THE WAPITI 
with elk trails innumerable. But there was no trail of man to tell us where 
we could go, no feed but wild peas and a few small patches of grass that 
the horses could eat up over night, so that we should have to move on in the 
morning. Shade almost solid ruled over all. The Douglas fir towered one 
hundred and fifty feet on the hills, with trunks like ship masts mingling 
their feathery tops so as to shut out the sun, while down in the gulches 
the great Port Orford cedar deluged the depths with heavier gloom. 
Through the few openings from which we could look out upon the world 
there was nothing in sight but ridge after ridge, cutting the skyline 
with serried ranks of pine, and great gulches between, hazily blue with 
solid timber. The whole was interlaced with such a tangle of fallen trees 
that one would suppose an elk safe anywhere.” 
Such then is the forest home of the wapiti in Oregon and in a like degree 
in Vancouver Island, where the Douglas firs and cedars are even more 
colossal in size. Up the Campbell River, where a few of these deer are 
found, I attempted an experimental march, and after several hours of 
exhausting climbing over fallen Douglas higher than my head, as they lay 
on the ground amid dense thickets of ferns, six to eight feet high, had 
to admit myself defeated. Until the bracken is down it is not possible to 
hunt wapiti in this district, and even then the everlasting climbing over 
fallen logs or branches is more than severe labour. The few wapiti that are 
killed in Vancouver Island are usually shot by waiting at openings on lake 
or river beds as they come to drink at eve. If the hunter is so vigorous 
that he can surmount the various obstacles in this giant forest he may 
come upon the deer, which are often so tame owing to the security of their 
retreat that they do not always attempt to run away. 
In East Kootenay the ground is more open and numerous small parks 
intersect the hillsides on the edges of the denser forests, and to these 
the deer come both to feed and to fight in the rutting season, so that there 
is a good chance of finding one in the open. One bull is now allowed to 
be shot, but the heads such as I have seen are very poor. 
A few wapiti still linger in the Cascades and here there is a better chance 
for the hunter, as a wagon can be taken and most of the mountains are 
possible to penetrate even on horseback. Mule deer are very plentiful 
there, but the wapiti must be sought for about the headwaters of the streams 
that drain the gorges of the eastern slopes. This forest region is, like the 
Olympics, still very dense and wrapt in shade owing to the heavy timber 
growth ; but to a man who loves Nature and does not mind scrambling over 
297 
QQ 
