The Wapiti or Round-homed Elk 143 



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 very 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 kins- 

 folk ; 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 Mis- 

 souri ; 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 reso- 

 lutely 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. 



