the Rockies are killed, I have seen a well-known British Columbian
rancher ride up to a band of ewes in the highlands of the Ashnola
country, _galloping_ after them until within range, then dismounting
and killing two out of the band. This was in early autumn, and in
what I consider the easiest country I have ever seen; in winter, of
course, when the snows are heavy on the mountains, the sheep come right
down on to the flat, by the edge of the Frazer river. Indeed, in the
winter (end of November 1890) I found a fair-sized ram feeding amongst
a band of cattle, and killed him before he had put a hundred yards
between himself and them. Another recent statement to which I must
take exception is that ‘a man who can find a band of ten or fifteen
(sheep) after a week’s riding and climbing is a fortunate man.’ Sheep
extend from the Missouri to Alaska, and whatever their numbers may be
east of the Rockies, they are certainly plentiful enough west of that
range. In Cassiar they are very numerous, and along the banks of the
Frazer I have in one season (1889) seen one band of seventy, one of
sixty, and on another occasion, late in the fall, a friend of mine and
myself came upon an immense band feeding in little bunches of fifteen
and twenty, aggregating, I should think, at least 150. I did not and
could not count them, but should imagine my estimate was absurdly
within the limit. M. D. and I took them at first sight for strayed
cattle from a neighbouring ranch. Later on we met a portion of this
band going uphill, and watched them file past us, within twenty yards
of us, each beast coming up on to a little mound immediately below our
ambush, pausing for a moment to look downhill, and then making place
for the next. In this procession the barren ewes led, the ewes and
lambs came next, and the rams brought up the rear, with the biggest
ram, for whom we were waiting, last of all. But though the Frazer River
country contains plenty of sheep, neither this country nor Alaska seems
to produce such fine heads as are found east of the Rockies. A 16-inch
head (honest measurement) is an exceptionally good head for British
Columbia. Let those who doubt this statement tape their trophies
and judge for themselves. East of the Rockies larger heads are not
uncommon; the largest of which I have any accurate information having
been bought at Morley by my friend Mr. Arnold Pike. This head measured
17.25 ins. round the base of the horn, being, therefore, considerably
bigger than the fine heads exhibited by Messrs. F. Cooper and H. Seton
Karr in the American Exhibition. The record sheep head, according to
Ward’s excellent book, is 41 ins. in length and 17¼ in circumference.
Of course, there are stories of heads which measure far more than
this--of giant heads with two twists to the horns; but they are never
seen, although, like most sportsmen, I have myself once seen a head,
which I did not secure, that will haunt me until my shooting days are
done.
[Illustration: Mr. Arnold Pike’s great ram]
There is a tiny sheep district very far up in the mountains at the head
of one of the Frazer’s tributaries to which my Indian guide alone knew
the trail. He had blazed it three years before, and burnt some timber
whilst he was up there, in order that another year the sweet grasses
which would spring in the _brulé_ might attract plenty of deer to this
his private hunting ground. From the bald top of Siyah, as I prefer to
call this ground, we could see the great hills round the Frazer rolling
down fold upon fold into their river-beds, their sides red-brown in the
sunlight, a rich dark purple in the shadows. We were lying on the very
highest ground, spying into a hollow below us in which a solitary sheep
was feeding. ‘Yoharlequin,’ muttered the Siwash, ‘it is a ewe.’ Just
as he spoke we both crouched close to the ground, though we were safe
enough even from a bighorn’s marvellously all-seeing eyes, for at that
moment five more sheep walked slowly into sight. There was no doubt as
to the new-comers. We were looking upon the finest bit of sheep ground
I had ever seen, and the five were worthy of it. There was one enormous
ram, two which would have satisfied any man, a fourth such as I had
often killed before, and a small fellow.
Everything seemed to favour us at first. The little glacier at the head
of the dark gulch had sent a snow-stream tearing through the hollow,
and this had cut a deep course up which we could sneak unseen. I
suppose the water must have been bitterly cold, but we crawled through
it for ten minutes without so much as noticing that when we had to come
down to our knees the icy current ran into our trousers pockets, and
though the wind blew off the glacier it was welcome, because for once
it was right in our teeth. In the middle of the gulch was a big mound,
and 240 yards from this (I measured the distance afterwards) stood the
glorious three. Unless we could have burrowed, no man could have crept
closer unseen, so that from this point I had to fire. But why tell the
story, and what is the good of trying to instruct others when I so
often break every rule myself? Three things I did on that day which I
ought not to have done, and I paid the penalty for my folly. First, I
took my Indian with me on the stalk, and, of course, at the critical
moment he flurried me with his accursed ‘Shoot, shoot!’ He knew what
the ram was like upon which I was trying slowly to draw a bead. Then I
took two rifles with me upon that trip, and shot sometimes with one,
sometimes with another. The result was that I shot badly with both,
and knew nothing of either of them. Lastly, when I had missed or only
wounded the big ram, I lost my head, and instead of waiting until the
beasts should pause for a moment to look back, I fired three fluky
shots at them ‘on the run.’ Not until the big beasts were behind a
piece of rolling ground did I realise what a fool I had made of myself,
and then, as we wanted meat badly, I took a quiet steady shot at the
little ram which had hung behind, and killed him neatly at a good 400
yards--a shot which under ordinary circumstances I should never dream
of attempting.
After waiting for awhile we followed the wounded beast, hoping that
as we had given him time he would lie down and afford us a chance of
another stalk. But, as the Indian said, ‘there was no lie down in that
ram.’ He could only go very slowly (at a walk), but he could keep
going, and over the ground to which he took us we could do no more.
We tried everything that we could think of to circumvent him, but
it was no good. When the dusk was falling I got my last view of his
great white quarters, lurching slowly over yet another ridge. He was
evidently bound for a far country, and had no intention of stopping
until he reached it; I was limping almost as badly as he was, and was
far more ‘done.’ I had left a nasty piece of rock and ice behind me to
recross on my way to camp, I had not a notion how far I had come, where
my Indian was, or which was the nearest way to my camp, so with a heart
full of bitterness I turned back, vowing to track him on the morrow and
stay with him as long as he stayed in British Columbia.
But then I knew only that he was a very big ram. When I stood beside
the beast which the Indian and myself had taken for a two-year-old
at most, and taped his horns at 14½ ins., I had a better idea what
the beast must have been like beside which this fair ram had seemed a
pigmy. Of course, that night enough snow fell to hide the tracks of a
mammoth! I try sometimes to console myself with the reflection that
after all he was probably only a 16- or, at most, 17-in. ram, but it
won’t do. I know better. From blood-stains upon the rocks (my Indian
had my glass) I am pretty sure that I shot through the withers the
first time, and probably hit him very far back with one of the others.
It is an extraordinary thing that though sheep so often turn and bolt
_downhill_ when merely frightened, a wounded ram, especially a big one,
will struggle on higher and higher as long as life and the possibility
of ascending lasts.
I have noticed the same habit in Caucasian _tûr_; but, of course, my
experience may be exceptional.
Sheep rut in October, but the season varies somewhat in different
localities, being a little later in some than in others. However, in
a good sheep country the hunter may be pretty sure of hearing the
hollow clang of the horns of fighting rams some time in October, and,
at least, he may be sure that in that month he has the best chance of
coming across the really big beasts, which, his Indian will tell him,
retire during the rest of the year to the very highest peaks. This I
doubt myself, as I have always tried the highest ground, and never done
any better there with the big rams than elsewhere. My own belief is
that all the sheep frequent the open tops in July and August, when the
grass is fresh where the snow has but recently disappeared; that in
September they come down nearer the timber, and even into it, in search
of sweeter feed than that which the sunburnt tops afford; that during
this time the old rams are away by themselves hiding in the bush; and
that in October, when the uplands have been revived by the late autumn
rains, the ewes seek the hill-tops again, and the amorous rams follow
the ewes.
But at whatever season you seek the bighorn, remember that he is very
easily driven away, that all his senses are exceptionally keen, and
that from his vantage ground above he incessantly watches the valley
beneath. Therefore, if you are changing camp, do not arrange matters
so as to arrive in a new country, which you intend to hunt, about
nightfall, or if you do, reduce the chopping which has to be done to
a minimum; don’t light big fires, and let those you light be as much
hidden as possible from the ridges upon which you expect to find game.
If possible, it is better to get to a fresh shooting ground so early
that you can do a day’s hunting before there is any necessity for
cutting timber or lighting a fire.
As it is not easy to weigh large game in camp, and as I am no believer
in guess-weights, I shall not attempt to estimate the weight of a
bighorn ram; but, bearing in mind that the _O. montana_ is one of the
most compactly built animals in the world, the curious in such matters
may form an approximate idea of the beast’s weight from the following
measurements of a 16-in. ram, which I took myself within an hour of
his death. Measuring him as he lay, this ram was 3 ft. 6 ins. from the
root of his tail to where the neck is set on to the shoulder; his girth
under his forelegs was 3 ft. 9 ins.; and his height, as nearly as I
could get it, 3 ft. 2 ins. at the shoulder.
VI. THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN GOAT (_Haploceros montanus_)
[Illustration: Rocky Mountain goats]
The Rocky Mountain Goat may, like other animals, vary in its habits a
good deal in different localities. In British Columbia, which appears
to be peculiarly its home, I am bound to say that it appears to be the
biggest fool that walks on four legs. I am aware that some authorities
upon sport, whose opinions deserve consideration, differ from me upon
this point, but living as I do at present amongst British Columbians,
I am not afraid of being contradicted by local sportsmen when I
aver that there is no wild animal easier to stalk than _Haploceros_.
There are many men out here who, after having killed their first few
heads, will have nothing more to do with goat hunting, regarding it
as unworthy the name of sport. I remember well one old goat which I
stalked in the Bridge River country. The beast was a very big one, and
was first seen feeding upon a bare hillside. He was on one side of an
amphitheatre, we were on the other. Between us lay over half a mile
of rattling shale and moraine, and there was no cover for a mouse.
However, there was nothing else to hunt, and the goat was the largest
I had ever seen, so with my Indian behind me I began the stalk. I am
confident that any other beast would have seen us before we had gone a
hundred yards; we slipped and fell, we rattled the stones about, and
the whole thing was so ludicrous that I had to sit down and laugh more
than once; but in spite of all this I got within forty yards of the
poor stupid brute, who had been looking in our direction in a puzzled
way for the last ten minutes, and felt thoroughly ashamed of myself
when I put an end to his doubts with a bullet. To give an idea of the
tameness of these brutes, I took six or seven photographs of goats
in one day last year with a very elaborate photographic apparatus,
the photographs unfortunately being destroyed before they could be
developed, when the whole apparatus, together with my guide, went
rolling down a steep incline almost into the Bridge River.
Though not worth stalking, these goats are quaint beasts and worth
watching. As a rule, they live where nothing else would care to, on
precipitous rock faces overhanging a stream where no grass grows,
and where there is very little even to browse upon. Just at dawn you
may see them crossing a wall of rock high above your camp in single
file, or wending their way slowly from their feeding grounds to the
timber patches in which they lie all day. They are very local in
their distribution and very conservative in their habits, infesting
one small mountain in great numbers and never seeming to stray into
the neighbouring heights. Day after day they appear to seek the same
feeding grounds, and retire to the same lairs, with a punctuality
which would be becoming in a postman. Their meat is so poor that
Indians will hardly eat it, and the market value of their hides is
only 3_s._ 6_d._ to a tourist. They occupy only such localities as
other beasts would despise, and altogether seem somewhat justified in
the mute protest of their wondering regard when attacked, which seems
to say as plainly as dumb beasts can speak, ‘Surely you are not going
to meddle with us; we, at least, are beasts of no account.’ To obtain
a good specimen head their haunts ought to be visited as late in the
year as possible, as the coats are not so white or the beards so long
in early autumn as they are in November, and a goat’s head without the
long patriarchal beard is a poor affair. They abound all over British
Columbia, especially in such places as Bute Inlet, and I have even
seen them on the islands in the Straits of San Juan, from which I am
inclined to infer that they had swum over from the mainland. An old
billy which I shot girthed 56 ins. round the chest after he had been
skinned, and the longest horns of which I have any record measured
11½ ins. from base to tip. The accompanying plate gives a better idea
of the queer old-world appearance of the Rocky Mountain goat than any
word-painting of mine could do. In old days, the Indians used to make
blankets of their fleece, but the industry appears to be nearly dead,
now that English blankets have become cheap and plentiful in British
Columbia, so that there appears to be no reason why the white goat
should not be allowed to remain unmolested for many years to come. I
have seen _Haploceros_ in Alaska as well as in British Columbia, and
expect that my friend Mr. John Fannin, curator of the British Columbian
Museum, is right in inferring that the goats go as far north as the
mountains do. The skin, measured by Mr. Fannin, and mentioned in his
article upon goats in the ‘Big Game of North America,’ is far and away
the largest I have ever heard of, a skin 5 ft. from horns to tail, by
40 ins. from side to side, being an exceptionally large one, whereas
Mr. Fannin’s large skin measured 7 ft. by 4 ft. 10 ins.
The track of the goat is not unlike that of a large bighorn ram, but
squarer and blunter.
VII. THE PRONGHORN ANTELOPE (_Antilocapra americana_)
[Illustration: Antilocapra americana]
The scheme of these volumes does not allow for a full and detailed
account of the shooting of every variety of game found in each country.
It may therefore suffice to say of this antelope that it may be killed
as any other antelope is killed, either by stalking, the shots being
taken as a rule at long ranges, or by coursing. There are very few
parts of America, if any, in which the antelope has been so little
hunted as to allow the old ruse of flagging (i.e. of attracting them
within range by the exhibition of strange objects which arouse their
curiosity) to be practised with success. Ten or fifteen years ago,
antelope might be seen from the windows of almost every train running
west of Chicago, but now their range is vastly curtailed, and though a
few small herds may still be found in most of their old haunts, they
are not really abundant except in Texas, in the neighbourhood of the
National Park, and in Assineboia, where in 1893 I saw two considerable
bands in April from the carriage windows of the Canadian Pacific
Railway train.
In Texas, a friend who was there in November 1892 wrote me: ‘There
seems to be plenty of antelope round here, as they are frequently
brought into town, sometimes by the cartload to be shipped.’ In
California antelopes have been almost exterminated, and the same may
be said of Oregon, whilst in Colorado the districts in which they
occur are not numerous, nor even in these does the beast exist in any
numbers, except where it has been preserved. It seems likely that
the pronghorn will be the next of the American mammals to disappear
before the arms of the white man. Like the buffalo, the antelope is
a dweller on the plains, seldom seeking refuge either in the timber
or in the high mountains, although he is found at a very considerable
altitude on the high tablelands near Gunnison, Colorado, for example
(6,000 to 7,000 ft. at least above sea level). The season for antelope
shooting should be from August to the middle or end of October, after
which time the oldest of the bucks will have shed the shell-like
covering of their horns. The rutting season lasts for about six weeks,
beginning in September and ending in October. The pronghorn, though
an inhabitant of the great plains, is not a wanderer as most denizens
of such countries are, but seems to attach himself to a certain
district, and to remain there or near there until his tribe has been
exterminated. For instance, there is a small band which may be seen
almost any day in winter within a few miles of one of the big cities
of Colorado. The band grows smaller year by year, but it never alters
its winter quarters in consequence of man’s persecution. The pronghorn
has, moreover, other enemies to contend against besides man and his
Winchester, the great eagles of the North-West occasionally taking
toll from the herds. An instance of this was seen by Mr. A. Pike in
Colorado last year, when the buck, after dodging the eagle’s attacks
for some time, escaped into some brush; but such attacks are said by
the plainsmen to be fairly frequent and often successful.
[Illustration: A herd of pronghorns]
Mr. Rowland Ward gives 15¾ ins. as the length of the longest horn of
the pronghorn within his knowledge.
VIII. THE DEER OF AMERICA
Judge Caton, an authority upon the deer of his own country, describes
eight well-defined species as inhabiting the North American continent.
These are the wapiti (_C. canadensis_), the moose (_C. alces_), the
woodland caribou (_C. tarandus_), the Barren Ground caribou (_C.
tarandus arcticus_), the mule deer (_C. macrotis_), the Columbian
black-tailed deer (_C. columbianus_), the Virginian or white-tailed
deer (_C. virginianus_), and a little-known beast called by Caton _C.
acapulcensis_.
With the last-named a sportsman is likely to have very little to do,
as its range is extremely limited and its size insignificant (‘weight
from 30 to 40 lbs., height 24 ins. at the shoulder, and length from the
end of the nose to the root of the tail 44 ins.’; cf. Caton’s ‘Deer
of America,’ pp. 121, 122), whilst its antlers, though quaint, are
hardly worth taking as a trophy. Caton gives a cut of the antlers of
a full-grown buck of this species. Of the originals of that cut Caton
says that they measure in length 7 ins. and 3 lines, in circumference
above the burr 2 ins., and that they are more palmated than the horns
of any other American deer except moose and caribou. For further
information on this deer the reader is referred to Caton’s work, which
should be in the library of every man interested in natural history. Of
the other seven species of American cervidæ there is much to be said,
and little space left to say it in.
(1) MOOSE (_C. alces_)
[Illustration: The record head]
Of all deer extant to-day, the moose is the largest. Of all earth’s
animals, except perhaps old _Haploceros_, he bears most plainly still
the impress of Nature’s ’prentice hand when she made things huge and
roughhewn, and had no time to polish her work and smooth off the
corners. Evolution does not seem to have affected the moose, for
to-day he wanders along that great chain of lakes from the Arctic
to the Atlantic, from the mouth of the Mackenzie River to the St.
Lawrence--a survival of the earth’s dawn rather than a commonplace
nineteenth-century deer. All sorts of stories are told as to his weight
and size. Caton, who is always careful not to exaggerate, puts the
weight of a bull moose at from 700 to 1,400 lbs., and his height at 6
ft. at the withers. The largest pair of horns of which we have any
authentic record (the cut is from a photograph of them) measures in
span 66 ins. (or 5 ft. 6 ins.) from tip to tip, but a recent writer in
an American work upon sport and natural history (Mr. Hibbs) describes
a moose which he saw dead in the Teton Basin, whose antlers spanned 8
ft. 6 ins. from tip to tip, making an arch when inverted under which
a man ‘slightly stooping’ could walk. This Titan of the Tetons stood,
‘_without his legs under him_, 15 hands high,’ so that, allowing for
the fact that a moose has, according to Caton, ‘very long legs, to
which he is indebted for his great height,’ he must have stood in
life, _with his legs under him_, from 8 to 9 ft. high at the withers.
This seems rather tall, even for a moose from the Rocky Mountains. As
before stated, this great deer ranges from the Arctic Ocean to the St.
Lawrence, and in spite of the persecution of man still abounds as far
east as the provinces of Quebec and Ontario; is reported to exist in
large numbers on the head-waters of the Clear Water River, in Idaho;
is found in Montana and Wyoming, and flourishes exceedingly in the
North-Western portions of British Columbia as well as in the adjoining
territory of Alaska.
[Illustration: MOOSE AT HOME]
With great wisdom the Legislatures both of Canada and the States have
taken the moose under their protection, but the great deer would be in
no danger of extermination even if the law had overlooked him, as he
has haunts still remote, and except in deep snow can take very fair
care of himself; indeed, even as lately as 1887 I could have killed
seven bull moose in six days’ hunting in Ontario had I been butcher
enough to do so, whilst in 1891 I saw two canoes (big freight canoes)
come down loaded with magnificent moose horns from a district where
almost the only residents are a few Siwashes (Indians) and some Chinese
miners! Where Chinese kill game, game must be fairly plentiful still.
Although as big as a haystack, the moose is not quite as easy to hit,
nor is he everybody’s ‘meat.’ His favourite haunts are the dense
thickets round lakes and about river-bottoms, the dark balsam groves,
hardwood hills, and brulé patches of Ontario, and wherever the lily
pads, moose wood, swamp maple, alder bushes, coarse grasses or mosses
upon which he feeds are most luxuriant.
By some strange fatality, wherever things are most convenient for the
moose they appear to be least convenient for the hunter. The scrub over
which the moose looks without raising his ugly head closes over and
drowns the unfortunate biped who tries to follow him; the fallen trees
and huge logs which the moose takes comfortably in his stride must be
climbed by the hunter, and yet, in spite of his size, when the big bull
has answered your call and has come crashing through the alder and
swamp tea to within twenty yards of you, he is likely enough to halt in
the shadow, detect the fraud, and steal away without a sound.
Like other deer, the moose seems slow to identify objects with his
eyes, but there is no doubt about the keenness of his other senses.
If it pleases him to answer your call, though his answer may be all
but inaudible to you, you need not call again unless you like. Through
a mile of brush which to you appears a pathless tangle he will steer
straight to the square yard from which your call came, unless a bough
should scrape against your overalls or a tiny puff of wind carry the
faintest suggestion of your presence to him. If either of these things
happen, the moose will make up his mind without stopping to think. In
addition to the keenness of his senses the bull moose is credited with
considerable pugnacity when pursued and ‘cornered,’ and he undoubtedly
is a bit of a strategist, choosing his couch, for instance, invariably
in such a position as to command the country all round. The Indians,
when following a moose’s track, will, oftener than not, keep describing
a succession of semicircles, so that, instead of walking in the bull’s
tracks, they cut them from time to time. This is done to outwit the
bull, who, they say, when he means to lie down will turn aside and walk
back parallel to his trail, and lie down with his head towards his back
tracks, so that either his eyes or his nose must give him warning of
anyone who attempts to follow him.
There are three principal methods of hunting the moose besides the foul
practice of snaring him with a loop in his run ways or of butchering
him in his yards (i.e. in those camps and feeding grounds which moose
stamp out for themselves in the deepest snows of winter). The favourite
method (in Canada, at any rate) is ‘calling,’ a birch-bark horn being
used night and morning to imitate either the cry of the bull or of
the cow, and so lure a would-be mate or rival (as the case may be)
to his ruin. September is the season of the rut in Lower Canada, and
during the earlier part of this season the bull seems nearly beside
himself with rage and unrequited passion, wandering constantly in
search of a mate or a rival, and filling the woods with hoarse calls
or hoarser challenges. About one man in a million is clever enough to
mimic these calls, and if you are lucky enough either to be that man
or his employer, you may take advantage of the moonlight and lie out
behind some log or bush watching the skyline and listening while the
half-breed (it will probably be a French half-breed) grunts and roars
upon the horn, imitates the thrashing of the bull’s antlers amongst
the alder-bushes. Experts disagree as to the amount of skill required
to call a moose. Some say that any noise is good enough when he is
really on the war-path, that the chopping of an axe or the bray of a
donkey will ‘fetch’ him; others again affirm that the nicest accuracy
is necessary in imitating every call, and I am bound to admit that,
though I have never met a man who had seen a moose drawn to his ruin
by the sound of chopping, I have more than once known that a moose
owed his life to the fact that my overalls were made of a peculiarly
harsh material from which the brush in passing managed to elicit a very
penetrating sound.
If all goes well with the caller, it may be that at last he will hear,
faint and far off, a hoarse response from the depths of the swamp
below him, a response repeated from time to time, and growing each
time nearer, until at last, if he can hear anything but the beating of
his own heart, he will hear the scrub crunched under the foot of the
advancing monster. As long as all goes well, the quiet night betrays
the bull’s every movement to the hidden man, almost as clearly as if
the hunter could watch the whole play with his naked eyes. Now the bull
comes crashing up from the swamp through the alder-bushes, now he is
standing listening half in doubt as to whether to come on or go back,
but the half-breed is prepared for the emergency. Good as he is, he
dare not try a call at such close quarters, but he strikes the horn
against the scrub and the bull comes on again, thinking that he has
heard the rattle of his enemy’s weapons.
When at last, with strangely little warning it seems to you, and much
closer to you than you had expected, that monstrous form looms up
against the half-light, remember to _look at its shoulder_, and try
not to merit my Indian’s reproof to me when a bullet went six inches
too high--‘All same again, you allus look at the horns instead of the
bull, cap.’
Moose calling has almost every attribute of true sport. To succeed, a
man must know the habits of his quarry and have admirable opportunities
for studying them; if he ‘calls’ himself, he must have an excellent
ear and be a perfect mimic, and for him the morning and the evening,
moonlight and the grey of dawn, lend their beauty to the beauty of the
silent woods. But for some men, ‘calling’ hardly gives the man enough
to do. To these men I recommend still hunting over the hardwood hills
about the time of the first snowfall, when there is enough snow to
track in, with a good French Canadian half-breed as a guide. To my mind
there is hardly any better sport on earth than to follow the great
tracks through the new-fallen snow, through woods beautiful beyond
all description with the beauty of a Canadian winter, over hardwood
hills, and through patches of brulé, and then down into a bed of frozen
willows, silvered by the frost, and jewelled by the sun, through swamps
of tea-bush off which the frost falls in showers of crisp scales,
until late in the afternoon you run up to your beast in a heavy grove
of balsam, looking intensely black against the blinding purity of the
snow. But for this sport you want young limbs and strong ones, and the
wind and endurance of a temperate and clean liver. You want these for
any sport worth the name.
There is yet another way of hunting moose, when the snows are down
and the crust upon them is strong enough to bear a man on snow-shoes,
but not strong enough to carry the moose. Of course, all the odds are
against the animal, but still this is exciting sport, making tremendous
demands upon the man’s endurance; and it is moreover when pursued in
this way that the moose is said to turn ‘ugly’ and sometimes hunt the
hunter. Provided that a man only kills old bulls, and not too many of
them, I see no objection to this form of pursuit. The percentage of men
who can run to within shooting distance of a bull moose when trying to
escape through his native forest, even when the snow is at its worst
for the bull, will never be very great, and the excitement of the sport
must be intense. I have never yet had a chance of trying it.
Even when a man is in the best of luck, what he generally has to shoot
at, and that in a hurry, is not a beast 8 ft. high, weighing 1,400
lbs., standing broadside on in the open, but a small piece of brown
passing between the boles of the pine-trees in deep shadow, one or
two hundred yards off. The Indian may tell him that what he sees is
a moose. Nine men out of ten would not have discovered the fact for
themselves.
(2) THE WAPITI (_C. canadensis_)
The creatures of the nineteenth century are the children of the earth’s
old age. The days of the giants are over, and the days of the pigmies
are upon us. When our naked forefathers were armed only with bows and
arrows, there were elk in Ireland whose antlers spanned 11 ft. from
tip to tip, and even in the more recent days of the Hudson Bay musket,
there were (so men say) wapiti in Wyoming whose antlers when inverted
formed arches under which a six-foot man might pass without stooping.
Alas! there are no such wapiti nowadays, and indeed, although there
are scores of men in the States who will assure you that they have
themselves walked under such arches, it is very hard to believe that
they are not mistaken, in the face of the fact that a _four-foot man_
could not walk under the largest head known to be in existence at
the present moment, though the longest wapiti head in the American
Exhibition of 1887 (belonging to Mr. Frank Cooper, and numbered 89 in
the catalogue) is described as measuring 62½ ins. along the back of the
beam from base to tip of the longest tine, with an expanse between the
antlers of 48½ ins.
[Illustration: WAPITI IN THE EMERALD PASS, B.C.]
It is not easy, either in America or elsewhere, to find a head (dead or
alive) which will beat this by an inch in any direction; and yet, if
this head were inverted, no _four-foot man_ could walk without stooping
under the arch so made. During several years spent in wandering about
Canada and the States, I have heard again and again of gigantic wapiti
heads; I have even met men who own such trophies, and have actually
bought them for $500, the money to be paid when the ‘head’ was
delivered. Unfortunately, my cash was never claimed, and I confess that
I never expected that it would be, yet some of the trophy-owners wanted
money ‘in the worst way.’
But though the ‘bull elk’ of to-day is neither as large as the Irish
elk nor as the ‘elk’ of pioneer legends, he is still a magnificent
beast, not quite as big as the moose and not carrying a very much
larger head on the average than the Caucasian stag; but still, take him
all in all, he is the grandest stag left on earth. To an unscientific
eye, the wapiti differs from the Scotch red deer in three points only:
he is larger of course, his antlers as a rule lack the cup peculiar
to the Scotch royal, and his call in the rutting season is a whistle,
whilst the red deer’s is a roar. His range in America is still a wide
one, although the encroachments of civilization are driving him ever
further and further back into that dense timber of which he is always
too fond. It is this love of the timber which has enabled the wapiti
to outlive his old comrade the bison, and will probably enable him to
survive the antelope, which seems likely to be one of the next animals
wiped off the face of the great American continent. In the mountain
forests of Wyoming and Montana, of Idaho and Colorado, wapiti are
still fairly plentiful; in California, I have heard that there are a
good many in the red-wood districts, though of this I have no certain
knowledge; but there is no doubt that the home, _par excellence_, of
the wapiti to-day is in the dense timber of the Olympian range, in
Washington Territory, in Oregon, and to a certain extent in Vancouver
Island, British Columbia. In the early part of this century there were
wapiti on the mainland of British Columbia, and their bones may still
be found pretty frequently in the Chilcotin country; but the animals
themselves are said to have been exterminated by the Indians or starved
to death during an exceptionally severe winter sixty or seventy years
ago. Be that as it may, there are no wapiti on the mainland of British
Columbia to-day, nor are there anywhere (unless it be in the fastnesses
of the Olympian range) any vast herds of this splendid beast such as
we read of in the books of the pioneer sportsmen of the North-West.
For this change for the worse we have to thank the meat-hunter, the
skin-hunter, and the ranchman about equally, although perhaps the
advent of cattle does more to drive deer out of a country than anything
else. As an example of what _was_ as compared to what _is_, I may cite
the case of my old camp man, Sam Wells, who, when the Union Pacific
Railway was being built to the west of Cheyenne, killed, in his
capacity of meat-hunter to the construction party, 84 antelope, 24 elk,
and 18 deer during one autumn; whereas this year, in the best bit of
country known to him in Colorado, our camp was many days without meat,
and myself and my friend were looked upon as exceptionally fortunate in
having secured three good heads (wapiti) in three weeks’ hunting. It
is fair to add that the country hunted, although comparatively little
disturbed, was very near to a good-sized town.
It is said that before the advent of the white man the wapiti
frequented the plains, where the rich bunch grass helped to build
up the enormous antlers of which we hear so much and see so little.
Nowadays men and cattle have driven the wapiti from the bunch-grass
plains, and he has become almost entirely a denizen of the dense timber
districts.
In Colorado, where I hunted wapiti in 1892, we found our game in the
timber at an elevation of 10,000 ft. above sea level, but I have shot
them in equally dense timber on Vancouver Island at little above sea
level. Speaking broadly, the habits of the wapiti and of the Scotch red
deer are identical, except for the former’s detestable predilection
for timber. About the beginning of September the ‘bull elk,’ as all
Americans insist on calling him, has rubbed the velvet off his
antlers, and ten days later these antlers are dry and hard and fit for
fighting. The rubbing, or ‘fraying,’ is generally done against the
stem of a quaking asp or young green pine, the wapiti never using a
dry stick for his rubbing-post. As soon as his horns are dry, the bull
begins whistling or bugling, this whistling being kept up until about
the middle of October. I am inclined to think that the whistling (i.e.
the rutting) season varies a good deal in different districts according
to the seasons and the altitude at which the bulls find themselves. In
Colorado in 1892 we heard the first whistle on September 16th, and the
last about three weeks later; and although our old guide considered
1892 an exceptionally early season, I fancy that from the middle of
September to the middle of October may be looked upon as the ordinary
rutting season of _Cervus canadensis_.
There is nothing about the wapiti more characteristic or more striking
than his whistle, a call wild enough and weird enough to harmonise with
the savagery of the beast’s surroundings. I have never yet met a man
who could imitate the whistle or even adequately describe it; but if I
must attempt to give some idea of it, I should say that it was a long
flute-like sound, sometimes rising and falling, and ending more often
than not in two or three hoarse, angry grunts. Like the Scotch red
deer, the wapiti carries his horns until March, my friend Mr. Arnold
Pike having seen two old bulls with good heads on the 29th of March of
this year. In Colorado, as in Vancouver Island, each band of wapiti
seems to confine itself pretty closely to a particular district, never
moving more than twenty or thirty miles from one place, but travelling
on occasion from one side to another of its domains with a rapidity
which is exasperating to the hunter who has to follow with a pack
train. Early in September the principal food of the wapiti appears to
be the pink-flowered fireweed (_phlox_), which grows in rank luxuriance
amongst the burnt timber; and later on, when the frost has nipped the
tops of the young elder bushes, these seem to attract a good deal of
the great deer’s attention. But _Cervus canadensis_ is a somewhat
promiscuous feeder, all grasses and most weeds and bushes seeming to
be included in his list of things to be eaten. The young tops of the
quaking asp, of the willow, and of a low creeping shrub locally known
as elk weed, all seem favourites in their season.
On such food as this the wapiti grows to prodigious proportions, of
which the following measurements, supplied by Mr. Andrew Williamson,
give the best idea. Mr. Williamson killed sixteen bulls in one season
in Colorado in 1878, of which the largest measured 9 ft. from the tip
of the nose to the tail, stood 17 hands at the shoulder, and girthed
6 ft. 8 ins. round the heart. The average measurements of eight out
of the sixteen bulls were as follows: Length from nose to tail, 8
ft. 5 ins.; height at shoulders, 16 hands and ⅝ in.; girth round
the heart, 6 ft. 1 in. Compare these measurements with those of the
largest racehorse on record, and you get some idea of the size of the
wapiti, though even then the figure which you will conjure up will be
small compared with the apparition which sometimes confronts a Western
hunter upon the skyline, or to a ‘bull elk’ at bay with his head down,
his bristles up, and his eyes glaring angrily at the insignificant
collie yapping round him. The average length of the antlers of Mr.
Williamson’s bulls is given as 53 ins., and the span of these antlers,
measured _inside_ the beam, as 44 ins. As to the weight of a wapiti,
it is unfortunate that the man who kills one has very rarely any
apparatus at hand for weighing his prize; and even Mr. Caton, the great
American authority upon the _Cervidæ_ of North America, gives neither
measurements nor weights of full-grown bulls.
In his work upon the deer of America, this writer mentions a bull once
in his possession which when killed, as a _five-year-old_ weighed 900
lbs. live weight; and adds that ‘as the elk grows till he is eight or
nine years old, he (this bull) would, had he lived to his full age,
have attained to the weight of 1,000 or 1,100 lbs.’ Colonel Dodge, in
his ‘Plains of the Great West,’ puts the weight of an average ‘elk’
at only 500 lbs., although he qualifies this by adding that one has
been killed which weighed 800 lbs.; while Mr. Andrew Williamson, in
his ‘Sport and Photography in the Rockies,’ guesses the weight of his
big bull at 1,200 lbs. But most of this is guesswork. The nearest
approach to an accurate record of weight in my possession is taken
from a statement made to me by an old Western meat-hunter in whose
truthfulness I have every confidence. This man told me that the
hind-quarters of the largest bull he ever killed (‘and I cut ’em off
pretty high up,’ he added) weighed, when taken into town, a little over
400 lbs. From this it would appear that the live weight of the whole
animal could not have fallen far short of Mr. Williamson’s estimate of
the weight of his big bull.
In spite of the fact that no large areas of food pasture are known on
Vancouver Island, the wapiti found upon it do not, in point of size,
fall far short of those upon the mainland of the American continent.
I have myself, at the head of the Salmon River on this island, shot a
bull which measured rather over 16 hands and 1 in. at the shoulder,
and appeared to be a heavy stag for his size. Indeed, if the wapiti
of Vancouver Island vary at all from deer of the same species on the
mainland, it is in their antlers, which have always seemed to me to be
peculiarly heavy in the beam and narrow in the span, whilst amongst
them I have more than once noticed specimens having cups similar to
those of a Scotch royal: a somewhat remarkable fact, as this formation
is exceptionally rare amongst the wapiti on the mainland of America.
To anyone who has read this chapter thus far believing what he read,
it must appear that _Cervus canadensis_ is as fine a game animal as
the heart of a hunter could desire. But I have only presented hitherto
the fair side of the picture; of course it has another. The wapiti is
superb, but his habits are beneath contempt. While the gallant mountain
ram lives out on the open hill-tops, staking his life boldly upon the
keenness of his own senses, the great ‘bull elk’ sneaks about in the
shadows of the densest timber he can find just below the edge of the
sheep ground, pottering about the beds of mountain streams, poking
his head noiselessly through the thickets of willow round the parks,
picking his way gingerly over chaotic windfalls of burnt timber, and
dozing by day on the top of some woodland ridge which a shadow in
moccasins could hardly reach unheard.
But ‘what’s the good of gassing?’ as old Sam Wells would say. Come
away to my camp in Colorado and see the bull elk for yourself. And
first let me warn you that here in his own land, _Cervus canadensis_
is ‘elk,’ or ‘bull elick’ on occasion, but never wapiti. The ‘boys’
don’t know what a wapiti is; never ‘heerd tell on him’ as like as
not. _Cervus canadensis_ is, of course, the wapiti of the naturalists
and a few thousand Englishmen and scientific gentlemen, just as the
buffalo is the bison of the same well-informed circle; but to sixty
or seventy millions of white men these beasts are elk and buffalo,
now, henceforth, and for ever. The ‘boys’ round camp are rude enough
to say that ‘_they_ know what a bull elk is, and if they don’t, who
the ---- does?’ and as I hate arguing (where arguments are sometimes
six-chambered), it may be as well to call _Cervus canadensis_ by his
local name for the next few pages.
Our camp, then, is pitched at an altitude of nearly 10,000 ft. above
sea level, on the edge of a great park or ‘open’ of rank yellow grass,
through which a mountain stream twists and turns. Years ago, before
Sam Wells cleared them out, beavers had dammed this stream, and the
park stills owes a good deal of its richness to their operations. Above
the park in a great circle the dark ranks of the pine-trees close in;
whilst above them again rise the bare ridges and strangely castellated
tops of the ‘divide.’
In the early summer the elk may have wandered upon those bare ridges
(their tracks prove it, and a natural desire to avoid their insect
tormentors accounts for it), but they are not upon those ridges now. As
the rutting season approaches the elk come down from the high places,
and in September every one of the forty or fifty beasts which live
all the year round in this little district is within that dark belt of
timber, worse luck to it!
Since June there has been no rain in the State of Colorado, nor can
even the most sanguine of us see any promise of rain to come in the
crystal clear vault above us.
By day the sun is hot enough to make men sit about in their
shirt-sleeves, but by night the frost makes us draw our blankets
closer, and almost wish for another pair. It is perfect weather for
picnicing in the woods, but it is impossible weather for still hunting.
Between them, sun and frost and mountain air have made the woods dry as
a chip and crisp as a biscuit. The woodland solitudes are more noisy
than Chinatown at New Year: the leaves rattle like dead men’s bones,
and the twigs seem to explode like fire-crackers under your feet.
But it is September; the hunter’s moon has begun, and now and again,
just about dawn or towards evening, there is a hollow whistle from the
depths of the pine forests, followed by a succession of hoarse choking
grunts. This is the love song of the great bull, and for the moment he
is careless of rustling leaves and snapped twigs, and, being in love,
is as great a fool as a biped under similar circumstances. Nor is love
the bull elk’s only excuse for imprudence just now. In summer the
great woods are still, but for the hum of insect life; in winter they
are still as death; but now, in late autumn, they are full of sounds.
Winter is coming, and everything that has breath is busy laying in
stores for the approaching snow-time. All day long there is a rattle
among the brush as creatures bustle through it; all day long the great
fir-cones come thumping down from the pine-tops, while the squirrels
who are gathering them chatter and swear at one another with the vigour
and bitterness of rivals in business. Chipmunks, engaged in the same
work of harvest, skip like long-legged streaks of light along the logs,
and the short-tailed grey rats are as busy as either squirrels or
chipmunks. As you cross the hillside, your foot sinks deep into the
light soil, for the earth is full of little tunnels, and every tunnel
is choked with garnered pine-cones; whilst in the high places amongst
the rocks you come now and again upon a miniature haystack, neatly cut,
and made of dried Alpine flowers and grasses, prepared for winter use
by one of Nature’s invisible workers.
As you lie upon the hillside in the warm sun at noon, with the timber
all below you and a good day’s work behind you, you will have time to
note these things; but just now, though the stars are still visible,
you should not be ‘foolin’ around camp’ any longer, if you want to get
a shot at a bull before sundown.
It is no good pleading that you have toiled for a fortnight and seen
nothing; that your limbs ache, your clothes are torn to rags, and your
hands and feet wounded by the beastly dead timber. Such heads as bull
elk wear in Colorado can only be earned nowadays by early rising, long
patience, and honest hard work; so off with you, while the rime is
on the sage brush, in spite of the temptation to stop until Sam has
cooked just one rasher of sow-belly. The first crossing of the brook,
before you are a hundred yards from camp, will effectually wake you
up and make you step out, unless you want to ‘freeze solid,’ for the
stepping-stones at this early hour are coated with ice, and neither
courage nor caution, neither moccasins, nails, nor even sand, can save
you from a cold plunge. Great Cæsar’s ghost! how cold it is; and how
warm even the woodland bogs strike after that running water!
Here, within half a mile of your camp, is the first sign of elk; a
great wallow made in the marsh late yesterday evening, and running from
the wallow is a trail, well beaten, which leads, as you know, by a very
circuitous route to that bare patch of red mud where the elk lick for
alkali. But we have no time to follow the trail to-day, more especially
as the elk seem to leave the lick before dawn. Our hunting-ground is in
a belt of burnt timber very near the top of the divide, and to reach
it in time we must climb straight up one ridge after another without
staying to look for trails and easy places. From camp the belt of
timber looks as if it lay upon a smooth, gently rising hillside. Once
within it, you learn that the belt is composed of densely timbered
ridges rising one behind another like waves in a choppy sea, and as you
toil through and over these ridges, you wish, if you are an ordinary
man, that you had never heard of elk.
Everywhere the trees crowd one another for light and breathing room,
but so long as they are standing (unless they are young green pines) a
man may walk at ease among them. It is when fire and wind have swept
through them and left them in chaotic tangles upon the ground that
the trouble begins. Then it is that the elk hunter has to rival the
squirrel or Blondin, tacking from point to point along the pine logs,
now straining every muscle to get a grip on the slippery trunk of a
pine which offers a bridge uphill across the prone carcases of its
fellows, now manfully suppressing an oath as his feet slip and he sits
down inadvertently upon the ‘business end’ of a rampike.
For an hour, perhaps, or two, there is little or no change in your
work. Your road may lie through dense green timber at one moment,
through half-lit mossy glades at another, and the next through hollows
full of burnt timber, amongst which the elk tracks are thick, and the
pink fire-flower blooms; but it is always uphill work, and almost
always in places where still hunting is impossible. Now and again there
is something to cheer you up and encourage you to make fresh exertions.
Now it is a great track like a deer’s, but larger and blunter; now it
is the stem of a young quaking asp with its bark hanging in ribbons,
which makes your heart beat quicker; or perhaps it is only the freshly
nibbled buds of a young elder bush. There is no doubt that there are
elk about, and a good many of them, and as you stretch in vain to reach
the scars upon the quaking asp, you realise that there are big bulls
among them; but what is the use of the biggest bull if you are never to
see him within two hundred yards? Once to-day you heard a bough break
several hundred yards below you, and a few minutes later you saw the
warm lair from which an elk had stolen away; but you never saw him,
never even heard him, until he was well out of range.
‘Hang the luck!’ you mutter; in another hour the wind that rises about
noon will get up and then the odds will be doubled against you. Will
the luck never change? Well, yes. Just as you are deciding for the
twentieth time that you never will hunt elk again, there is a long
hollow whistle among the pines below you. The whistle is faint and far
off, and if you had not been sitting down and at rest you would never
have heard it. You have, as a matter of fact, failed to hear two or
three similar whistles during the morning--whistles which a better
woodsman would have heard, and which even you would never have missed
had you taken Sam’s advice and gone slow, ‘settin’ down once in a while
to listen.’
You are not likely to see a motionless stag when you are scrambling
through the brush, or to hear a bull’s stealthy tread upon the trail,
or his distant call, whilst you are forcing your way through a
barricade of burnt timber.
Well, luck, which after all counts for more in hunting than all the
skill and experience of the best hunter--luck has favoured you at last,
and there the whistle comes again, and directly after it another,
followed this time by deep, hoarse grunts, so deep and hoarse and so
close to you that, as Sam puts it, ‘your hair almost lifts your cap
off your head.’ That last bull was within five hundred yards of you,
and there can be no doubt about his size. Creeping forward, you look
cautiously over the brow of a little ridge on to a flat, where amongst
the black, burnt stems of the dead pines the tall jungle of fireweed is
vivid with every shade from fresh green to royal purple, scarlet, and
orange, and even as you look, without a sound, a great head is pushed
out from a bunch of quaking asp. For what seems to you an age the cow
stares straight at you, and then, when you are almost in despair, moves
quietly into the open followed by her calf. In another moment the bull
appears on the cow’s trail, without any display of that caution shown
by her. There are others, you think, still in the timber, and a gleam
of brown moving between the pine stems convinces you that you are
right; but there is no doubt that this is the master bull of the herd,
and you fairly catch your breath at the sight of his vast antlers.
As he stands there, sounding again his weird, unearthly challenge, you
realise that you are looking upon one of Nature’s masterpieces set in a
fitting frame. When your finger presses the trigger it will destroy the
picture, and yet if you hesitate much longer all your labour will be
lost, and you will have no royal trophy to remind you of this day, when
the good rifle is rusting with disuse and your limbs are stiff with old
age.
For my part, if I could get a camera which would do good work at a
hundred yards, I would rather press a button than a trigger. However,
like the rest of us, the bull must die some day; if you don’t kill him
there is a ‘prominent citizen’ somewhere who made a pile in hardware,
who will give a hundred dollars for those splendid antlers, and the
bar-tender in the same city (a gentleman ‘way up in the Order of the
Elks’) will give five dollars apiece for his tushes, so that, after
all, you may as well fire the shot and take the spoils yourself.
For a moment the woods ring with the report; the other elk vanish like
the figures of a dream, but the bull stands unflinching, as if he had
neither heard the shot nor felt the sting of the bullet.
A little shiver creeps over him, and he seems to draw himself together.
A moment he stands a royal figure amongst the grey mosses of his native
forest, above his head a haze of golden aspen leaves, like drops of
pale gold in a sea of deep amethyst, and then he staggers and crashes
down amongst the giant pines lying dead like himself athwart the forest
floor.
The sport is over; there is nothing left to do but butcher’s work; the
forest which a moment ago seemed full of moving forms is empty and
still again--and are you quite sure that there is no reproach in the
silence? It seems almost a pity that sport must end in the death of
such a noble victim.
[Illustration: Abnormal palmated wapiti head]
The largest wapiti head of which I have been able to obtain trustworthy
dimensions belongs to Messrs. Schoverling & Daly of New York. This
head measures in length along the beam, 64 ins. (left) and 65 ins.
(right); its greatest width is 48 ins. The circumference of the beam
is 7⅝ ins. It is a head of 14 points. A cut of an abnormal wapiti head
from Boseman is here given, and it is perhaps worth mentioning that
this apparent tendency to become palmated is not rare in the horns
of wapiti. An exceptionally fine head in the possession of Mr. G. B.
Wrey is a good instance of this tendency and has also the remarkable
girth of nearly 9 ins. in the beam. The beast was, I believe, killed in
Montana.
(3) WOODLAND CARIBOU (_C. tarandus_).
[Illustration: 1, Woodland caribou; 2, Barren Ground caribou]
If we except _C. canadensis_, the woodland caribou comes next in
size to the moose, amongst American _cervidæ_. Luckily I have been
able to obtain some accurate measurements of a bull caribou, taken
while the beast was still in the flesh by a man who knew the value
of precision. This bull, killed in 1890 by Mr. John Fannin, measured
from the nose to the root of the tail 6 ft. 7 ins.; stood 4 ft. 5
ins. at the shoulder, and 4 ft. 7 ins. behind the saddle on the rump;
his girth just behind the forelegs was 5 ft. 1 in., and the length
of his neck (measured along the top) was 1 ft. 5 ins. His weight was
never accurately ascertained, but a fair estimate would be 400 lbs.
live weight. These dimensions seem to me to give a better idea of
this long, low, heavily-built beast than any which I could pen, but I
freely confess that one of them comes as a surprise to me. I should
never have imagined that a caribou stood higher behind than he does in
front, but I know my authority too well to doubt his accuracy in such
a matter. Our British Columbian caribou is reputed to grow larger than
the caribou of Eastern Canada, and those heads which I have seen in the
east were certainly not nearly as fine as heads which I have seen out
here. It is said, too, that the British Columbian caribou is darker
in colour than his eastern cousin: a bull killed here in September
is nearly as black as a bull moose, and a cow set up in the British
Columbian Museum is even blacker than the bull. This seems worth
noting, as Caton says of _C. tarandus_, ‘the colour lighter than any of
the other deer.’ The head figured is from a photograph of one killed in
British Columbia, and may be considered fairly typical, except perhaps
that it is too symmetrical, and that the ploughs are too even. As a
rule, one plough is large and much palmated, whilst the other is a mere
spike. A large British Columbian caribou head measured 3 ft. 6 ins. in
length, 3 ft. in span, and 6 ins. in circumference above the big tine,
but I have no record of any exceptional head. As most men know, both
male and female caribou have antlers, but the antlers of the cow are
light and insignificant compared with those of the bull. The antlers
are clear of velvet some little time before the rut, which begins in
British Columbia when the first snow begins to fly (in September) in
those high upland districts which the caribou inhabit.
The two or three haunts of this deer known to me in British Columbia
are all similar in character, lying very high at the top of the
timber-line, where dark groves of balsam and other conifers, hung with
immense quantities of beard moss, alternate with open glades of yellow
swamp grass. The snow in these districts remains unthawed in the timber
till late in May, and begins to fall again about the middle or end
of September, but the exposed tops of the rolling highland above the
timber are said to be free from snow a little earlier than the timber.
In early summer the caribou frequent these high grassy downs, lying
close to the large patches of snow left in the hollows, seeking as
far as may be to avoid that pest created for their special annoyance,
the caribou fly. Later on, in August, the caribou are hard to find,
having left the hills and sought (so the Indians say) the seclusion
of the densest brush to rub off their old coats, clean and burnish
their antlers, and generally make ready for the rut. The best time to
hunt the bulls is in the rutting season, when they are a little less
cautious than usual, and when there is generally a good ‘tracking snow’
to help the hunter, who requires all the help he can get in his match
with the keenest-scented beast on earth. Dull-witted the caribou may
be, and I very much doubt whether his eyes are any better than a man’s,
but his nose is, as our neighbours say, a ‘holy terror.’ I have seen a
caribou allow a man to walk almost up to him in very thin covert, and
have had his congener, the Spitzbergen reindeer, walk straight _back
to me_ when I crouched (after ‘jumping’ him) to see what I was. I shot
him at ten paces to save myself from being run over by the inquisitive
fool. The last caribou shot by friends of mine out here were killed
by the lazy one of the party, while satisfying an inordinate appetite
at the unreasonable hour of midday, and in camp. Captain L., like an
honest hunter, was scouring the hills; Major P. was feeding contentedly
in camp. L., of course, never got a shot during the expedition, but
three caribou walked up to lunch with P. and were shot.
But if the eyes of caribou are not very trustworthy, their ears are
about as good as the ears of other forest beasts, and their noses are
matchless. I have known a herd strike the track of a man in the snow a
day old, and turn as if their noses had touched hot iron; and once a
caribou has satisfied himself that there is a man about, he will not
stop travelling for half a day; good feed won’t tempt him, deep snow
won’t stop him, snow-shoes can’t catch him--in fact, the hunter had
better look for another, and keep on the right side of him when he
finds him.
Caribou feed upon very much the same food as the moose, browsing for
the most part, and depending largely during the depth of winter upon
beard moss and other lichens for support. Caribou hunting in British
Columbia is sufficiently fascinating in itself, but for some of us it
has an added charm from the fact that the best chance of getting a
grizzly occurs when the bones and offal of two or three of these deer
are lying about in the upland forest. Where the caribou are, there
also are the grizzlies, in British Columbia at least; and the man who
revisits a caribou carcase after a few days’ absence is likely enough
to find big tracks going in front of him, and a big, bad-tempered beast
suffering from a surfeit of venison lying not far from the body.
Mr. Rowland Ward mentions a head 60 ins. long, with a span of 41⅛ ins.,
having 15 tines on the one side and 22 tines on the other.
(4) BARREN GROUND CARIBOU (_C. tarandus arcticus_)
Almost all that I know of the Barren Ground Caribou (_C. tarandus
arcticus_) has been derived from the writings of my friend Mr.
Warburton Pike, who has enjoyed exceptional opportunities of studying
this beast recently in its native haunts, the barren lands of Upper
Canada. According to him, the Barren Ground caribou is about one-third
smaller than its woodland cousin. This seems fairly conclusive, coming
from a man who has seen and shot so many Barren Ground caribou as Mr.
Pike has.
The range of this beast is, according to my authority, ‘from the
islands in the Arctic Sea to the southern part of Hudson Bay, while the
Mackenzie river is the limit of its average western wanderings.’
The Barren Ground caribou appears to rut at about the same season as
the woodland variety, and masses up into those huge herds known locally
as ‘la foule’ for its winter migration southwards, late in October. A
month later the males and females separate, the latter beginning to
work their way north again as early as the end of February; they reach
the edge of the woods in April, and drop their young far out towards
the sea-coast in June. The males stay in the woods until May and never
reach the coast, but meet the females on their way inland at the end
of July; from this time they stay together till the rutting season is
over, and it is time to seek the woods once more. The horns are mostly
clear of velvet towards the end of September, and are shed by the old
bulls early in December.
As to hunting this beast, Mr. Pike says in his ‘Barren Ground of
Northern Canada,’ ‘It is no hard matter to kill caribou in the open
country, for the rolling hills usually give ample cover for a stalk,
and even on flat ground they are easily approached at a run, as they
will almost invariably circle head to wind and give the hunter a chance
to cut them off.’
(5) MULE DEER (_C. macrotis_)
[Illustration: Typical mule deer
(_C. macrotis_)]
To my mind the best deer we have in North America for sport is the
beast whose head is here represented, _C. macrotis_, the mule deer of
British Columbia and the naturalists, and the Black-tail of Colorado
and elsewhere in the States. More than any other of his kin in this
country, _C. macrotis_ haunts the open uplands, the largest bucks being
found oftener than not right up by the little snow patches, in and on
the edge of the sheep land, or if not there, then in the small patches
of starved and moss-grown forest at the top of the timber range. Thanks
to his predilection for high places and the open, it is often possible
to stalk _C. macrotis_ in ‘old country’ fashion, instead of crawling
about after him in choking timber as a man must after _C. columbianus_
or almost any other American deer; but to get mule deer a man should
rise early in order to see them moving up to their beds for the day.
The mule deer ruts about the middle of October, his horns being clean
as a rule about a fortnight earlier, although I have seen a big buck
very high up (10,000 ft.) in Colorado who had not _begun_ to rub in the
third week of September.
One of the writers in a recent book on American big game speaks of
the _whistling_ of this deer during the rutting season; but though
I have spent many seasons amongst mule deer, in British Columbia and
elsewhere, I have never yet heard them whistle, nor heard any mention
of this habit from the natives or white hunters. However, I am not
prepared to say that they do not whistle.
[Illustration: Abnormal head of mule deer]
More than any other American deer with which I am acquainted, _C.
macrotis_ migrates with the seasons, passing in large numbers from his
summer feeding grounds on the uplands to the green timber districts of
the lower country. This migration seems to begin with the first heavy
snows, but it is not an invariable rule, for I have seen big bucks in
the Chilcotin country, nearly as high up as they could climb, at the
beginning of December, with snow a foot deep and the thermometer 10°
below zero. There is no deer in the country, I fancy, whose antlers are
subject to such great variation as those of _C. macrotis_. The pair
figured on p. 419 is typical, although distinctly above the average
in size (25½-in. span); another pair (obtained by Mr. H. A. James in
Colorado) had 41-in. span, but the abnormal head figured on p. 420 is
that of a mule deer, and it has no fewer than 59 points in place of
the ordinary 10 points. This stag was killed in British Columbia. I
have also seen another pair, old and thick and covered with well-marked
pearls, with no tines at all except at the top. The average weight of
a male mule deer is about 200 lbs., though they sometimes run much
larger, individuals having been killed weighing as much as 250 and 300
lbs.
Some idea of the number of these deer in British Columbia may be
gathered from the fact that in one district I have had a chance of
killing seventeen separate stags in an hour’s still hunt, whilst one
settler in the Similkameen country fed his hogs on deer-meat through a
whole winter.
(6) THE WHITE-TAIL (_C. virginianus_)
Of the White-tail or Virginian deer I have very little to say. Every
quality which a deer ought not to possess from a sporting point of view
this exasperating little beast possesses in the most highly developed
form. He lives very often in close proximity to men, and seems to
have caught some of their cunning. His habitat is from the Atlantic
to the Pacific, his haunts are in river bottoms, in choking, blinding
brush, and his habits are beastly. No one need ever expect to _stalk_
a white-tail. If you want to get one, you must crawl about in places
where the big boughs swing back and lash you across the eyes, where
the rampikes catch in your clothes or rise up under your feet and trip
you more cleverly than a professional wrestler, where hidden logs
break your shins, and every other device of inanimate Nature is found
to obstruct and annoy you with what seems almost live personal malice.
After a long course of such sport as this, after having become dumb
because you have no more ‘swear words’ left to say, after having grown
sick of hearing that abominable ‘thump, thump,’ which means that you
have jumped another buck without seeing him, you may catch a glimpse
of a waving white tail going over the logs, and if you are a good
wing-shot with a rifle you may get the beast which wears it, but the
betting is you won’t; or you may some day be astounded by the sight of
a creature, apparently about as big as a good-sized jack rabbit, _close
to you_, sneaking along under the brush, with its head craned forward,
intent on escaping observation. If you move to fire, that sneaking
beast will at once convert itself into the white-tailed timber jumper
you have seen once or twice before.
[Illustration: The White-tail’s haunt]
Let me be honest to the little beast. On nearly every occasion _C.
virginianus_ has got the best of me (I never hunted him with dogs or
torches, or any other such abomination, and never mean to), but once
on a red-letter day I caught a big buck of his kind dreaming on a
hardwood hill. He was two hundred yards off, and though the bullet
from my Express broke his foreleg, he jumped ‘at a stand’ a log by his
side over which I could not look, though I stand nearly six feet in
my boots, and gave me an hour’s excessively hard work before I killed
him. I should think that about 150 lbs. would be the extreme weight of
the largest bucks of this variety when cleaned, but there are stories
of exceptionally large white-tail bucks in the Okanagau district of
British Columbia, and the heads which come from that country are
certainly very fine. Mr. Rowland Ward gives 27⅛ ins. as the length and
19 ins. as the span of the best head of this deer known to him.
(7) THE BLACK-TAIL (_C. columbianus_)
Although not quite so exasperating an animal as _C. virginianus_,
this, the common deer of Vancouver Island, of the islands all along
the Pacific coast from Victoria to Alaska, and of the Pacific slope
generally, is desperately fond of thick timber and the deep jungles of
noisy sal lal bush. In size _C. columbianus_ is considerably smaller
than the mule deer: a buck which would weigh 175 lbs. would be a big
buck for Vancouver Island, and I am not aware that the deer of this
island are smaller than those of the mainland. But if _C. columbianus_
is small, he is at least abundant. A week from the date of writing
this, a friend of mine and myself saw fourteen deer in two days’ still
hunting within a drive of Victoria, and a grateful memory of my dinner
reminds me that the venison of a yearling buck hung for one week is as
good meat as any Esau ever brought home to Isaac. In 1892 a couple of
half-breeds sold over eighty bucks in Victoria in two months, and in
1893 the same two (excellent shots and woodsmen) are reported to have
killed twenty-two deer in one day. But to hunt deer or anything else
upon Vancouver Island a man must be a born woodsman. Where the deer
are thickest the woods fairly swallow a man up: every rolling hill is
exactly like its neighbour, high peaks are scarce and landmarks very
few.
Fortunately the island deer are not as wary as the white-tail, and
will generally stand to gaze for a moment after having jumped from
their lair amongst the sal lal. Early in the season the neighbourhood
of swamps is the likeliest place to find deer, but during the rutting
season (middle of October) the old bucks seem to keep to the higher
grounds. Like other deer, the black-tail browses on all manner of
shrubs and deciduous trees, and, unfortunately for farmers, has a
decided weakness for growing crops.
The largest head I have seen was shot in 1892 near Cowitchan Lake,
Vancouver Island. It measures along the beam from skull to extreme
point 21 ins., and in span it is 19 ins. from tip to tip. A typical
head appears in the illustration on the next page.
Mr. Rowland Ward records a head of this deer measuring 28⅝ ins. in
length, with a span of 26 ins.
[Illustration: Guanaco
C. paludosus, C. columbianus]
NOTE ON CENTRAL AND SOUTH AMERICAN BIG GAME
There is no lack of game either upon the Pampas or in the forests and
along the river-beds of Central and South America, but as yet very few
English sportsmen appear to have visited either the seas of grass or
the luxuriant tropical forests of Patagonia, Paraguay and the Amazon.
Admiral Kennedy, indeed, in his recent book, ‘Sporting Sketches in
South America,’ is, I fancy, the first sportsman pure and simple who
has visited these regions and described the sport to be found therein,
and it is to be regretted that even he has not had the luck to secure
specimens of all the principal beasts known in the country. Others
have, of course, written of the Amazon and of the Pampas, but they
have been naturalists, who cared more to secure a new mouse than mere
trophies of the chase, however fine.
According to Admiral Kennedy, the game list of South America includes
the guanaco, five kinds of deer, the ostrich or rhea, the jaguar, puma,
tapir, wild cattle, and the wild pig. The last two species are, of
course, representatives of domestic animals which have become wild,
but, unless report belies them, there are wild cattle in the world
(e.g. in the Galapagos Islands) which are as well worth hunting as the
biggest buffaloes.
The jaguar, though a much larger beast than the puma (identical with
the panther of the West), appears to be anything but a sporting beast,
haunting river jungles and dense swamps, and being unable, according to
Mr. Hudson (the ‘Naturalist on La Plata’) to hold his own even against
his smaller cousin, the puma, who is described by the same authority as
a ‘bold hunter,’ invariably preferring large to small game, which he
kills as a tiger does, by dislocating the neck. The puma is, according
to the same authority, a persistent persecutor of the jaguar. Both
Mr. Hudson and Admiral Kennedy seem agreed that the puma is a very
dangerous enemy to the guanaco, and a scourge to everything living upon
the Pampas, except man and the gama (_C. campestris_), which protects
itself as the skunk does, by its unpleasant smell. Mr. Hudson’s stories
of the strange affection of the puma for man, although calculated to
excite incredulity at first, coincide somewhat strangely with some of
the Western stories of the panther (or puma) already narrated; but it
must be borne in mind that the panther of the West does attack man in a
few rare instances, according to the evidence of Mr. Perry.
Of all the beasts in South America Admiral Kennedy writes most
enthusiastically of the guanaco, an animal nearly allied to the camel,
weighing about 180 lbs., abundant from the Rio Colorado to the Straits
of Magellan, and affording good sport to the stalker.
But a beast which carries no ‘head,’ which, according even to its
admirers, ‘neighs like a horse’ when giving warning of danger, and
‘quacks like a duck’ when alarmed, seems to one who knows neither
guanaco nor ciervo a very unattractive creature compared with the
really fine deer, _C. paludosus_, which is found upon the Chaco of
Paraguay and in the Argentine Republic. This deer somewhat resembles
the red deer of Scotland, but grows to large dimensions. The horns
figured are from some in the British Museum.
Besides the ciervo, South America boasts, according to Admiral Kennedy,
of four other species of deer, the gama (_C. campestris_), a beast
rather larger than the Scotch roe deer, common all over the Pampas,
the ghazu vira or swamp deer, the ghazu colorado, and the venadillo.
It is a pity that some enterprising sportsman does not devote a year
or so to sport in South America. Jaguar and ciervo (to say nothing of
the possibility of bagging deer almost unknown to his brother sportsmen
in England) should be bait enough to tempt some one to more thoroughly
investigate the sporting possibilities of South America.
For a fuller knowledge of South American game beasts, the reader is
referred to Admiral Kennedy’s book, and to Mr. Hudson’s ‘Naturalist on
La Plata.’
[Illustration: Musk ox]