284 HANDBOOK OF NATURE STUDY 



New York. Read the articles on the Yellowstone Park in Forest and 

 Stream, 1894. 



The object of this chapter on " Big Game " is to interest the 

 pupils in the grand and beautiful, as expressed in our large, 

 wild mammals, and to cause them to take an active interest in 

 their intelligent preservation, wherever conditions permit it. 

 Compare the chapter on "Domesticated Animals." 



Both the wapiti and the moose are deer. The wapiti, 

 often called elk, stands about as high as a horse. The 

 head of the male, called the bull by hunters, is adorned with 

 a pair of formidable antlers, each generally having six 

 prongs. The prongs that diverge most have points about 

 three and one-half feet apart, and a pair of the horns weigh 

 from thirty to forty pounds. The color of this grand and 

 beautiful deer is a chestnut-red in summer and grayish in 

 winter. Formerly the wapiti was found from Virginia to 

 the Rockies, but it is now very rare on this side of the 

 B-ocky Mountains. It is estimated that about thirty thou- 

 sand of these noble beasts roam in the Yellowstone Park, 

 where no rifleman may molest them, but where a lover of 

 nature may hunt them with a kodak. 



The moose, which is the largest of all our deer, fully 

 reaches the height of a horse, but the maximum weight of a 

 very large bull is not more than fifteen hundred pounds. 

 The bull carries a pair of flattened antlers of enormous size, 

 weighing from fifty to seventy pounds. The head of the 

 moose resembles that of a horse, but the upper lip is con- 

 siderably longer than the lower and enables the moose to 

 browse on twigs and peel off the bark of trees. Its ears are 

 about as large as those of a domestic cow or mule. More 

 than one inexperienced hunter has not fired at a moose cow, 

 because he was under the impression that some farmer's 

 mule had strayed rather far into the woods, and later the 

 same inexperienced hunter has killed the first mule he came 



