36 MAMMALS OF PENNSYLVANIA AND NEW JERSEY. 



season did not wait for any overt act on the part of an enemy, but was 

 instantly aggressive. One blow from an elk's foot would kill a wolf or a dog, 

 and I have more than once been forced to elude an elk by running around 

 trees, jumping from one to another before the bulky beast, unable to make 

 the turns quick enough, could recover himself and follow me too closely to 

 prevent it, thus making my way by degrees to a safe refuge. I was once 

 treed by a bull elk not half a mile from home and kept there from noon until 

 night began to fall. I haven't the least doubt but he would have kept me 

 there all night if another bull hadn't bugled a challenge from a neighboring 

 hill and my bull hurried away in answer to it. 



" The whistle of the bull elk, as the hunters call it, wasn't a whistle, although 

 there were changes in it that gave it something of a flute-like sound. The 

 sound was more like the notes of a bugle. In making it the bull threw back 

 his head, swelled his throat and neck to enormous size, and with that as a 

 bellows he blew from his open mouth the sound that made at once his chal- 

 lenge or call for a mate. The sound was far-reaching, and heard at a dis- 

 tance was weird and uncanny, yet not unmusical. Near-by, it was rasping and 

 harsh, with the whistling notes prominent. 



"The Pennsylvania elk was never much scattered. When I first came to 

 the Sinnemahoning country, nearly seventy years ago, the salt marsh that lay 

 in the wilderness where my residence now is [Gardeau, in the extreme S. E. 

 corner of McKean Co., almost on Potter Co. line], was trampled over by 

 herds of elk and deer that came there to lick the salt from the ground as if a 

 drove of cattle had been there. I have seen seventy-five elk huddled at that 

 marsh. That was the ' Big Elk Lick ' of legend which the reservation [Corn- 

 planter] Indians had often talked to me about when I lived in Allegheny 

 county, New York, as a boy, and it was to find that lick that my father and I, 

 following the rather indefinite directions of one Johnnyhocks, an old Shongo 

 Indian, entered the Pennsylvania wilderness in 1826. The marsh is now the 

 site of a big hotel, it having been found that the depth of the swamp con- 

 cealed waters [Parker's Springs] of rare medical value. 



"To follow an elk forty miles before running it down was considered 

 nothing remarkable. I have done it many a time. Leroy Lyman, Jack 

 Lyman and A. H. Goodsell once started on an elk hunt from Roulette, Potter 

 county, struck the trail at the head of West creek in McKean county, thirty 

 miles from Roulette, followed it through Elk, Clarion and Clearfield counties^ 

 and finally drove it to its rock eighty or ninety miles from where the trail was 

 first struck. They had followed the elk many days, and finally the quarry 

 was found, an enormous bull with a spread of horns like a young maple tree. 

 The horns were the only trophy that the hunters got from the long and tedious 

 chase [meat being unfit to eat], and that trophy was well worth it. It was 

 the largest and next to the finest pair of antlers ever carried by an elk in the 

 Pennsylvania forests, so far as there is any record. 



