx Shearwater, Oyster-catcher, and Ringed Plover, but found no Terns breeding." On June 8th he decided to put off his trip to Holland, as it was too late. I then gave him particulars where he could get Arctic, Lesser and Sandwich terns in Scotland, and also obtained permission for him to take two Capercaillie nests. All of these he obtained.
In any collection of hunting trophies, the gems of all collections (with perhaps the exception of the red deer of Europe and the great sheep and goats of Central Asia) are the great deer of North America, and Selous had for long envied the possessors of such fine specimens of moose, wapiti and caribou as had been obtained in the seventies and eighties of the last century. It is true that as good moose and caribou can be killed to-day as ever; but the great wapiti, owing to their curtailed range, are gone for ever, so a hunter to-day must be content with inferior specimens. In 1897 three or four specimens of wapiti were allowed to be killed in the restricted area south of the Yellowstone Park, and it was with the intention of killing these as well as other North American game that Selous turned to the West in August, 1897.
In his youth Selous, like other boys of similar tastes, had devoured the works of Ballantyne, Mayne Reid, Catlin, and Kingston, relating to fact and fiction, and had always desired to visit America as one of his lands of dreams. But it was not civilized America that appealed to him. Cities are the same all the world over. It was the land of vast plains and trackless forests swarming with game that appealed to him; and if he could not, alas, now find such a hunter's paradise, he could at least see something of the little that was truly wild which was left and perhaps obtain a few fair specimens for his collection. Once, it is true, he had actually taken his passage to America. That happened in 1893, but the outbreak of the Matabele war in that year had caused him to alter his plans and he went back to South Africa instead.
Selous had a good friend, W. Moncrieff, who owned a small cattle ranch in the heart of the Big Horn Mountains in Wyoming. Here in the adjoining forests and mountains still lived a remnant of the bears, wapiti, mule-deer and sheep that had formerly been so abundant, and the local knowledge enjoyed by Moncrieff enabled him to furnish Selous with the best information. Accordingly he left England accompanied by his wife, and, passing through Canada, reached the ranch on the last day of August. Next day the party on horses, accompanied by a waggon with one Bob Graham as a guide, struck into the mountains and, after passing over the main range of the Big Horns, descended into the Big Horn basin. This is covered with sage brush, and is still the home of a few prong-horned antelopes, two of which, one a good male, Selous succeeded in shooting.
The hunters then proceeded up the south fork of Stinking Water, and established a main camp in the forests, where a few very shy wapiti males were still to be found. For twenty days Selous toiled in a mass of dense and fallen timber before he carried his first wapiti head back to camp. Wapiti are in fact now both shy and scarce, and a man must persevere and work continuously, at least early in the season, before even one fair specimen can be found, but Selous greatly enjoyed the grandeur and wildness of the scenery, and being still in the prime of life the exertion of daily toil did not in any way affect his energy. On September 29th he shot his first mule-deer buck. A little snow came and helped to make tracking easier. Then Selous had some luck, and he killed four wapiti, two in one day, and a fifth near Davies' ranch on October 28th. Near the same place too he killed one of the few remaining white-tailed deer-bucks in Wyoming, but its head was rather a poor one, that of an old male "going-back." Selous wrote an account of this trip to Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary to the American Navy, and received (November 30th, 1897) the following reply:—
"Your letter made me quite melancholy—first, to think I wasn't to see you after all; and next, to realize so vividly how almost the last real hunting-grounds in America have gone. Thirteen years ago I had splendid sport on the Big Horn Mountains which you crossed. Six years ago I saw elk in bands of one and two hundred on Buffalo Fork; and met but one hunting expedition while I was out. A very few more years will do away with all the really wild hunting, at least so far as bear and elk are concerned, in the Rocky Mountains and the West generally; one of the last places will be the Olympic Peninsula of Oregon, where there is a very peculiar elk, a different species, quite as big in body but with smaller horns, which are more like those of the European red deer, and with a black head. Goat, sheep, and bear will for a long time abound in British Columbia and Alaska.
"Well, I am glad you enjoyed yourself, anyhow, and that you did get a sufficient number of fair heads—wapiti, prong-buck, black-tail, and white-tail. Of course I am very sorry that you did not get a good sheep and a bear or two. In the north-eastern part of the Park there is some wintering ground for the elk; and I doubt if they will ever be entirely killed out in the Park; but in a very short while shooting in the West, where it exists, will simply be the kind that can now be obtained in Maine and New York; that is, the game will be scarce, and the game-laws fairly observed in consequence of the existence of a class of professional guides; and a hunter who gets one good head for a trip will feel he has done pretty well. You were in luck to get so fine a prong-buck head.