THE WAPITI 
Dr Hornaday gives the measurements of an eight year old bull as follows : 
Length 86f inches: height at shoulders 56f inches; circumference of chest 
78 inches. Andrew Williamson in his book gives the height of a very large 
bull as seventeen hands, or 5 feet 8 inches at the shoulder (this, I think, is 
excessive); 9 feet long, and 6 feet 8 inches around the chest. The bull 
measured by Dr Hornaday weighed 706 lb. live weight. Mr P. Dunham 
(“Recreation Magazine,” April, 1896) weighed a bull whose entrails had 
been removed, which gave 800 lb. This would give a live weight of about 
1,000 lb. 
The colour of the upper parts of the body is brownish or yellowish grey; 
reddish-brown on the chest and belly, turning black on the latter later 
in the season; dark brown on the head, neck and legs; inside the ears, 
round the eyes, each side of the lips and on the chin, pale buff; bordering 
the whitish anal disc is a brown-black stripe. Late in the winter and in 
early spring the upper part of the pelage fades until males look, at a distance, 
almost white. The summer coat is a little darker than the winter one. 
Females are somewhat darker than the males at all seasons. The crown- 
ing glory of the male wapiti is its horns which, in former days, were of great 
size and beauty. Even so late as 1886 heads that were over 54 inches were 
not common. One day in this year, ascending the Big Horn Mountains, 
my brother Geoffrey, who for ten years was a rancher there, took me to 
see the great shedding ground of these animals as they left the foothills 
and Bad-lands in their annual spring trek to the higher mountains. For 
centuries this range of hills, situated about fifty miles north-west of the 
Powder River, had been the resting place for a few days of these animals, 
and here they had stayed on the southern slopes shedding their great 
antlers. It was a marvellous sight, and one that will never be witnessed 
by man again. As we approached the place it looked as if some forester of 
the past had been felling trees and had left all the shaggy branches to rot 
on the ground, but there was no timber there, only a vast collection of fallen 
antlers in every shade of decay, from white, bleached, and broken stumps 
that fell to pieces at the touch to recently shed horns that were still brown 
and hard. 
We wandered amongst this vast collection, numbering, I should say, 
three to four thousand pairs, for most of them had been shed close together, 
and picked up and admired the best. The best I found was 60 inches in 
length, massive, but old and nibbled by chipmunks. One noble head 
with the skull attached carried twenty -one points and presented the rare 
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