254 
WILD NORWAY. 
handsome face expanded into a smile that reached from 
ear to ear, as we breasted a steep rise. Straight before 
ns began a long hog-backed ridge, narrow and birch- 
clad, and dropping precipitously on either side to darkly 
tarns. A covey of grouse came swinging round the 
shoulder in front, and “becc-ed down” right on our 
course. We lay flat till the last had run out of sight; 
but we felt that that ill-timed flight boded nothing but 
mischief for us. 
On reaching the main ridge and looking along it, 
I at once saw the cow-elk, lying, all alert and in the 
open, some fifty yards away. She and her calf dis¬ 
appeared in three strides to the right. To her I paid 
no attention, and in a moment my eye caught the 
coronet of the bull, gleaming in the sunlight over some 
low bushes about eighty yards distant. He, too, was on 
his legs with marvellous rapidity—(no doubt the grouse 
had put all three on the watch)—and slowly moved 
off, directly from us. I had not before seen a big bull- 
elk fully outlined in the open, and admit I was amazed 
by his proportions—indeed the impression conveyed 
was far more that of one of the great pachyderms than 
of an animal of the deer-tribe. (See plate opposite.) 
It was a straight-away stern shot—always awkward. 
Luckily a slight hummock lay beyond, and as the elk 
rose this, exposing for two strides an acre or so of dark- 
grey back, a Paradox bullet, well placed under the last 
rib, traversed his vitals. The second I heard “ whank” 
on his stern (hard by the hench-bone) as he floundered 
forward over the ridge and disappeared. No elk lay 
dead on the spot: but, two hundred yards beyond, I saw 
the beast prostrate. He tried to rise, but his quarters 
