278 SPORT AND TRAVEL 



to climb straight up the mountain-side above him, 

 and Graham said that he was going to lie down ; and, 

 sure enough, after climbing very slowly and carefully 

 on his tracks for four hundred or five hundred feet, 

 we came to his first bed. As the forest was here so 

 thick that any animal would have been invisible at a 

 distance of fifty yards; and as moreover it was im- 

 possible to move noiselessly over the snow-covered 

 ground, I don't think that anyone could have tracked 

 up this wapiti and got within shot of him unseen 

 or unheard even if he had remained lying on the 

 resting-place he had first chosen. But this did not 

 satisfy him, for he had only remained there a short 

 time, and then after threading his way through the 

 trees, back along the slope of the hill for about fifty 

 yards parallel with the course he had followed lower 

 down before he had commenced to climb, had made a 

 second bed in the snow. With this position, too, he 

 had become dissatisfied, for he had again got up and 

 ascended one hundred feet or so higher up the moun- 

 tain-side, before finally settling down for the day. 

 Here we disturbed him, for though we neither saw 

 him nor heard him, his tracks in the snow showed 

 us how he had first gone off at a trot on becoming 

 aware of our neighbourhood, and then galloped ob- 

 liquely down the mountain-side. Had we been very 

 close behind this wapiti, and had he been travelling 

 slowly and feeding, we might have overtaken him 

 whilst he was still on the move, and perhaps got a 



