4 The Wilderness Hunter. 



chief game fish are spotted trout and silvery salmon ; 

 grouse of various kinds as the most common game birds ; 

 all these the hunter finds as characteristic of the New 

 World as of the Old. So it is with most of the beasts of 

 the chase, and so also with the fur-bearing animals that 

 furnish to the trapper alike his life work and his means of 

 livelihood. The bear, wolf, bison, moose, caribou, wapiti, 

 deer, and bighorn, the lynx, fox, wolverine, sable, mink, 

 ermine, beaver, badger, and otter of both worlds are 

 either identical or more or less closely kin to one another. 

 Sometimes of the two forms, that found in the Old World 

 is the largest. Perhaps more often the reverse is true, 

 the American beast being superior in size. This is 

 markedly the case with the wapiti, which is merely a giant 

 brother of the European stag, exactly as the fisher is 

 merely a very large cousin of the European sable or 

 marten. The extraordinary prong-buck, the only hollow- 

 horned ruminant which sheds its horns annually, is a 

 distant representative of the Old-World antelopes of the 

 steppes ; the queer white antelope-goat has for its nearest 

 kinsfolk certain Himalayan species. Of the animals com- 

 monly known to our hunters and trappers, only a few, 

 such as the cougar, peccary, raccoon, possum (and among 

 birds the wild turkey), find their nearest representatives 

 and type forms in tropical America. 



Of course this general resemblance does not mean 

 identity. The differences in plant life and animal life, no 

 less than in the physical features of the land, are suffi- 

 ciently marked to give the American wilderness a charac- 

 ter distinctly its own. Some of the most characteristic of 



