136 AN AMERICAN HUNTER 



to be found; I shot one and saw others in 1893, at which 

 time I had not authentic information of a single wapiti 

 remaining anywhere on the river in my neighborhood, 

 although it is possible that one or two still lurked in some 

 out-of-the-way recess. In Colorado at one time the big- 

 horn was nearly exterminated, while the wapiti still 

 withstood the havoc made among its huge herds ; then fol- 

 lowed a period in which the rapidity of destruction of 

 the wapiti increased far beyond that of the bighorn. 



I mention these facts partly because they are of inter- 

 est in themselves, but chiefly because they tend to explain 

 the widely different opinions expressed by competent ob- 

 servers about what superficially seem to be similar facts. 

 It cannot be too often repeated that allowance must be 

 made for the individual variability in the traits and char- 

 acters of animals of the same species, and especially of 

 the same species under different circumstances and in dif- 

 ferent localities; and allowance must also be made for 

 the variability of the individual factor in the observers 

 themselves. Many seemingly contradictory observations 

 of the habits of deer, wapiti, and prongbuck will be 

 found in books by the best hunters. Take such questions 

 as the keenness of sight of the deer as compared with the 

 prongbuck, and of the pugnacity of the wapiti, both act- 

 ual and relative, and a wide difference of opinion will be 

 found in three such standard works as Dodge's " The 

 Hunting-grounds of the Great West," Caton's " Deer and 

 Antelope of America," and the contributions of Mr. 

 Grinnell to the " Century Book of Sports." Sometimes 

 the difference will be in mere matters of opinion, as, for 



