BIG GAME OF NORTH AMERICA 411 



another without staying to look for trails and easy places. 

 From camp the belt of timber looks as if it lay upon a smooth, 

 gently rising hill-side. Once within it, you learn that the belt 

 is composed of densely timbered ridges rising one behind 

 another like waves in a choppy sea, and as you toil through 

 and over these ridges, you wish, if you are an ordinary man, 

 that you had never heard of elk. 



Everywhere the trees crowd one another for light and 

 breathing room, but so long as they are standing (unless they 

 are young green pines) a man may walk at ease among them. 

 It is when fire and wind have swept through them and left 

 them in chaotic tangles upon the ground that the trouble 

 begins. Then it is that the elk hunter has to rival the squirrel 

 or Blondin, tacking from point to point along the pine logs, 

 now straining every muscle to get a grip on the slippery trunk 

 of a pine which offers a bridge uphill across the prone carcases 

 of its fellows, now manfully suppressing an oath as his feet slip 

 and he sits down inadvertently upon the ' business end ' of a 

 rampike. 



For an hour, perhaps, or two, there is little or no change in 

 your work. Your road may lie through dense green timber 

 at one moment, through half-lit mossy glades at another, and 

 the next through hollows full of burnt timber, amongst which 

 the elk tracks are thick, and the pink fire-flower blooms ; but it 

 is always uphill work, and almost always in places where still 

 hunting is impossible. Now and again there is something to 

 cheer you up and encourage you to make fresh exertions. 

 Now it is a great track like a deer's, but larger and blunter ; 

 now it is the stem of a young quaking asp with its bark hanging 

 in ribbons, which makes your heart beat quicker ; or perhaps 

 it is only the freshly nibbled buds of a young elder bush. 

 There is no doubt that there are elk about, and a good 

 many of them, and as you stretch in vain to reach the scars 

 upon the quaking asp, you realise that there are big bulls 

 among them ; but what is the use of the biggest bull if you 

 are never to see him within two hundred yards ? Once to-day 



