THE ELK 
T HE elk is one of the oldest inhabitants of Europe which sur- 
vives to-day, and in appearance it has a distinctly prehistoric 
look. As an old bull stands for a moment gazing at the hunter 
amidst the gloomy pines of the Scandinavian forest he looks 
like some survival of bygone days, a sort of mammalian 
anachronism. And yet no European beast is more full of mystery 
or interest to those who would study its habits in its native home. 
In the Pleistocene age the elk was common throughout the whole of 
the fir-tree area south of Finmark, east to the Urals and south to Ger- 
many. It seems to have been common in England in the early part of the 
warm snap between the two glacial epochs, but retreated northwards and 
must have been scarce about the beginning of the historic period. In the 
bronze age and contemporary with the Roman occupation of Britain 
it was fairly numerous in the South East of Scotland, and some heads 
in a good state of preservation have been found in Peebles and Roxburgh. 
At this time it was abundant in Denmark, Germany, Poland, Scandinavia 
and Russia, and held its own through the following centuries, except in 
Central Germany and Denmark, where the increasing population ac- 
counted for deforestation and the destruction of its habitat. 
Strange and fabulous tales of this beast are told in the pages of Pliny, 
Caesar, and Bishop Pontoppidon, who believed that the only way to kill it 
was to half saw through a tree on which the animal leaned when the fall 
would encompass its destruction. At the present day the elk is found in 
the marshy and forest regions of Sweden and Norway as far north as 
Finmark, through northern Russia, Livonia, Poland and East Prussia. 
In all these areas it is now holding its own, whilst in the more strictly 
preserved districts of North Central Norway it is rapidly increasing. 
Lloyd, in his “ Scandinavian Adventures,” gives very interesting ac- 
counts of the enormous “ skalls ” or “ surrounds ” in which vast districts 
were “ driven ” into central points by hundreds of peasants for the enter- 
tainment of the Swedish Kings and nobles, when great numbers of elk, 
bear, lynxes and wolves were killed. Even to-day this mode of killing 
elk is practised on a small scale in North-East Russia. In Saxony the last 
specimen of the elk was killed in 1746 and in Silesia in 1776, but there 
are still a few in the forests of East Prussia and the marshes of Pinsk, in 
Poland, where they are strictly preserved. 
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