The Wapiti or Round- horned Elk 151 



pitchy stumps flame like giant torches in the 

 darkness. 



In the old days, of course, much of the hunting 

 was done on the open plains or among low, rugged 

 hills. The wapiti that I shot when living at my 

 Little Missouri ranch were killed under exactly 

 the same conditions as mule-deer. When I built 

 my ranch-house wapiti were still not uncommon, 

 and their shed antlers were very numerous both on 

 the bottoms and in places among the hills. There 

 was one such place a couple of miles from my 

 ranch in a stretch of comparatively barren but 

 very broken hill-country in which there were 

 many score of these shed antlers. Evidently a 

 few years before this had been a great gathering- 

 place for wapiti toward the end of winter. My 

 ranch itself derived its name " The Elkhorn " 

 from the fact that on the ground where we built 

 it were found the skulls and interlocked antlers 

 of two wapiti bulls who had perished from getting 

 their antlers fastened in a battle. I never, how- 

 ever, killed a wapiti while on a day's hunt from 

 the ranch itself. Those that I killed were ob- 

 tained on regular expeditions, when I took the 

 wagon and drove off to spend a night or two on 

 ground too far for me to hunt it through in a sin- 

 gle day from the ranch. Moreover, the wapiti on 

 the Little Missouri had been so hunted that they 

 had entirely abandoned the diurnal habits of their 



