MAMMALS OF PENNSYLVANIA AND NEW JERSEY. 35 



he offered the Pine Creek hunters $ioo for the one they had captured. They 

 refused the offer, but afterwards got into a dispute about its ownership, and it 

 was sold to Bill StowcU and John Sloanmaker, of Jersey Shore. These men 

 took the elk about the country, exhibiting it, and made quite a sum of money. 

 Next fall, although the elk was a cow, it became very ugly and attacked its 

 keeper, nearly kilhng him before he could get away. No one could go near 

 her, and her owners ordered her shot. The carcass was bought by a man 

 who had a fine pair of elk horns. He was a skillful taxidermist, and he man- 

 aged to fasten the horns to the head of the cow elk in such a manner that no 

 •one was ever able to tell that they hadn't grown there. This made of the 

 head an apparently magnificent head of a bull elk, and it was purchased for 

 ^100 on that belief, by a future governor of Pennsylvania. 



"That cow elk was one of the last family of elk in the Pine creek country 

 [Potter Co.]. She and the bull and calf had been discovered some time be- 

 fore Sterling Devins ran across the cow, by Leroy Lyman, on Tomer's run, 

 near the Ole Bull settlement [Abbot township]. Lyman got a shot at the 

 bull, but the whole three escaped. The same party of hunters that captured 

 the cow killed the bull afterward in the woods on Kettle creek. The calf the 

 •dogs ran into Stowell's mill pond, and there it was killed. 



" A set of elk antlers of five feet spread and weighing from forty to fifty 

 pounds, was not an infrequent trophy. George Rae, who was one of the 

 great hunters of northern Pennsylvania in his day — and he is one of the 

 greatest in the Rocky Mountains even to this day, in spite of his eighty-five 

 years — lived along the Allegheny at Portville. He had in his house and in 

 his barn, the walls almost covered with the antlers of elk he had killed, on the 

 peak of his roof, at one end, being one that measured nearly six feet between 

 the extremities. When George moved West forty years ago he left the horns 

 on the buildings, and only a few years ago many of them were still there, as 

 reminders of what game once roamed our woods. 



" It required more skill to hunt the elk than it did to trail the deer, as they 

 were much more cautious and alert. For all that, an elk, when started from 

 his bed, did not instantly dash away, like the deer, but invariably looked to 

 see what had aroused him. Then, if he thought the cause boded him no 

 good, away he went, not leaping over the brush, like the deer, but, with his 

 head thrown back, and his great horns almost covering his body, plunging 

 through the thickets, his big hoofs clattering together like castanets as he 

 went. The elk did not go at a galloping gait, but traveled at a swinging trot 

 that carried him along at amazing speed. He never stopped until he had 

 crossed water, when his instinct seemed to tell him that the scent of his trail 

 was broken before the pursuing dogs. 



" At the rutting season the elk, both male and female, were fearless and 

 fierce, and it behooved the hunter to be watchful. An elk surprised at this 



