264 AN AMERICAN HUNTER 



contain thousands of animals. In the old days such huge 

 herds were far from uncommon, especially during the 

 migrations; but nowadays there only remain one or two 

 localities in which wapiti are sufficiently plentiful ever 

 to come together in bands of any size. The bulls are 

 incessantly challenging and fighting one another, and 

 driving around the cows and calves. Each keeps the 

 most jealous watch over his own harem, treating its mem- 

 bers with great brutality, and is selfishly indifferent to 

 their fate the instant he thinks his own life in jeopardy. 

 During the rut the erotic manifestations of the bull are 

 extraordinary. 



One or two fawns are born about May. In the moun- 

 tains the cow usually goes high up to bring forth her 

 fawn. Personally I have only had a chance to observe 

 the wapiti in spring in the neighborhood of my ranch 

 in the Bad Lands of the Little Missouri. Here the cow 

 invariably selected some wild, lonely bit of very broken 

 country in which there were dense thickets and some wa- 

 ter. There was one such patch some fifteen miles from 

 my ranch, in which for many years wapiti regularly bred. 

 The breeding cow lay by herself, although sometimes the 

 young of the preceding year would lurk in the neigh- 

 borhood. For the first few days the calf hardly left the 

 bed, and would not move even when handled. Then it 

 began to follow the mother. In this particular region 

 the grass was coarse and rank, save for a few patches in 

 the immediate neighborhood of little alkali springs. Ac- 

 cordingly, it was not much visited by the cattle or by the 

 cowboys. Doubtless in the happier days of the past, 



