XXIV 
THE WAPITI 
245 
some places there was not a sound tree, as every 
stem had been used from time to time as a rubbing- 
post, to clean the antlers. This would be a proof 
that the animals were collected in vast numbers 
towards the end of the period when the horns were 
hardening, and the velvet required rubbing. The 
horns are clean in the middle of August; the 
animals would be there about the middle of July in 
their greatest numbers, but at that time they would 
not be fit to shoot. 
The flies are insufferable until about 15 th 
August, therefore the actual shooting season in the 
Big Horn is limited from that date until 30th 
September. 
A man who never misses a day, but who is in 
the saddle from sunrise till sunset, will cover a large 
extent of country in a month, and there will be very 
little remaining after a shooting expedition of six 
weeks. 
When I was there, a party of skin-hunters had 
obtained a start of a few days, and I was obliged to 
change my course in order to avoid them, as they 
had already disturbed a portion of the ground. 
There was no attractive scenery throughout the 
Big Horn range; it was a great expanse of 
desolation. The finest spruce were not larger than 
those ordinarily seen in England ; the cotton-wood, 
which in the low country grows to the size of a 
black poplar (which it exactly resembles), is dwarfed 
by the rigour of the climate, and is not thicker, nor 
taller, than a hop-pole. This grows in dense patches 
