278 AN AMERICAN HUNTER 



ing through likely localities, going up or across wind, 

 keeping the sharpest lookout, and moving with great care 

 and caution, until I happened to strike the animals I 

 was after. More than once I took the trail of a band, 

 when out with some first-class woodsman, and after much 

 running, dodging, and slipping through the timber, over- 

 took the animals though usually when thus merely fol- 

 lowing the trail I failed to come up with them. On two 

 different occasions I followed and came up to bands, 

 attracted by their scent. Wapiti have a strong, and, on 

 the whole, pleasing scent, like that of Alderney cattle, 

 although in old bulls it becomes offensively strong. This 

 scent is very penetrating. I once smelt a herd which was 

 lying quite still taking its noonday siesta, certainly half 

 a mile to the windward of me; and creeping up I shot 

 a good bull as he lay. On another occasion, while work- 

 ing through the tangled trees and underbrush at the bot- 

 tom of a little winding valley, I suddenly smelt wapiti 

 ahead, and without paying any further attention to the 

 search for tracks, I hunted cautiously up the valley, and 

 when it forked was able to decide by the smell alone 

 which way the wapiti had gone. He was going up 

 wind ahead of me, and his ground-covering walk kept 

 me at a trot in order to overtake him. Finally I saw 

 him, before he saw me, and then, by making a run to 

 one side, got a shot at him when he broke cover, and 

 dropped him. 



It is exciting to creep up to a calling wapiti. If it 

 is a solitary bull, he is apt to be travelling, seeking the 

 cows, or on the lookout for some rival of weaker thews. 



