Silver-Tip Surprises 
During a. Hunting Trip for Big Game with the 
Camera on the Upper Yellowstone River 
By GEORGE SHIRAS. 3d 
(Concluded from page 50.) 
W E continued to struggle against the swift 
current, but our progress was slow. It 
seemed now that the only way more 
speed could be acquired was by my getting out of 
the canoe—thus lightening the bow to a material 
degree—and with a twenty-foot rope occasionally 
pulling the boat against the swift water at some 
of the bends. As the rest of the crew had their 
axes and the club, I, of course, took the revolver 
ashore with me, which, as Ferrell remarked—I 
thought with a little sarcasm—"I might have 
occasion to use in another case of ‘mistaken 
identity.’ ” 
At one place while walking in the thick brush 
a hundred yards ahead of the canoe I heard a 
heavy animal crashing through the bushes on 
the immediate left and coming toward me. My 
theory of a few minutes before somehow van¬ 
ished and, jumping to the edge of the bank, I 
drew the revolver and faced the approaching 
animal, intending, in case it were a grizzly, to 
fire a couple of bullets into him and then, tak¬ 
ing the revolver between my teeth, to jump into 
the swift current and swim down to the canoe 
below me. 
As I stood with the revolver pointed at the 
quivering bushes out came the head of a large 
cow elk, which seemed as ill pleased as I was 
gratified at the nature of the encounter. It 
turned and rushed along the bank, jumped into 
the stream and swam across, much to the amuse¬ 
ment of my two guides who had been watching 
the pantomime from below. 
The Moose of the Upper Yellowstone. 
The rest of the afternoon was uneventful 
until just before we selected a place for the 
night’s camp, when I heard the splashing of a 
heavy animal in a small cut-off of the river, 
which for many year.s had been closed up, so 
that the warm and stagnant water was well filled 
with aquatic vegetation. Here I discovered a 
fine bull moose, extremely dark in color, with 
the legs somewhat lighter. The animal was evi¬ 
dently an old one, the antlers showing ten or 
twelve points to the side, though not having a 
total spread of more than thirty-five inches. In 
my frequent photographic trips after moose I 
have seldom been closer to one in the bright 
sunlight, or have seen one in more beautiful 
surroundings, and my finger fairly itched to 
press the button of the little camera swinging 
by my side. In a few minutes the sound of 
voices from the passing canoe frightened him 
and he quickly sought the heavy timber that 
surrounded this little pool. 
During the remainder of the afternoon and 
on the succeeding days I examined all the trails 
and sandbars for evidence of moose besides 
keeping a sharp lookout for these animals which 
are supposedly rare in this district. I was sur¬ 
prised at the results of this investigation, for 
we found that many of the trails on the river, 
which we had supposed were being used exclu¬ 
sively by elk or whitetail deer, were traveled 
almost entirely by moose. 
The next afternoon I walked to within fifty 
feet of a large bull lying half asleep at the tail 
of a small island, and not until the canoe came 
up did he rise to his feet. Then another bull 
was seen twenty feet further back, and as they 
ran off they were joined by a cow, one of the 
few instances in which I have seen a cow moose 
consorting with two bulls in mid-summer. 
Before we reached the lake on the return trip 
I saw six more bulls and another cow, making 
a total of eleven of these animals seen during 
the daytime along the swift waters of the 
Upper Yellowstone. Doubtless had we gone to 
some of the small pools and lakes in the valley 
of the river, where proper food was likely to 
be found, many more would have been seen. 
Yet the territory referred to does not cover 
more than eight miles on the river in a direct 
line, although by reason of its circuitous course 
it would probably be sixteen miles by water. 
Most of the moose were approached very 
closely or examined with equal ease through a 
powerful field glass, and several conclusions may 
be drawn regarding the size and character of 
the antlers. With one exception all the bulls 
were full grown adults and showed a remark¬ 
able uniformity in size and symmetry of the 
horns, and had I not known by reason of my 
careful examination that they were different 
bulls, I might have supposed that I had seen 
the same animal a number of times. The spread 
of the antlers was small, ranging between thirty- 
five and forty inches, and the palmations did not 
seem to exceed four inches. Whether these 
limitations in size were due to the former de¬ 
struction of the larger bulls and with a deterio¬ 
ration further increased by the inter-breeding 
of a small number of animals thus isolated, or 
whether it was due to the fact that these are 
really mountain moose living all the year at an 
altitude exceeding seventy-five hundred feet in 
a region where those deciduous trees and aquatic 
plants which they like best are scarce, or whether 
it may be a combination of all these conditions, 
it is hard to say. That not a single calf was 
seen may mean merely that they were hiding 
in the denser thickets or, on the other hand, it 
may mean that the larger carnivorous animals 
were making destructive inroads upon the breed¬ 
ing stock. 
When I told General Young of our discovery 
he seemed quite surprised and was sorry I took 
no pictures, as the investigations of all his scouts 
made not only during the summer, but on snow- 
shoes during the winter, had not disclosed the 
great abundance of moose in this locality, al¬ 
though a few had been seen in certain portions 
of the park. Ferrell was astonished also, for 
during his thirty years of big-game hunting in 
the Rockies he had seen but three moose. All 
of which is evidence that this great park has 
been the harboring place of an animal that is 
now extremely scarce in the United States out¬ 
side of Maine and Northeastern Minnesota. 
On the third day our trip up the river was 
definitely ended by the breaking of both our 
oars, and although we carefully spliced them 
with copper wire, they were useless in combat¬ 
ing the heavy currents at every turn of the river. 
I 
The Return Down the River. 
So we went into our last river camp, and the 
next day walked up stream a considerable dis¬ 
tance, examining the country and the character 
of the water so that, in case of return another 
season, we would have some knowledge of the 
country ahead of us. A couple of days later 
camp was struck for our return, and in four 
hours we had reached the lake, so rapidly cover¬ 
ing a distance that had required nearly three 
days in the ascent. 
As we passed the sandbar where the bear had 
greeted us, Ferrell suggested that silence was 
the order of the day, and we shot by with all 
our armament in easy reach. At the next bend 
the canoe nearly ran down a band of fully fifty 
elk lying drowsily in the sun on a small sandy 
island with two or three old cows standing 
guard. From this I concluded that the old 
silver-tip had deserted the neighborhood. 
That night, Aug. 4, we made camp under a 
high mountain in the southeast corner of the 
lake. I had previously arranged with Hofer 
that on Aug. 5 the canoe would be sent down 
