1 32 ' A SPORTSMAN'S EDEN. 



LETTER XII. 



The Potato Eanche. 

 MY DEAR PAT, 



There are two beasts in America which 

 are not of to-day, whose forms have nothing 

 homely about them, who dwell in such wild soli- 

 tudes and are so weirdly monstrous in their 

 outlines that they seem to be the births of fairy- 

 land, or, at least, the last relics of an earlier 

 creation, when herds of gigantic mammoths pas- 

 tured on the desolate tundras of Siberia, and the 

 elephant and the cave-dweller lived at Maiden- 

 head. I mean, of course, the moose, which wan- 

 ders along Canada's chain of lakes from the 

 Arctic to the St. Lawrence, and that quaint white 

 beast, between a poodle and a buffalo, which 

 haunts some few remote mountain-tops in the 

 north-west, and to which naturalists (recently in- 

 troduced to it) have given the high-sounding title 

 of ' haploceros montana.' 



English sportsmen call it the Rocky Mountain 



