From a painting by Belmore Browne
This animal is the Colossus of the Deer Family. If his wits were equal to his bulk, no man with a gun ever would see a live moose save through binoculars, and we never would acquire any antlers save those discarded by the animal. The homeliest members of the Deer Family are its female moose in calving time, beside which warthogs and hippopotami are sirens and sylphs.
A full-grown bull moose in October or November is, as we have already insinuated, a wonder. No mammoth, nor mastodon, nor sabretoothed tiger ever was any more so. I am glad that I have lived in the day of that astounding beast. I never yet really wished to kill a moose, even though I have often been told that I should shoot one, for the sake of my reputation as a sportsman. But I never did. I would like to see 100 moose in a week,—as I once came near doing,—but I do not like the thought of destroying a big bull moose.
ANTLERS OF “GIANT” ALASKAN MOOSE
In the Reed-McMillin Collection, New York Zoological Park. The spread is 76 inches. Probably the finest pair of moose antlers “in captivity”
The moose of the greatest horns and the longest skulls are found in Alaska. The Kenai Peninsula is for them the greatest of all places, and there the grandest antlers have been produced. The bull stands seven feet high at the shoulders,—and no man ever yet has weighed a whole adult animal,—so far as is known to this writer. The finest moose picture ever made, by lens or by brush, is the great painting owned by the New York Zoological Society, which was executed by Carl Rungius in 1915. The model that posed for that bull’s antlers hangs in the Reed-McMillin collection of the National Heads and Horns, in the next room to mine, and the road for the doubting Thomases is short and easy.
No; the moose does not prefer to live in thick timber; although in Maine and northern Minnesota the timber of the moose is quite thick enough for all practical purposes. The ideal home of the moose is burned-over tracts of timber, wherein the brush grows rankly, the obstructing trees are absent, and in running or traveling the moose has only to stride over fallen trunks lying four feet high, and always about. The moose is the only land animal now living on this continent that is physically qualified, with a standing of 100 per cent, to travel fast over “down timber” and get away with it.
We must admit that in eastern captivity the moose cannot thrive anywhere south of Canada. The climate of New York city is like poison to moose, caribou and antelope. The salt-laden rains of winter, at 32° Fahrenheit are to blame. In New Brunswick, through wise laws rigidly enforced, (as a rule) the moose are increasing, even though hunted every year. In Maine, moose-hunting has been stopped. The great State game preserve in northern Minnesota contains many hundred moose, quite well protected. Strangest of all, there now are hundreds of moose in northwestern Wyoming, where the species long has been absolutely protected, and there are about 700 in the Yellowstone Park.