I 



ELK* AND ANTELOPE HUNTING IN WYOMING 



jTXAWN, with its accompaniment of camp-fire smoice, rat- 

 JL_y tling of pans and pots, and odor of frying bacon, brought 

 a sound sleeper reluctantly from warm blankets to gaze upon 

 a frosty Rocky Mountain landscape. Having left behind the 

 small Mormon settlement of Wilson, in Jackson's Hole, three 

 days before, Charlie Wilson and I had ridden to the western 

 slope of the Gros Ventre Mountains, taking three heavily laden 

 pack-horses, and had camped the evening before on picturesque 

 Granite Creek. 



About three-quarters of a mile above us the waters of the creek 

 gushed out of a granite canon in a beautiful water-fall, swept 

 by our camp, and were lost to view in the sage-flats below, 

 eventually to join the south fork of the Snake via Hoback's 

 River. On either side of the stream the wide sage-brush fiats 

 terminated in rolling mountains covered with a growth of 

 high weeds, bunch-grass, and timber. Farther up the caflon 



^ The Indian name, "wapiti," is more accurate than the word " elk," which is 

 the term applied to the animal in Northern Europe corresponding to the North 

 American moose, which derives its name from an Algonquin word meaning 

 "wood-eater." The prong-buck, sometimes called "prong-horned antelope," is 

 not a true antelope, but is the only member of a family known as the Antilo- 

 capridcB. The prong-buck sheds its horns, while all the true antelopes be- 

 long to the family Bovidce, in which the horns, when present, are non-decidu- 

 ous. The two terms, "elk" and "antelope," are so commonly used in America 

 to describe both these animals that I have made use of them in this article in- 

 stead of the proper nomenclature. 



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