46 MR. PALLISER'S STORY. 



and beautiful feeding-grass for deer and elk. We con- 

 tinued riding alternately through these and thick willows 

 till, on emerging from a copse of the latter, we came in 

 Bight of a band of some fifteen or twenty wapiti, feeding 

 in a large glade. We immediately fastened up the horses, 

 and crept noiselessly on foot under cover of the brush- 

 wood towards the spot. Arrived at the utmost verge of 

 our friendly shelter, we had the mortification to find that 

 we were too far to -risk a shot, there being fully two hun- 

 dred and thirty yards between us and them. We held a 

 council of war, and after some hesitation, determined to 

 steal back to the horses, ride some way round, and came 

 upon them from a direction at right angles to the one we 

 had just tried, where we could see a clump of rose-bushes, 

 which we fancied considerably nearer to the elk, and which 

 we intended to try and reach by approaching from an 

 easterly instead of a northerly direction, we being then be- 

 tween them and a river. Accordingly we crept back on 

 our hands and knees ; nor did we get up and run towards 

 the horses until we were well out of sight of the wapiti. 

 We then mounted and rode half a mile or so round to the 

 east, when having again tied up the horses, we crawled 

 as before upon our hands and knees, and reached the ex- 

 tremity of the rose-bushes unperceived. Here there was 

 a large tree, behind which I could stand up quite screened 

 from view of the elk, while Boucharville knelt on one 



