THE GUN AT HOME AND ABROAD 
where all conditions of life exist that would have been agreeable to them. 
On the northern coast of California wapiti were fairly abundant until 1880, 
amongst the great redwoods, but when the desire for “ heads ” and elk- 
teeth became pressing numbers of hunters entered this region and nearly 
exterminated them. A few exist to-day and are closely protected. 
The great density of the forests in Oregon, Washington and British 
Columbia has been the only safeguard of these fine animals in this part 
of the Pacific Slope, and to its deterrent influence alone do we owe a very 
fair stock of wapiti in these forests. Enormous numbers have been killed 
in the more open forests bordering the Olympics, but even to-day there 
are thousands of square miles where the foot of man hardly ever treads, 
and where hunting on horseback is impossible and heart-breaking on foot. 
I have met several men who have hunted in the Olympics and they have 
generally returned in a chastened frame of mind with a minus quantity 
of wapiti. The fallen trees are so numerous, and the difficulty of breaking 
a trail, to say nothing of the noise created in so doing, is so great that until 
these timber jungles fall before the woodman’s axe there will be little 
wapiti hunting. The States, too, of Washington and Oregon are careful 
to see that the travellers from distant lands do not get much opportunity 
for hunting, whilst a blind eye is turned on all infringements of the laws 
by citizens. 
Mr T. S. Van Dyke gives a vivid picture of the home of the elk in Oregon 
(“The Deer Family,” pp. 180-1). “Here you may find,” he says, “great 
hills standing almost on end, ridge joining ridge in endless chain, where 
you may descend a thousand feet from the top only to find it break off in a 
precipice of dozens or hundreds of feet into a canyon still farther below. 
Nowhere can you find a place where you can take a horse down, and if 
you find one where you can make a toboggan of your trousers, it is by no 
means certain that you can return. I was once on such a ridge for four 
days with a party of four and nine horses. It was but six miles long and not 
over two thousand feet above the gulches that yawned all around it into 
the different parts of the Cognille River in Oregon. Yet we had to spend all 
our time in trying to descend to the river. A big drove of elk were just 
ahead of us, their tracks were everywhere, and many more were on the 
same ground. Everything showed that we were in their chosen home. 
There was hardly a sapling of any size from which a long strip of bark 
had not been rubbed by the elk cleaning the velvet from their horns, either 
in that year or the one before. Horns in all stages of decay were around us, 
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