230 THE PRESENT AND FUTURE 



the largest and best breeding bulls of the Mirimachi country, 

 lest it finally reduce the size and antlers of the moose of that 

 region; but only the future can tell us just what the result 

 of this practice will be. 



The Biological Survey of the Department of Agriculture 

 has by legal proclamation converted the whole of the Kenai 

 Peninsula, in Alaska, into a moose preserve. This will save 

 Alces gigas, the giant moose of Alaska, from extermination; 

 and New Brunswick and the Minnesota preserve will save 

 Alces americanus. But in the northwest we can positively 

 depend upon it that eventually, wherever the moose may 

 legally be hunted and killed by any Tom, Dick or Harry 

 who can afford a twenty-dollar rifle and a license, the moose 

 will surely disappear. 



The moose laws of Alaska are strict — toward sportsmen, 

 only! The miners, "prospectors" and Indians may kill as 

 many as they please, "for food purposes." This opens the 

 door to a great amount of unfair slaughter. Any coffee- 

 cooler can put a pan and pick into his hunting-outfit, go out 

 after moose, and call himself a "prospector." 



I grant that the real prospector, who is looking for ores 

 and minerals with an intelligent eye, and knows what he is 

 doing, should have special privileges on game to keep him 

 from starving. The settled miner, however, is in a different 

 class. No miner should ask the privilege of living on wild 

 game, any more than should the farmer, the steamboat man, 

 the railway laborer or the soldier in an army post. The 

 Indian should have no game advantages whatever over a 

 white man. He does not own the game of a region any more 



