BIG GAME OF NORTH AMERICA 403 



and yet, if this head were inverted, no four-foot man could walk 

 without stooping under the arch so made. During several years 

 spent in wandering about Canada and the States, I have heard 

 again and again of gigantic wapiti heads ; I have even met men 

 who own such trophies, and have actually bought them for 

 $500, the money to be paid when the ' head ' was delivered. 

 Unfortunately, my cash was never claimed, and I confess that 

 I never expected that it would be, yet some of the trophy- 

 owners wanted money ' in the worst way.' 



But though the ' bull elk ' of to-day is neither as large as 

 the Irish elk nor as the ' elk ' of pioneer legends, he is still a 

 magnificent beast, not quite as big as the moose and not 

 carrying a very much larger head on the average than the 

 Caucasian stag ; but still, take him all in all, he is the grandest 

 stag left on earth. To an unscientific eye, the wapiti differs 

 from the Scotch red deer in three points only : he is larger 

 of course, his antlers as a rule lack the cup peculiar to the Scotch 

 royal, and his call in the rutting season is a whistle, whilst the 

 red deer's is a roar. His range in America is still a wide one, 

 although the encroachments of civilization are driving him 

 ever further and further back into that dense timber of which 

 he is always too fond. It is this love of the timber which 

 has enabled the wapiti to outlive his old comrade the bison, 

 and will probably enable him to survive the antelope, which 

 seems likely to be one of the next animals wiped off the face 

 of the great American continent. In the mountain forests of 

 Wyoming and Montana, of Idaho and Colorado, wapiti are 

 still fairly plentiful ; in California, I have heard that there are 

 a good many in the red-wood districts, though of this I have 

 no certain knowledge ; but there is no doubt that the home, 

 par excellence, of the wapiti to-day is in the dense timber of 

 the Olympian range, in Washington Territory, in Oregon, and 

 to a certain extent in Vancouver Island, British Columbia. 

 In the early part of this century there were wapiti on the main 

 and of British Columbia, and their bones may still be found 

 pretty frequently in the Chilcotin country ; but the animals 



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