10 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[July i, 1911. 
feet of a reindeer. The skin of this figure is 
covered by fine lines which seem to represent a 
covering of hair. Another female figure is a 
bust carved from the tooth of a horse. 
In the caverns and rock shelters once occu¬ 
pied by palteolithic man, great numbers of human 
relics are found, and a study of the floors of 
these caverns reveals a succession of beds con¬ 
taining human implements, representing different 
stages of advancement. Among these are cut¬ 
ting implements formed of flint flakes with one 
end chipped obliquely, bone scrapers and bone 
points with cleft bases, some of which might 
well have been used as awls employed in sew¬ 
ing. In these caves, too, are found the begin¬ 
nings of sculpture, engraving and painting, and 
possibly also the beginnings of the making of 
pottery. At this time the cave bear, the horse, 
the mammoth and the hyena were important 
animals of Europe. 
Here in a vast country, forest-clad and abound¬ 
ing in wild animals, lived the primitive man who 
had his home in these caverns and rock shelters. 
With his rude, but effective stone weapons, he 
overcame and slew great beasts like the bison, 
the horse, the cave bear, perhaps even the mam¬ 
moth. For we must remember that feeble and 
ill-armed as is man, he has yet the wit to devise 
methods for overcoming the brutes that are far 
stronger, far better protected and far better 
F OR six days we had been trailing over the 
roughest kind of country that had tried 
both men and horses severely, so it was 
with a sense of great physical relief that on the 
afternoon of the sixth day we made permanent 
camp in a valley between high mountains where 
there was abundant grass for our animals and 
a promise of game for ourselves—two very im¬ 
portant considerations where twenty-five horses 
would have to be fed every day for a month and 
two hunters provided with live things to shoot 
at. A more isolated spot could not be found 
in the Rockies, and only the most imaginative 
sportsman could conceive of a more ideal hunt¬ 
ing locality. There was but one trail leading 
into the valley, and that a hard one, and steep. 
No white man had visited the valley for a dozen 
years, and in consequence bird and beast had 
been able to follow the Biblical injunction to be 
fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth. 
We feasted that evening on mountain sheep, 
killed while we were packing over the divide, 
and on mountain trout fried in elk tallow. Hun¬ 
gry men may have eaten better viands, but they 
have never given the world the recipe. Later we 
added elk and deer and bear meat to our larder, 
and our cook, an old-time round-up caterer, must 
have lain awake at night thinking up new and 
sometimes novel dishes, even as on one or two 
occasions we lay awake in consequence of them. 
It seems almost an insiduous affront to nature 
to suggest that indigestion could ever find its 
way to such a remote locality, but men will some¬ 
times over-eat of rich meat dishes before going 
to bed. 
armed than he. Of course, man used his bow 
and arrows, and drawn on the cave walls are 
figures of buffalo which show arrows sticking 
in them and blood trickling from their wounds. 
It is not to be doubted that this primitive man, 
of whom we know so little, had also invented 
traps by which wild animals might be taken 
effectively. Perhaps he dug pitfalls for the 
mighty mammoth, and snared the horse, the stag 
or even the reindeer. 
A suggestion of possible methods, though 
based on error, is given by Tacitus, who related 
the story that the Germans killed the elk, the 
equivalent of our moose, in the following way: 
The elk has no joints in its legs and therefore 
cannot lie down, but sleeps standing up, leaning 
against a tree. The primitive Germans, when 
they found a tree that showed it was commonly 
used for this purpose, chopped it a'most through 
on the side opposite the one against which the 
eik leaned, and when the animal next came there 
and leaned against the tree to sleep, his weight 
caused the tree to fall, he lost his balance and 
fell over, and being unable to rise to his feet, 
was killed by the people who lay in wait for 
him ! 
Considering the enormous numbers of wild 
animals that inhabited these primitive forests, 
man probably had little difficulty in supplying 
himself with food. 
While trailing in from the railway we had 
hunted a little, mostly in the late afternoons 
after making camp, but on the morning follow¬ 
ing our arrival in the valley we began hunting 
in earnest. Leaving camp at daybreak we 
climbed the mountain. At first in the thick tim¬ 
ber the ascent was easy, but as the growth began 
to thin out, the climbing became wearisome. We 
were glad, therefore, after three hours’ rough 
work to throw ourselves down on a ledge to 
rest. Lying there in the warm sunshine we 
could look straight down the canon into the 
valley where our tent gleamed white, and a few 
glistening patches showed where the river broke 
through the green of the timber. Lip the canon 
the view was cut off by a sharp bend and an 
overhanging promontory of rock. 
As we lay resting, the sound of a falling stone 
attracted our attention. In a country large’y 
made of precipitous slopes and ledges, weather¬ 
beaten by the sun and frost of countless ages, 
a falling stone is a common enough occurrence, 
but the wise hunter never lets a sound pass his 
notice, and we looked around to see if perchance 
an animal had loosened the pebble. As we did 
so another falling stone guided our eyes to the 
promontory, and we saw, outlined against the 
sky, a ram that at that distance seemed to be the 
record for size of all the sheep family. He had 
not seen or winded us, but was standing in a 
belligerent attitude, gazing intently across the 
canon. Unconsciously we followed the direction 
of his gaze, and there on the opposite side of 
the canon stood an old she bear, scraggy and 
hungry looking, evidently the grandmother of 
all the bears in the country. So weak she 
seemed either from age or starvation that I 
doubt if she couid have killed the sheep, even 
if she cou.d have got at him, a fact which he 
seemed, to understand, for he had an air of 
saying: “Well, old bones, if you'll come over 
here I'll butt you into the canon.” 
“One, two, three—fire!” was to be the signal, 
and I had got as far as “two” when beside the 
first sheep stepped another ram, slightly smaller, 
but with an even better head. It was the work 
of an instant to pick our animals, and at the 
word “fire” two shots rang out as one, and both 
sheep bounded upward and forward, falling over 
the cliff into the canon where we could see them 
lying on a shelving bank of shingle. 
Where the bear went, we did not try to dis¬ 
cover. It took us all the rest of the day to pack 
the carcasses out of the canon and down to 
where we could get horses to them, and we 
reached camp by moonlight. The timber was 
heavy, the walking desperately tiresome, and 
though the sheep heads were unusually fine, we 
felt when we crawled into our blankets that they 
had been well earned. 
The next three or four days we drew blank, 
as one frequently does even in the very best 
game country. The tyro, of course, expects to 
be besieged in his camp every day by legions of 
bear, elk and every other known kind of animal, 
but I have hunted for ten days on end without 
seeing anything worth shooting, and that, too, 
in regions where game was abundant. 
On the fifth morning, while still-hunting e k 
in heavy timber, I came unexpectedly on a very 
large brown bear that was industriously tearing 
up brush and rotten logs in search of pinon 
nuts. I was going slowly and carefully up wind, 
so he neither saw nor scented me, and I man¬ 
aged to get in a shot at short range that put 
him down and out without his knowing what 
had struck him. Only once before had I walked 
on to a bear like that, and I felt that Provi¬ 
dence was indeed looking my way that morning. 
Usually a pack of good dogs is necessary if one 
wishes for success in bear shooting, and we had 
brought a few good ones along to use in run¬ 
ning bears and mountain lions, but had not taken 
them out as yet, as it was our mention to re¬ 
serve that branch of sport till we had got all 
the other game we wanted. 
It was still early in the morning, and the bear 
not more than three miles from camp, so that 
it would be an easy matter to pack him in later, 
hence I pushed on and started to work around 
a hillside to reach a little open park in the tim¬ 
ber where on the previous day I had heard an 
eik bugle. I hardly expected to find that par¬ 
ticular elk in exactly the same place as yester¬ 
day, for he was probably roaming in search of 
a mate, but I worked in that direction along a 
sort of natural aisle or path. Then the aisle 
ended abruptly in impenetrable undergrowth. I 
paused a moment to pick a path and was startled 
by the sudden bugle of an elk on the hillside. 
Silently I stole in the direction of the sound, 
but I reached the place where the elk had bugled 
without catching a glimpse of him. It was the 
same elk I had heard the day before, for I had 
noticed then that a piece had been broken from 
the point of the near hind hoof, and these tracks 
showed the same characteristic. The elk had not 
heard nor winded me, but before I had gone a 
hundred yards I heard him wind his horn again,. 
A Big-Game Hunt in the Rockies 
By W. R. GILBERT 
