284 
ZOOLOGY. 
nutritious. The food of the elk varies greatly: it eats 
grass and herbage as well as leaves and twigs of hard-wood 
trees. 
The reindeer, or woodland caribou, inhabits the north- 
ern regions of America, Europe, and Asia. In the United 
States it still occurs in northern Maine, and is not uncom- 
mon in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, abounding in 
Newfoundland and Labrador. The female reindeer has 
antlers as well as the male. The old males shed their 
horns usually before Christmas, but the young males carry 
them later, the yearlings till spring, and the females later 
still, until their young are born. The reindeer's foot is 
very broad and thin, and the accessory or hinder hoofs are 
of more use in supporting the body in deep snows or in 
marshy places than the dew-claws of any other deer. The 
hair is unusually long and crinkled, and underlaid by a 
dense coat of fur. The skin is used by the inhabitants of 
Labrador as well as the Esquimaux for making water-tight 
boots. The principal food of the reindeer is lichens, par- 
ticularly the '^reindeer moss." 
The barren ground caribou is much smaller than the 
other sj)ecies; it inhabits the treeless arctic border of the 
continent, and its habits are more arctic than any other 
ruminant of this continent except the musk-ox. It is 
more migratory than the woodland caribou, traversing in 
its migrations some ten degrees of latitude southward from 
the Arctic Ocean. 
The moose (Fig. 315) is an awkward, ungainly crea- 
ture, and is the largest of the family, its weight being from 
700 to 1400 pounds. The antlers are large and spreading, 
broadly palmatcd, and wanting in the female, while the 
nose is long and flexible, and the ears enormous. It for- 
merly ranged from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast north 
of latitude 43° to latitude 70°, but now it is confined to 
northern Maine, to Montana and Alaska, as well as to the 
forests of portions of British America. In summer the 
moose eats grass and moss, in the winter it browses on the 
