THE PRESENT CONDITION OF ASIATIC WAPITI 
they are dried and sent to China. An average head fetches from 100 to 
120 roubles (£10 to £12). In China the horns are crushed into powder and 
used as a medicine, often for women’s diseases. In a former chapter I 
have given some particulars of this deer-horn trade. 
Speaking of a spot which he visited called Sabie, in the basin of the Upper 
Yenisei, Mr J. H. Miller writes: 
“ Sabie is situated on the edge of a fine game country; in fact, 
wapiti come so close to the village that it is an easy and a profitable 
undertaking to capture the younger animals alive. These the colonists 
keep in enclosures (as is the custom in all localities along the Russo- 
Chinese frontier where wapiti exist), and take a yearly tribute from 
the stags in the shape of their soft horns when in velvet. The nearness 
of the Chinese markets, to which these horns find their way, as well 
as the existence of many wild wapiti, has caused Sabie to be a flourish- 
ing settlement. The inhabitants told us that during the winter they 
employed the Uriankhai, owing to their exceptional skill in forest lore, 
to catch the wapiti. The method they employed was to dig pitfalls and 
to attract the stags to the locality by distributing salt in the neighbour- 
hood; but the pitfalls they only found to be successful so long as the 
snow covered the ground. The mountains to the south and south-west 
were the best ground for wapiti, and we noticed their traces quite close 
to the village on the opposite banks of the Beikem. The horns, when 
sawn off, are boiled in weak tea as a preservative, and then sent to 
Chakul on the Ulukem, where they pass into the hands of Chinese 
merchants. The value of the soft antlers to the Chinese is well demon- 
strated by the price paid for them. At Chakul they were sold in bulk 
at the rate of ten shillings for a pound weight of horn, while at other 
places on the frontier we heard of hunters who got twenty or twenty - 
five pounds for a heavy pair of horns.” 
Wapiti in Asia are almost invariably hunted by Europeans during the 
rutting season, when their long-drawn bugling roars denote the position 
of the best stags. The roar itself varies. Mr Church describes the call of 
the Tian Shan wapiti as a scream. According to the musical notation 
of the rutting call of a stag copied by Mr H. J. Elwes from Radde’s “ Reisen 
im Suden von ost Sibirien,” the call of the Altai wapiti is more of a “bugle,” 
like that of the American wapiti, than a “roar ” like that of a European 
stag. The two sounds are quite distinct; the former I have attempted to 
describe elsewhere as “ a kind of loud whistling through a coach horn.” 
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