Outdoor pastimes of an American hunter

by Theodore Roosevelt

Most of my elk-hunting was done among the stupendous mountain masses of the Rockies, which I usually reached after a long journey, with wagon or pack-train, over the desolate plains. Ordinarily I planned to get to the hunting-ground by the end of August, so as to have ample time. By that date the calves were out of the spotted coat, the cows and the young of the preceding year had banded, and the big bulls had come down to join them from the remote recesses in which they had been lying, solitary or in couples, while their antlers were growing. Many bulls were found alone, or, if young, in small parties; but the normal arrangement was for each big bull to have his own harem, around the outskirts of which there were to be found lurking occasional spike bulls or two-year-olds who were always venturing too near and being chased off by the master bull. Frequently several such herds joined together into a great band. Before the season was fairly on, when the bulls had not been worked into actual frenzy, there was not much fighting in these bands. Later they were the scenes of desperate combats. Each master bull strove to keep his harem under his own eyes, and was always threatening and fighting the other master bulls, as well as those bulls whose prowess had proved insufficient hitherto to gain them a band, or who, after having gained one, had been so exhausted and weakened as to succumb to some new aspirant for the leadership. The bulls were calling and challenging all the time, and there was ceaseless turmoil, owing to their fights and their driving the cows around. The cows were more wary than the bulls, and there were so many keen noses and fairly good eyes that it was difficult to approach a herd; whereas the single bulls were so noisy, careless, and excited that it was comparatively easy to stalk them. A rutting wapiti bull is as wicked-looking a creature as can be imagined, swaggering among the cows and threatening the young bulls, his jaws mouthing and working in a kind of ugly leer.

The bulls fight desperately with one another. The two combatants come together with a resounding clash of antlers, and then push and strain with their mouths open. The skin on their necks and shoulders is so thick and tough that the great prongs cannot get through or do more than inflict bruises. The only danger comes when the beaten party turns to flee. The victor pursues at full speed. Usually the beaten one gets off; but if by accident he is caught where he cannot escape, he is very apt to be gored in the flank and killed. Mr. Baillie-Grohman has given a very interesting description of one such fatal duel of which he was an eye-witness on a moonlight night in the mountains. I have never known of the bull trying to protect the cow from any enemy. He battles for her against rivals with intense ferocity; but his attitude toward her, once she is gained, is either that of brutality or of indifference. She will fight for her calf against any enemy which she thinks she has a chance of conquering, although of course not against man. But the bull leaves his family to their fate the minute he thinks there is any real danger. During the rut he is greatly excited, and does not fear a dog or a single wolf, and may join with the rest of the herd of both sexes in trying to chase off one or the other, should he become aware of its approach. But if there is serious danger, his only thought is for himself, and he has no compunctions about sacrificing any of his family. When on the move a cow almost always goes first, while the bull brings up the rear.

In domestication the bulls are very dangerous to human beings, and will kill a man at once if they can get him at a disadvantage; but in a state of nature they rarely indeed overcome their abject terror of humanity, even when wounded and cornered. Of course, if the man comes straight up to him where he cannot get away, a wapiti will fight as, under like circumstances, a blacktail or whitetail will fight, and equally, of course, he is then far more dangerous than his smaller kinsfolk; but he is not nearly so apt to charge as a bull moose. I have never known but two authentic instances of their thus charging. One happened to a hunter named Bennett, on the Little Missouri; the other to a gentleman I met, a doctor, in Meeker, Colorado. The doctor had wounded his wapiti, and as it was in the late fall, followed him easily in the snow. Finally he came upon the wapiti standing where the snow was very deep at the bottom of a small valley, and on his approach the wapiti deliberately started to break his way through the snow toward him, and had almost reached him when he was killed. But for every one such instance of a wapiti’s charging there are a hundred in which a bull moose has charged. Senator Redfield Proctor was charged most resolutely by a mortally hurt bull moose which fell in the death throes just before reaching him; and I could cite case after case of the kind.

The wapiti’s natural gaits are a walk and a trot. It walks very fast indeed, especially if travelling to reach some given point. More than once I have sought to overtake a travelling bull, and have found myself absolutely unable to do so, although it never broke its walk. Of course, if I had not been obliged to pay any heed to cover or wind, I could have run up on it; but the necessity for paying heed to both handicapped me so that I was actually unable to come up to the quarry as it swung steadily on through woodland and open, over rough ground and smooth. Wapiti have a slashing trot, which they can keep up for an indefinite time and over any kind of country. Only a good pony can overtake them when they have had any start and have settled into this trot. If much startled they break into a gallop—the young being always much more willing to gallop than the old. Their gallop is very fast, especially downhill. But they speedily tire under it. A yearling or a two-year-old can keep it up for a couple of miles. A heavy old bull will be done out after a few hundred yards. I once saw a band of wapiti frightened into a gallop down a steep incline where there were also a couple of mule-deer. I had not supposed that wapiti ran as fast as mule-deer, but this particular band actually passed the deer, though the latter were evidently doing their best; the wapiti were well ahead, when, after thundering down the steep, broken incline, they all disappeared into a belt of woodland. In spite of their size, wapiti climb well and go sure-footedly over difficult and dangerous ground. They have a habit of coming out to the edges of cliffs, or on mountain spurs, and looking over the landscape beneath, almost as though they enjoyed the scenery. What their real object is on such occasions I do not know.

The nose of the wapiti is very keen. Its sight is much inferior to that of the antelope, but about as good as a deer’s. Its hearing is also much like that of a deer. When in country where it is little molested, it feeds and moves about freely by day, lying down to rest at intervals, like cattle. Wapiti offer especial attractions to the hunter, and next to the bison are more quickly exterminated than any other kind of game. Only the fact that they possessed a far wider range of habitat than either the mule-deer, the prongbuck, or the moose, has enabled them still to exist. Their gregariousness is also against them. Even after the rut the herds continue together until in midspring the bulls shed their antlers—for they keep their antlers at least two months longer than deer. During the fall, winter, and early spring wapiti are roving, restless creatures. Their habit of migration varies with locality, as among mule-deer. Along the little Missouri, as in the plains country generally, there was no well-defined migration. Up to the early eighties, when wapiti were still plentiful, the bands wandered far and wide, but fitfully and irregularly, wholly without regard to the season, save that they were stationary from May to August. After 1883 there were but a few individuals left, although as late as 1886 I once came across a herd of nine. These surviving individuals had learned caution. The bulls only called by night, and not very frequently then, and they spent the entire year in the roughest and most out-of-the-way places, having the same range both winter and summer. They selected tracts where the ground was very broken and there was much shrubbery and patches of small trees. This tree and bush growth gave them both shelter and food; for they are particularly fond of browsing on the leaves and tender twig ends, though they also eat weeds and grass.

Wherever wapiti dwell among the mountains they make regular seasonal migrations. In northwestern Wyoming they spend the summer in the Yellowstone National Park, but in winter some go south to Jackson’s Hole, while others winter in the park to the northeast. In northwestern Colorado their migrations followed much the same line as those of the mule-deer. In different localities the length of the migration, and even the time, differed. There were some places where the shift was simply from the high mountains down to their foothills. In other places great herds travelled a couple of hundred miles, so that localities absolutely barren one month would be swarming with wapiti the next. In some places the shift took place as early as the month of August; in others not until after the rut, in October or even November; and in some places the rut took place during the migration.

No chase is more fascinating than that of the wapiti. In the old days, when the mighty antlered beasts were found upon the open plains, they could be followed upon horseback, with or without hounds. Nowadays, when they dwell in the mountains, they are to be killed only by the rifle-bearing still-hunter. Needless butchery of any kind of animal is repulsive, but in the case of the wapiti it is little short of criminal. He is the grandest of the deer kind throughout the world, and he has already vanished from most of the places where he once dwelt in his pride. Every true sportsman should feel it incumbent upon him to do all in his power to preserve so noble a beast of the chase from extinction. No harm whatever comes to the species from killing a certain number of bulls; but an excessive number should never be killed, and no cow or calf should under any circumstances be touched. Formerly, when wapiti were plentiful, it would have been folly for hunters and settlers in the unexplored wilderness not to kill wild game for their meat, and occasionally a cow or a calf had to be thus slain; but there is no excuse nowadays for a hunting party killing anything but a full-grown bull.

In a civilized and cultivated country wild animals only continue to exist at all when preserved by sportsmen. The excellent people who protest against all hunting, and consider sportsmen as enemies of wild life, are ignorant of the fact that in reality the genuine sportsman is by all odds the most important factor in keeping the larger and more valuable wild creatures from total extermination. Of course, if wild animals were allowed to breed unchecked, they would, in an incredibly short space of time, render any country uninhabitable by man—a fact which ought to be a matter of elementary knowledge in any community where the average intelligence is above that of certain portions of Hindoostan. Equally, of course, in a purely utilitarian community all wild animals are exterminated out of hand. In order to preserve the wild life of the wilderness at all, some middle ground must be found between brutal and senseless slaughter and the unhealthy sentimentalism which would just as surely defeat its own end by bringing about the eventual total extinction of the game. It is impossible to preserve the larger wild animals in regions thoroughly fit for agriculture; and it is perhaps too much to hope that the larger carnivores can be preserved for merely æsthetic reasons. But throughout our country there are large regions entirely unsuited for agriculture, where, if the people only have foresight, they can, through the power of the State, keep the game in perpetuity. There is no hope of preserving the bison permanently, save in large private parks; but all other game, including not merely deer, but the pronghorn, the splendid bighorn, and the stately and beautiful wapiti, can be kept on the public lands, if only the proper laws are passed, and if only these laws are properly enforced.

Most of us, as we grow older, grow to care relatively less for sport than for the splendid freedom and abounding health of outdoor life in the woods, on the plains, and among the great mountains; and to the true nature lover it is melancholy to see the wilderness stripped of the wild creatures which gave it no small part of its peculiar charm. It is inevitable, and probably necessary, that the wolf and the cougar should go; but the bighorn and white goat among the rocks, the blacktail and wapiti grouped on the mountain-side, the whitetail and moose feeding in the sedgy ponds—these add beyond measure to the wilderness landscape, and if they are taken away they leave a lack which nothing else can quite make good. So it is of those true birds of the wilderness, the eagle and the raven, and, indeed, of all the wild things, furred, feathered, and finned.

A peculiar charm in the chase of the wapiti comes from the wild beauty of the country in which it dwells. The moose lives in marshy forests; if one would seek the white goat or caribou of the northern Rockies, he must travel on foot, pack on back; while the successful chase of the bighorn, perhaps on the whole the manliest of all our sports, means heart-breaking fatigue for any but the strongest and hardiest. The prongbuck, again, must be followed on the desolate, sun-scorched plains. But the wapiti now dwells amid lofty, pine-clad mountains, in a region of lakes and streams. A man can travel in comfort while hunting it, because he can almost always take a pack-train with him, and the country is usually sufficiently open to enable the hunter to enjoy all the charm of distant landscapes. Where the wapiti lives the spotted trout swarm in the brooks, and the woodgrouse fly upward to perch among the tree-tops as the hunter passes them. When hunting him there is always sweet cold water to be drunk at night, and beds of aromatic fir boughs on which to sleep, with the blankets drawn over one to keep out the touch of the frost. He must be followed on foot, and the man who follows him must be sound in limb and wind. But his pursuit does not normally mean such wearing exhaustion as is entailed by climbing cliffs all day long after the white goat. Whoever has hunted the wapiti, as he looks at his trophies will always think of the great mountains with the snow lying in the rifts in their sides; of the splashing murmur of rock-choked torrents; of the odorous breath of the pine branches; of tents pitched in open glades; of long walks through cool, open forests; and of great camp-fires, where the pitchy stumps flame like giant torches in the darkness.