The Wapiti or Round-Horned Elk. 175 



No bird is so common around camp, so familiar, so 

 amusing on some occasions, and so annoying on others, 

 as that drab-colored imp of iniquity, the whisky-jack also 

 known as the moose bird and camp robber. The familiarity 

 of these birds is astonishing, and the variety of their cries, 

 generally harsh, but rarely musical extraordinary. They 

 snatch scraps of food from the entrances of the tents, and 

 from beside the camp fire ; and they shred the venison hung 

 in the trees unless closely watched. I have seen an irate 

 cook of accurate aim knock one off an elk-haunch, with a 

 club seized at random ; and I have known another to be 

 killed with a switch, and yet another to be caught alive in 

 the hand. When game is killed they are the first birds to 

 come to the carcass. Following them come the big jays, 

 of a uniform dark-blue color, who bully them, and are bullied 

 in turn by the next arrivals, the magpies ; while when the 

 big ravens come, they keep all the others in the back- 

 ground, with the exception of an occasional wide-awake 

 magpie. 



For a steady diet no meat tastes better or is more 

 nourishing than elk venison ; moreover the different kinds 

 of grouse give variety to the fare, and delicious trout swarm 

 throughout the haunts of the elk in the Rockies. I have 

 never seen them more numerous than in the wonderful and 

 beautiful Yellowstone Canyon, a couple of miles below 

 where the river pitches over the Great Falls, in wind- 

 swayed cataracts of snowy foam. At this point it runs like 

 a mill-race, in its narrow winding bed, between immense 

 walls of queerly carved and colored rock which tower aloft 

 in almost perpendicular cliffs. Late one afternoon in the fall 



