TRAITS AND HABITS OF THE MOOSE 65 



his depth of body was sixty inches. And if his 

 legs were as long in proportion as those of the 

 moose on the Kenai Peninsula, his height at the 

 shoulders was 11 feet and 8 inches. It is not 

 worth while to dispute these dimensions. It 

 would not be worth while, in fact, to mention 

 this Rocky Mountain bull at all, save that foreign 

 writers have quoted the description of the monster, 

 without questioning the correctness of the dimen- 

 sions given. The moose is a large animal — 

 the largest of the deer family that ever lived— and 

 it is quite unnecessary to exaggerate his stature. 



A full-grown bull moose is six feet or more in 

 height at the withers. Most measurements have 

 been made, however, when the animal was lying 

 on the ground. The position of the bones at the 

 shoulder joint are not the same in death as in life — 

 in the prone and the standing animal. The hoof 

 of the prone moose is usually straightened out in a 

 way which adds to the seeming stature; and many 

 persons in measuring have included the long hair 

 of the mane, giving the animal an altogether 

 fictitious height.^ 



4 See Big Game Shooting, by CHve Phillipps-Wolley (London, 1894), 

 vol. i., p. 397. 



s Frederick C. Selous, a prolific writer on African hunting, in his 

 Recent Hunting Trips in British North America, writing of a moose 

 killed in the Yukon mountains in 1904, says, at page 184, "I measured 

 it carefully with a steel tape, and made its standing height at the withers 

 5 



