igoi] Campbell — Algonquin Park. 85 



3 



slaug-htered after Christmas. If one-half of these were females, 

 and if they even averaged only one calf each, here was game 

 enough destroyed in one season to stock the Park. Besides 

 affording noble sport to the hunter, the moose is a very valuable 

 animal to the settler and the frontiersman, and it would be a pity 

 to allow him to be exterminated like the buffalo of the western 

 plains without at least affording him every opportunity of survival. 

 A full-grown moose' weighs upwards of 1,000 pounds, and will 

 dress 600 pounds of beef, while his skin will make twenty pairs of 

 moccasins, which readily sell at two dollars a pair. 



The nimble-footed deer are, notwithstanding the onslauefhts 

 of the pot-hunter in the past, and of their natural enemy the wolf, 

 always, growing in numbers. For here, too, the wolf, the fiercest 

 and most cunning enemy of all animal life, thrives, and claims 

 many a victim, especially among the young deer and smaller 

 quadrupeds. The interlocked antlers of moose and deer, which 

 the rangers occasionally find in the Park, tell of forest tragedies 

 where conflicts have been waged to the death and the strife has 

 been ignominiously terminated by the arrival of the wolves on the 

 scene. At the time of his first visit to the Park, the writer was 

 shown (and got an excellent photograph of) two pairs of these 

 locked antlers, which had been taken from the carcasses of two 

 bucks found the previous winter in the woods, and whose inex- 

 tricable grip of each other caused their mutual destruction. It 

 would, in fact, be impossible to separate them without destroying 

 them, 



BIRD LIFE. 



Bird life is also being attracted to the Park. Owing to the 

 wanton and useless destruction of our feathered friends, by means 

 of guns in the hands of boys and young man, insectivorous birds 

 are every year becoming scarcer in the settled portions of the 

 Province, and had we not a refuge such as the Algonquin Park 

 some species would probably eventually become practically extinct. 

 Partridge are numerous, but are preyed upon by the foxes — 

 which, however, along with the wolves, bears and other destruc- 

 tive and objectionable animals and birds, are being gradually killed 

 off by the rangers. Wild duck are reported plentiful on some of 

 the lakes, and wild rice has been sown with the intention of at- 



