Chapter XVIII: Big Game of North America (2)

But it must not be inferred from these facts that every tenderfoot who comes along will run up against bears the first time he goes in search of them. On the contrary, an old friend of mine (every inch an English sportsman) has been out in this country for twenty-five years, travelling from time to time all over the province, and has never yet seen a bear alive in the woods. The reason is simply that my friend uses a shot-gun, and doesn’t look for bears; and if you want to see these beasts you must look for them at the right time and in the right place, and even then be thankful if you see more than their fresh tracks, for Nature has given them noses as keen as the nose of a caribou, and ears which are always on the alert, as well as an impregnable sanctuary in the dense timber and tangled woodfall of their native forests. To those who live upon the Pacific coast the black bear is an animal to be thankful for, affording as he does an excuse for carrying a rifle when spring is in the woods; when the cedar swamps smell heavy with the musk of the skunk cabbage, and are lit in their green darkness by stray beams of May sunshine; when _Cormus Nuttalli_ is white with blooms as big as the palm of a man’s hand, and underfoot all is bright with the red and orange of columbine and ‘Indian pink,’ or white with the delicate petals of the dog violet. To me the black glossy hide beneath my feet always brings back memories of spring-time, either here on the island, or on the mainland by the Frazer, where the beautiful olalis are smothered in white blossom, and where the great yellow swallow-tails and plum-coloured Camberwell Beauties sail and sun themselves upon the stone slides round the lake.

But though the black bear affords an excellent excuse for bolting out of town in spring-time, it cannot be said that he is a very sporting beast. He hasn’t got an ounce of ‘fight’ in him, and stalking is of course impossible in such districts as those which he frequents. Even ‘still hunting’ is very nearly useless in such timber as exists on this coast; so that unless you use hounds to hunt him with, your best chance of meeting _Ursus americanus_ is to take a canoe and paddle quietly up untravelled streams, where fish are plentiful, or where in autumn the berry bushes grow thickly. In spring you may get a shot by watching woodland swamps where the skunk cabbage grows, or hill-sides when the Indian potato is ripe, but you are nearly as likely to have your chance if you are out early upon the best trail in the country, which runs near such feeding places, for the black bear appreciates a good road as much as a man does, and always uses one when he can.

In Eastern America the black bear is principally hunted with hounds, and even here a good dog which will tree a bear is useful; but my own experience of such sport has been, that in nine cases out of ten the hounds’ music ceased just as I had done the hardest mile on record up hill and over fallen timber, and the hounds themselves turned up ten minutes later, meek and dejected, their muzzles full of porcupine quills, which they evidently expected me to pull out for them.

Most of the skins sent in to Victoria from Alaska are taken by trapping (by noose, gin, or deadfall), or by hunting with dogs, between the time the bears leave their dens and the time the snow leaves the river bottoms. It is a short season and an uncertain one, but I am assured by those who have tried it, that for a man who is a good goer upon snow-shoes, it is excellent fun whilst it lasts. The dogs used for bears are of every breed and combination of breeds, but perhaps the best are collies. It does not require a big dog or a powerful dog for the work, for no dog is big enough to close with, whilst any dog is big enough to frighten, a black bear. I remember upon one occasion seeing three dogs, two small Pomeranians and a cross-bred setter, run a two-year-old black bear to bay on the ford of a river. The dogs had to swim, but by standing up the bear could rest upon firm ground, and keep his arms and jaws free for fighting above water.

The bear had already received a shot in the stomach before the dogs tackled him, but when they ran him to bay he seemed strong and well. Neither dogs nor bear took any notice of me, though I was standing up to my knees in the water of the ford within a few paces of them; and in five minutes the fight was over without interference on my part. At first the bear cuffed the dogs as they swam up to him, as a man might cuff who knew nothing of hitting out from the shoulder, and once he took the big dog in his jaws and went right under with him. However, the setter came up smiling, and shortly afterwards poor old Bruin was floating down stream, his head under water, and the dogs tugging with impunity at his flanks. I suppose that this bear weighed less than 200 lbs.

Captain Baldwin in his excellent book on the game of Bengal describes two kinds of bears: _U. labiatus_ and _U. tibetanus_; and almost everything that he says of the Indian black bear would apply equally well to _U. americanus_ (even to his weakness for yellow raspberries), except that _U. labiatus_ appears to fight upon occasion, whereas _U. americanus_ is hardly ever known to fight even in self-defence, and has never, as far as I know, been accused of making an unprovoked assault upon a human being.

Baldwin seems to have been somewhat surprised when he discovered that the Indian black bear fed upon carrion. No one in America would be surprised at anything which _U. americanus_ considered good for him. I have seen a cub take rotten melon, a piece of meat, a cake of chocolate, a plug of T. & B. tobacco, and the end of a half-smoked cigar for breakfast. Being a true American, the cub naturally showed a preference for the plug of T. & B., but none of the other things came amiss to him. In a wild state a black bear will eat any garbage, putrid fish, dead animals, or anything else which comes in his way. In fact, the poor black bear is in all his tastes and habits a thorough hog: a pig without a pig’s pugnacity.

As a rule he is a lowland beast, living in swamps and river-bottoms, but I have seen him once or twice even in a mountain sheep country, probably crossing over the divide from one river-bed to another. It is well for him that he generally eschews the open, for once out of the timber everything which has eyes must see him. A man may mistake a burnt log for a bear, but no man could mistake a bear for a burnt log. The intense blackness and gloss of a bear’s coat is not thoroughly appreciated until you see it contrasted with other objects which you are accustomed to call black.

Where the sportsman runs any chance of seeing tracks of both black and grizzly in one and the same piece of country, it is as well to be able to distinguish the one from the other.

It is not easy to do this, but, as a general rule, if the ground on which the track is made is soft, you should be able to see the long _cuts_ made by the grizzly’s claws, as contrasted with the little holes made by the points of the black bears. I am talking now of the forepaws, and it will be remembered that the claws of the black are much arched, and therefore only touch at the tip, whereas the grizzly’s claw is flat and should touch almost along its whole length.

Again, there is no doubt that the heel of the grizzly is much broader and squarer than that of the black bear, which makes a very narrow impression, even upon soft clay.

Like the grizzly, the black bear varies greatly in size and weight. On Vancouver Island I am inclined to think that the average black bear would not weigh 300 lbs.; but no doubt there are many exceptional bears, even upon the island, which greatly exceed that weight; and I have myself seen an old male upon the mainland which, if I am any judge of weight, was not an ounce less than 500 lbs., and probably weighed more; while there are from time to time black bear skins in the warehouses of Mr. Boscowitz, the principal fur-dealer in Victoria, which would measure nearly 9 ft. from end to end (if allowance were made for the mask beyond the eyes), and 6 ft. from side to side below the arms.

In 1891 I measured in this store a black bear’s skin which did not seem unduly stretched, the length of which was, to the best of my recollection, 8 ft. 6 ins. from eyes to tail, or 8 ft. 10 ins. as measured.

Amongst the skins for sale by Messrs. C. M. Lampson & Co., at their small summer sale, June 12, 1893, at which I was told that the black bear skins were small, I measured one skin 93 ins. from eyes to tail, and one of the employés of the house assured me that a black bear skin measuring 8 ft. 6 ins. was not uncommon.

Before leaving the subject of bears altogether, I should like to refer to an extraordinary skin which I saw among Mr. Boscowitz’s consignments from the upper country last year. In size this skin is considerably larger than the average bear hide; the colour of it is white, with a few straw-coloured patches (little more than a few hairs in each) on the head and about the rump. The paws and claws of the animal were attached to the skin, and from the jaws and skin of the head I should imagine that the beast had a long shallow head like a black bear’s, though the skin is more like the skin of a Polar in summer season, _except that_ whereas other bear hides are of hair, this is distinctly woolly, more like the fleece of a sheep than the hide of a bear.

I am informed that this skin was sent to Mr. Rowland Ward’s. The bear was killed on one of the inlets of the north-west coast, and is the only one of the kind ever seen in our British Columbia fur market.

IV. BISON OR BUFFALO (_Bison americanus_)

In writing of big game in North America, it is impossible to write for more than the immediate present. That which was ten years ago has already ceased to be, and it is probable that the conditions, both of game and country, will change almost as much in the coming decade as they have done in that which has just passed.

Ten years ago, as I travelled along the Northern Pacific Railway line, the skin-hunters were at work in the neighbourhood of Glendive and Little Missouri, and I had an opportunity of killing my buffalo like my predecessors. Unfortunately for me, I agreed with Colonel Dodge’s plainsmen in ‘scarcely considering the buffalo game.’ Now the herds are gone, and neither I nor any other man will see the prairies again ‘all one vast robe.’ All that remains of the vast herds which used to roam ‘over the whole of the Eastern United States to the Atlantic Ocean, and southward into Florida,’ are two or three half-domesticated herds (one which was Colonel Bedson’s and one in the Kootenay country among the Flat-head Indians), and a small band of wild beasts, protected by the United States, in the Yellowstone Park. ‘Forest and Stream,’ January 29, 1892, puts this last herd at about 400 head, with an increase of 100 head per annum. West of Winnipeg the buffalo paths are still visible, worn deep in the grey prairies by millions of passing feet; but the herds have gone, and the men and beasts who lived upon them. All that is left are a few piles of bleaching bones and a few weather-worn skulls, and even these have almost all been gathered and turned into dollars by the manure manufacturer and the trophy-monger. In this practical money-grubbing age it does not do to lament the good old days, unless you want to be laughed at; but it is hard, nevertheless, to look on the ocean of grassland when the spring flowers are coming, and not regret the great waves of animal life which used to sweep over it. Such evidence as I can offer as to the mode in which the buffalo was hunted must of necessity be hearsay evidence, collected, however, at first hand, principally from an Indian confined, at the time I saw him, at the Stony Mountain Penitentiary, and from a white skin-hunter, whose last hunts were conducted in 1880, 1881 and 1882, in Montana and North Dacota.

A white skin-hunter’s ‘outfit’ of the most modest kind consisted in those days of one hunter carrying a Sharp’s rifle (with bullets weighing 500 grains), two skinners, and an extra man for camp work and odd jobs.

During the rutting season (from July 20 to September 16) the buffaloes all ran together, but during the rest of the year the old bulls kept together, apart from the cows and young bulls. Except during the rutting season, the bands were comparatively small--from 20 to 200--led, if consisting of cows and young beasts, by an old cow. In hot weather the bands would lie quiet during the heat of the day, but in windy weather they would keep travelling all day against the wind, feeding as they went. As soon as the herds had been found the hunter would begin operations, shooting at long ranges, and keeping out of sight as much as possible. The first beast shot was the leader of the band, and as often as the band seemed to have selected another leader he, too, had to be dropped in his tracks. Without a leader, and with no enemy in sight, the remainder of the herd would generally become confused, and allow the hunter to shoot down a large number ‘at a stand,’ as he called it. Having killed as many as he could, the hunter left the carcases where they lay, his assistants coming to skin them the next day. Fifteen head a day was, so my informant stated, a fair average for one man to kill and two to skin, although in the fall of 1880 and spring of 1881 he and his party averaged twenty-four heads per diem.

The best shot was low down behind the shoulder, about ten inches from the brisket. A ball placed there would penetrate the lungs, and, after a few plunges, the beast would drop and die.

The price of all the blood shed by the skin-hunters may be summed up briefly as 2 dollars 75 cents each for ‘leather hides’--i.e. hides of old bulls all the year round and young beasts during the summer season--and 3.50 cents for ‘robe hides.’

My informant told me that if it would pay him he thought that he could still find buffalo on the northern tributaries of the Saskatchewan, east of the Rockies, as some friends of his, trapping ‘away back’ in 1886, had seen plenty of them, though the difficulty of bringing the robes out had prevented their shooting any.

The last buffalo killed by a white man to my own certain knowledge was shot by Mr. Warburton Pike far away to the North, near the Great Slave Lake, when out after musk ox.[16]

Some idea of the number of the buffaloes in early days may be gathered from the well-attested fact that the pioneer settlers often drove through the herds for days and days with buffalo in sight all round them all day long, as well as from the statistics collected by Colonel Dodge, in his ‘Plains of the Great West.’ That author states that, from information furnished to him by the Atcheson, Topeka and Santa Fé Railway Company, he concludes that not less than a million and a half were killed in the States from 1872 to 1874.

Colonel Dodge mentions a mountain buffalo as a variety of the common buffalo, and Mr. J. E. Harting, in some remarks published originally in the ‘Field,’ alludes to a beast of the same class, which he calls ‘Zacateca.’

The Zacatecas, of which specimens were exhibited at the American Exhibition of 1887, inhabit the mountainous regions of Northern Mexico; they are smaller than the buffalo, are hornless, and have tails more like the tails of yaks than like those of the common buffalo, who by the way is, properly speaking, a bison (_Bos americanus_). I have taken the liberty of calling him a buffalo because in his native haunts he has been so called, and as such he will go down to posterity in the legends of those great plains which know him no longer.

The Wood Buffalo and the Mountain Buffalo appear to be almost, if not quite, identical with the common type of _B. americanus_, from which they differ only in habitat, in the quality of their coat, and in that they are of somewhat smaller size than their kinsmen of the plains.

A better idea of the appearance of the subject of these remarks may be obtained by a glance at the illustrations than could possibly be given by any amount of descriptive writing, the illustrations having been drawn by Mr. Whymper from photographs of the pure-bred beasts in Colonel Bedson’s herd, taken by Lady Alice Stanley, and by a photographer at Winnipeg, Manitoba.

An idea of the size of a buffalo bull may be conveyed by the fact that, in 1889, one of the bulls in Colonel Bedson’s herd was estimated at 2,000 lbs., and a much smaller beast, a half-bred bull, was killed, which dressed without the head 1,100 lbs. This was a four-year-old, by a buffalo bull out of a Durham cow.

P.S.--Since writing the above, I have spent a season with an old-time buffalo hunter, who confirmed all the statements made to me by others; and added that, as an instance of the numbers killed by individuals, he himself accounted for 3,500 head in four years, whilst a friend of his, A. C. Myers, killed 4,200 buffaloes in the Pan Handle Country, in Texas, in one year, ‘about the time Hayes was President.’

My old friend S. W. explained to me why men used such a gigantic weapon as the ‘old reliable’ Sharp, which used to weigh 16 lbs. and upwards, although the bullet was but a small one.

In buffalo shooting, he said, you had often to fire a deuce of a lot of shots one after another; the weather was hotter than ‘the hottest part of the hot place,’ and as you were shooting at long ranges, if the barrel got hot, a sort of mist would get between your eye and the sights, which helped the buffalo somewhat. Besides, where shooting was your trade, you didn’t want to get your shoulder ‘kicked’ at every shot; and as for the weight of your rifle, that didn’t matter to you, for your pony packed it.

V. THE BIGHORN (_Ovis montana_)

To a man who loves the hill-tops, where the winds blow keen and pure over the red gold of sun-dried grass and the deep blue of snow-fed tarns, there is no game in America to compare with the bighorn of the Rocky Mountains. Other beasts may hide away in the dense timber of Oregon, Washington Territory, and Vancouver Island; other beasts may sneak out only at dusk and dawn, but the gallant bighorn still lives out in the open, trusting for safety to the grey-faced ewes who watch over him, or to his own marvellously keen sight and scent. In spite of this, the man who kills a 16-in. ram generally deserves his good luck, for there is no beast better able to take care of himself than an old bighorn, nor any more difficult to stalk. Where he lives the wind seems never still, and never constant in any given direction; at night it strains at the hunter’s tent-rope and makes his fire roar and blaze like a mad thing, and in the morning it curls round the hill-tops and heralds the stalker’s coming from every quarter. It is the fashion in books of sport to describe the haunts of _Ovis montana_ as being ‘the highest, raggedest, and most forbidding mountain ranges.’ Nothing could be further from the truth than this, if the statement is intended to be general. Sheep are undoubtedly sometimes found in difficult and even dangerous places, but to describe sheep shooting as anything like ibex or chamois hunting is pure folly. The first sheep it was ever my good fortune to see was in the Bad Lands, on an eminence not 200 ft. above the level of the Northern Pacific Railway line, and the last I shot in 1892 was not 1,000 ft. above the level of the Frazer. As a rule, sheep in early autumn keep to the bald knolls above the timber-line (where patches of snow still linger), seeking refuge when disturbed in the abrupt rock faces with which the hills abound. When the snow comes they retire to the edge of the timber, sheltering among the juniper bushes and stunted balsams from the early winter storms. Later on, when the deep snows have covered all their upland pastures, the sheep come down to the benches immediately above the river, retiring at midday to the canyons which lead to the first ridges. On the Frazer river in late November and early December all the sheep of the district are down by the river; indeed, one ram which I shot in 1892 was first sighted feeding in the middle of a small band of cattle on the flat. But winter is not the time for sheep hunting, nor the flats above the river the proper places to hunt them in. To enjoy sheep shooting to perfection a man should leave the Pacific coast in September, pass through the belt of water meadows and pine forests, where the pink fireweed contrasts vividly with the grey stems of the pines and the soft green of the ferns, and through the country of sage brush and rolling yellow bluffs. From this point his road will lie steadily upwards, over the rolling prairie, through belts of green timber where the deer swarm in winter, and then by thread-like trails over side-hills and stone-slides along the course of some tributary of the Frazer, until at last a great yellow cone, patched here and there with snow, rises clear above the timber-line in front of him. This is sheep-land, the land of the roaring wind (Skulloptin), but it will take him a good long day to reach it, and both he and his horses will be dead tired by the time they stop to camp. At first a sheer rock wall rises from the river; on the top of the rock is a bench of golden grass, and then again there is a sharp ascent and another bench of grass. Finally the ladder of benches is lost in the forest, which goes climbing away uphill in resolute fashion until towards nightfall the hunter reaches the land of stone-slides and burnt timber, and passing through that comes out upon the edge of the sheep downs, where the stream becomes no more than a succession of small pools amongst the moss, and the only trees still left are dwarfed, stunted, and twisted into all manner of forms by the violence of the mountain winds. If the sun has left the landscape when the hunter first sees it, the effect is weird and cheerless. The great brown wastes above, the soft silent mosses underfoot, the trees huddled together in little groups as if for mutual support, the hanging fringes of blackened beard moss, all help to accentuate the bleakness of the land over which the mountain wind sobs or shrieks. But in the morning all changes as if at a magician’s word. The skies are cloudless, the sunlight dances on snowfield and streamlet, and even the grey stems of the trees are beautiful when contrasted with the ruddy orange of the Indian pinks at their feet--better than all, the hunter’s lungs are filled with air which acts on him like champagne, and on the skyline, as likely as not, he sees the great white sterns of half a dozen sheep feeding quietly on their way back to their sleeping ground. By ten o’clock at latest those sheep will lie down, and then where they lie down they will stay, motionless as the grey rocks they lie amongst, until nearly four o’clock, their eyes apparently open the whole time and fixed steadily upon the _nearest skyline_. Generally, sheep will choose a little sheltered meadow at the foot of a small glacier, lying down in the very middle of it, each old ram with his head turned in a different direction, and each with his eyes fixed on a different skyline. When sheep have chosen such a position as this, the only thing to be done is to lie and watch them until they move away to some more accessible country. Many a time have I lain like this waiting until first one old ram and then another rose, stretched himself, and then lay down again for another forty winks. It is very exasperating, but when at last the whole band gets upon its legs and feeds slowly over a ridge from behind which it is possible to stalk them, verily you have your reward.

As illustrative of the nature of the country in which sheep west of the Rockies are killed, I have seen a well-known British Columbian rancher ride up to a band of ewes in the highlands of the Ashnola country, _galloping_ after them until within range, then dismounting and killing two out of the band. This was in early autumn, and in what I consider the easiest country I have ever seen; in winter, of course, when the snows are heavy on the mountains, the sheep come right down on to the flat, by the edge of the Frazer river. Indeed, in the winter (end of November 1890) I found a fair-sized ram feeding amongst a band of cattle, and killed him before he had put a hundred yards between himself and them. Another recent statement to which I must take exception is that ‘a man who can find a band of ten or fifteen (sheep) after a week’s riding and climbing is a fortunate man.’ Sheep extend from the Missouri to Alaska, and whatever their numbers may be east of the Rockies, they are certainly plentiful enough west of that range. In Cassiar they are very numerous, and along the banks of the Frazer I have in one season (1889) seen one band of seventy, one of sixty, and on another occasion, late in the fall, a friend of mine and myself came upon an immense band feeding in little bunches of fifteen and twenty, aggregating, I should think, at least 150. I did not and could not count them, but should imagine my estimate was absurdly within the limit. M. D. and I took them at first sight for strayed cattle from a neighbouring ranch. Later on we met a portion of this band going uphill, and watched them file past us, within twenty yards of us, each beast coming up on to a little mound immediately below our ambush, pausing for a moment to look downhill, and then making place for the next. In this procession the barren ewes led, the ewes and lambs came next, and the rams brought up the rear, with the biggest ram, for whom we were waiting, last of all. But though the Frazer River country contains plenty of sheep, neither this country nor Alaska seems to produce such fine heads as are found east of the Rockies. A 16-inch head (honest measurement) is an exceptionally good head for British Columbia. Let those who doubt this statement tape their trophies and judge for themselves. East of the Rockies larger heads are not uncommon; the largest of which I have any accurate information having been bought at Morley by my friend Mr. Arnold Pike. This head measured 17.25 ins. round the base of the horn, being, therefore, considerably bigger than the fine heads exhibited by Messrs. F. Cooper and H. Seton Karr in the American Exhibition. The record sheep head, according to Ward’s excellent book, is 41 ins. in length and 17¼ in circumference.

Of course, there are stories of heads which measure far more than this--of giant heads with two twists to the horns; but they are never seen, although, like most sportsmen, I have myself once seen a head, which I did not secure, that will haunt me until my shooting days are done.

There is a tiny sheep district very far up in the mountains at the head of one of the Frazer’s tributaries to which my Indian guide alone knew the trail. He had blazed it three years before, and burnt some timber whilst he was up there, in order that another year the sweet grasses which would spring in the _brulé_ might attract plenty of deer to this his private hunting ground. From the bald top of Siyah, as I prefer to call this ground, we could see the great hills round the Frazer rolling down fold upon fold into their river-beds, their sides red-brown in the sunlight, a rich dark purple in the shadows. We were lying on the very highest ground, spying into a hollow below us in which a solitary sheep was feeding. ‘Yoharlequin,’ muttered the Siwash, ‘it is a ewe.’ Just as he spoke we both crouched close to the ground, though we were safe enough even from a bighorn’s marvellously all-seeing eyes, for at that moment five more sheep walked slowly into sight. There was no doubt as to the new-comers. We were looking upon the finest bit of sheep ground I had ever seen, and the five were worthy of it. There was one enormous ram, two which would have satisfied any man, a fourth such as I had often killed before, and a small fellow.

Everything seemed to favour us at first. The little glacier at the head of the dark gulch had sent a snow-stream tearing through the hollow, and this had cut a deep course up which we could sneak unseen. I suppose the water must have been bitterly cold, but we crawled through it for ten minutes without so much as noticing that when we had to come down to our knees the icy current ran into our trousers pockets, and though the wind blew off the glacier it was welcome, because for once it was right in our teeth. In the middle of the gulch was a big mound, and 240 yards from this (I measured the distance afterwards) stood the glorious three. Unless we could have burrowed, no man could have crept closer unseen, so that from this point I had to fire. But why tell the story, and what is the good of trying to instruct others when I so often break every rule myself? Three things I did on that day which I ought not to have done, and I paid the penalty for my folly. First, I took my Indian with me on the stalk, and, of course, at the critical moment he flurried me with his accursed ‘Shoot, shoot!’ He knew what the ram was like upon which I was trying slowly to draw a bead. Then I took two rifles with me upon that trip, and shot sometimes with one, sometimes with another. The result was that I shot badly with both, and knew nothing of either of them. Lastly, when I had missed or only wounded the big ram, I lost my head, and instead of waiting until the beasts should pause for a moment to look back, I fired three fluky shots at them ‘on the run.’ Not until the big beasts were behind a piece of rolling ground did I realise what a fool I had made of myself, and then, as we wanted meat badly, I took a quiet steady shot at the little ram which had hung behind, and killed him neatly at a good 400 yards--a shot which under ordinary circumstances I should never dream of attempting.

After waiting for awhile we followed the wounded beast, hoping that as we had given him time he would lie down and afford us a chance of another stalk. But, as the Indian said, ‘there was no lie down in that ram.’ He could only go very slowly (at a walk), but he could keep going, and over the ground to which he took us we could do no more.

We tried everything that we could think of to circumvent him, but it was no good. When the dusk was falling I got my last view of his great white quarters, lurching slowly over yet another ridge. He was evidently bound for a far country, and had no intention of stopping until he reached it; I was limping almost as badly as he was, and was far more ‘done.’ I had left a nasty piece of rock and ice behind me to recross on my way to camp, I had not a notion how far I had come, where my Indian was, or which was the nearest way to my camp, so with a heart full of bitterness I turned back, vowing to track him on the morrow and stay with him as long as he stayed in British Columbia.

But then I knew only that he was a very big ram. When I stood beside the beast which the Indian and myself had taken for a two-year-old at most, and taped his horns at 14½ ins., I had a better idea what the beast must have been like beside which this fair ram had seemed a pigmy. Of course, that night enough snow fell to hide the tracks of a mammoth! I try sometimes to console myself with the reflection that after all he was probably only a 16- or, at most, 17-in. ram, but it won’t do. I know better. From blood-stains upon the rocks (my Indian had my glass) I am pretty sure that I shot through the withers the first time, and probably hit him very far back with one of the others.

It is an extraordinary thing that though sheep so often turn and bolt _downhill_ when merely frightened, a wounded ram, especially a big one, will struggle on higher and higher as long as life and the possibility of ascending lasts.

I have noticed the same habit in Caucasian _tûr_; but, of course, my experience may be exceptional.

Sheep rut in October, but the season varies somewhat in different localities, being a little later in some than in others. However, in a good sheep country the hunter may be pretty sure of hearing the hollow clang of the horns of fighting rams some time in October, and, at least, he may be sure that in that month he has the best chance of coming across the really big beasts, which, his Indian will tell him, retire during the rest of the year to the very highest peaks. This I doubt myself, as I have always tried the highest ground, and never done any better there with the big rams than elsewhere. My own belief is that all the sheep frequent the open tops in July and August, when the grass is fresh where the snow has but recently disappeared; that in September they come down nearer the timber, and even into it, in search of sweeter feed than that which the sunburnt tops afford; that during this time the old rams are away by themselves hiding in the bush; and that in October, when the uplands have been revived by the late autumn rains, the ewes seek the hill-tops again, and the amorous rams follow the ewes.

But at whatever season you seek the bighorn, remember that he is very easily driven away, that all his senses are exceptionally keen, and that from his vantage ground above he incessantly watches the valley beneath. Therefore, if you are changing camp, do not arrange matters so as to arrive in a new country, which you intend to hunt, about nightfall, or if you do, reduce the chopping which has to be done to a minimum; don’t light big fires, and let those you light be as much hidden as possible from the ridges upon which you expect to find game. If possible, it is better to get to a fresh shooting ground so early that you can do a day’s hunting before there is any necessity for cutting timber or lighting a fire.

As it is not easy to weigh large game in camp, and as I am no believer in guess-weights, I shall not attempt to estimate the weight of a bighorn ram; but, bearing in mind that the _O. montana_ is one of the most compactly built animals in the world, the curious in such matters may form an approximate idea of the beast’s weight from the following measurements of a 16-in. ram, which I took myself within an hour of his death. Measuring him as he lay, this ram was 3 ft. 6 ins. from the root of his tail to where the neck is set on to the shoulder; his girth under his forelegs was 3 ft. 9 ins.; and his height, as nearly as I could get it, 3 ft. 2 ins. at the shoulder.

VI. THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN GOAT (_Haploceros montanus_)

The Rocky Mountain Goat may, like other animals, vary in its habits a good deal in different localities. In British Columbia, which appears to be peculiarly its home, I am bound to say that it appears to be the biggest fool that walks on four legs. I am aware that some authorities upon sport, whose opinions deserve consideration, differ from me upon this point, but living as I do at present amongst British Columbians, I am not afraid of being contradicted by local sportsmen when I aver that there is no wild animal easier to stalk than _Haploceros_. There are many men out here who, after having killed their first few heads, will have nothing more to do with goat hunting, regarding it as unworthy the name of sport. I remember well one old goat which I stalked in the Bridge River country. The beast was a very big one, and was first seen feeding upon a bare hillside. He was on one side of an amphitheatre, we were on the other. Between us lay over half a mile of rattling shale and moraine, and there was no cover for a mouse. However, there was nothing else to hunt, and the goat was the largest I had ever seen, so with my Indian behind me I began the stalk. I am confident that any other beast would have seen us before we had gone a hundred yards; we slipped and fell, we rattled the stones about, and the whole thing was so ludicrous that I had to sit down and laugh more than once; but in spite of all this I got within forty yards of the poor stupid brute, who had been looking in our direction in a puzzled way for the last ten minutes, and felt thoroughly ashamed of myself when I put an end to his doubts with a bullet. To give an idea of the tameness of these brutes, I took six or seven photographs of goats in one day last year with a very elaborate photographic apparatus, the photographs unfortunately being destroyed before they could be developed, when the whole apparatus, together with my guide, went rolling down a steep incline almost into the Bridge River.

Though not worth stalking, these goats are quaint beasts and worth watching. As a rule, they live where nothing else would care to, on precipitous rock faces overhanging a stream where no grass grows, and where there is very little even to browse upon. Just at dawn you may see them crossing a wall of rock high above your camp in single file, or wending their way slowly from their feeding grounds to the timber patches in which they lie all day. They are very local in their distribution and very conservative in their habits, infesting one small mountain in great numbers and never seeming to stray into the neighbouring heights. Day after day they appear to seek the same feeding grounds, and retire to the same lairs, with a punctuality which would be becoming in a postman. Their meat is so poor that Indians will hardly eat it, and the market value of their hides is only 3_s._ 6_d._ to a tourist. They occupy only such localities as other beasts would despise, and altogether seem somewhat justified in the mute protest of their wondering regard when attacked, which seems to say as plainly as dumb beasts can speak, ‘Surely you are not going to meddle with us; we, at least, are beasts of no account.’ To obtain a good specimen head their haunts ought to be visited as late in the year as possible, as the coats are not so white or the beards so long in early autumn as they are in November, and a goat’s head without the long patriarchal beard is a poor affair. They abound all over British Columbia, especially in such places as Bute Inlet, and I have even seen them on the islands in the Straits of San Juan, from which I am inclined to infer that they had swum over from the mainland. An old billy which I shot girthed 56 ins. round the chest after he had been skinned, and the longest horns of which I have any record measured 11½ ins. from base to tip. The accompanying plate gives a better idea of the queer old-world appearance of the Rocky Mountain goat than any word-painting of mine could do. In old days, the Indians used to make blankets of their fleece, but the industry appears to be nearly dead, now that English blankets have become cheap and plentiful in British Columbia, so that there appears to be no reason why the white goat should not be allowed to remain unmolested for many years to come. I have seen _Haploceros_ in Alaska as well as in British Columbia, and expect that my friend Mr. John Fannin, curator of the British Columbian Museum, is right in inferring that the goats go as far north as the mountains do. The skin, measured by Mr. Fannin, and mentioned in his article upon goats in the ‘Big Game of North America,’ is far and away the largest I have ever heard of, a skin 5 ft. from horns to tail, by 40 ins. from side to side, being an exceptionally large one, whereas Mr. Fannin’s large skin measured 7 ft. by 4 ft. 10 ins.

The track of the goat is not unlike that of a large bighorn ram, but squarer and blunter.

VII. THE PRONGHORN ANTELOPE (_Antilocapra americana_)

The scheme of these volumes does not allow for a full and detailed account of the shooting of every variety of game found in each country. It may therefore suffice to say of this antelope that it may be killed as any other antelope is killed, either by stalking, the shots being taken as a rule at long ranges, or by coursing. There are very few parts of America, if any, in which the antelope has been so little hunted as to allow the old ruse of flagging (i.e. of attracting them within range by the exhibition of strange objects which arouse their curiosity) to be practised with success. Ten or fifteen years ago, antelope might be seen from the windows of almost every train running west of Chicago, but now their range is vastly curtailed, and though a few small herds may still be found in most of their old haunts, they are not really abundant except in Texas, in the neighbourhood of the National Park, and in Assineboia, where in 1893 I saw two considerable bands in April from the carriage windows of the Canadian Pacific Railway train.

In Texas, a friend who was there in November 1892 wrote me: ‘There seems to be plenty of antelope round here, as they are frequently brought into town, sometimes by the cartload to be shipped.’ In California antelopes have been almost exterminated, and the same may be said of Oregon, whilst in Colorado the districts in which they occur are not numerous, nor even in these does the beast exist in any numbers, except where it has been preserved. It seems likely that the pronghorn will be the next of the American mammals to disappear before the arms of the white man. Like the buffalo, the antelope is a dweller on the plains, seldom seeking refuge either in the timber or in the high mountains, although he is found at a very considerable altitude on the high tablelands near Gunnison, Colorado, for example (6,000 to 7,000 ft. at least above sea level). The season for antelope shooting should be from August to the middle or end of October, after which time the oldest of the bucks will have shed the shell-like covering of their horns. The rutting season lasts for about six weeks, beginning in September and ending in October. The pronghorn, though an inhabitant of the great plains, is not a wanderer as most denizens of such countries are, but seems to attach himself to a certain district, and to remain there or near there until his tribe has been exterminated. For instance, there is a small band which may be seen almost any day in winter within a few miles of one of the big cities of Colorado. The band grows smaller year by year, but it never alters its winter quarters in consequence of man’s persecution. The pronghorn has, moreover, other enemies to contend against besides man and his Winchester, the great eagles of the North-West occasionally taking toll from the herds. An instance of this was seen by Mr. A. Pike in Colorado last year, when the buck, after dodging the eagle’s attacks for some time, escaped into some brush; but such attacks are said by the plainsmen to be fairly frequent and often successful.

Mr. Rowland Ward gives 15¾ ins. as the length of the longest horn of the pronghorn within his knowledge.

VIII. THE DEER OF AMERICA

Judge Caton, an authority upon the deer of his own country, describes eight well-defined species as inhabiting the North American continent. These are the wapiti (_C. canadensis_), the moose (_C. alces_), the woodland caribou (_C. tarandus_), the Barren Ground caribou (_C. tarandus arcticus_), the mule deer (_C. macrotis_), the Columbian black-tailed deer (_C. columbianus_), the Virginian or white-tailed deer (_C. virginianus_), and a little-known beast called by Caton _C. acapulcensis_.

With the last-named a sportsman is likely to have very little to do, as its range is extremely limited and its size insignificant (‘weight from 30 to 40 lbs., height 24 ins. at the shoulder, and length from the end of the nose to the root of the tail 44 ins.’; cf. Caton’s ‘Deer of America,’ pp. 121, 122), whilst its antlers, though quaint, are hardly worth taking as a trophy. Caton gives a cut of the antlers of a full-grown buck of this species. Of the originals of that cut Caton says that they measure in length 7 ins. and 3 lines, in circumference above the burr 2 ins., and that they are more palmated than the horns of any other American deer except moose and caribou. For further information on this deer the reader is referred to Caton’s work, which should be in the library of every man interested in natural history. Of the other seven species of American cervidæ there is much to be said, and little space left to say it in.

(1) MOOSE (_C. alces_)

Of all deer extant to-day, the moose is the largest. Of all earth’s animals, except perhaps old _Haploceros_, he bears most plainly still the impress of Nature’s ’prentice hand when she made things huge and roughhewn, and had no time to polish her work and smooth off the corners. Evolution does not seem to have affected the moose, for to-day he wanders along that great chain of lakes from the Arctic to the Atlantic, from the mouth of the Mackenzie River to the St. Lawrence--a survival of the earth’s dawn rather than a commonplace nineteenth-century deer. All sorts of stories are told as to his weight and size. Caton, who is always careful not to exaggerate, puts the weight of a bull moose at from 700 to 1,400 lbs., and his height at 6 ft. at the withers. The largest pair of horns of which we have any authentic record (the cut is from a photograph of them) measures in span 66 ins. (or 5 ft. 6 ins.) from tip to tip, but a recent writer in an American work upon sport and natural history (Mr. Hibbs) describes a moose which he saw dead in the Teton Basin, whose antlers spanned 8 ft. 6 ins. from tip to tip, making an arch when inverted under which a man ‘slightly stooping’ could walk. This Titan of the Tetons stood, ‘_without his legs under him_, 15 hands high,’ so that, allowing for the fact that a moose has, according to Caton, ‘very long legs, to which he is indebted for his great height,’ he must have stood in life, _with his legs under him_, from 8 to 9 ft. high at the withers. This seems rather tall, even for a moose from the Rocky Mountains. As before stated, this great deer ranges from the Arctic Ocean to the St. Lawrence, and in spite of the persecution of man still abounds as far east as the provinces of Quebec and Ontario; is reported to exist in large numbers on the head-waters of the Clear Water River, in Idaho; is found in Montana and Wyoming, and flourishes exceedingly in the North-Western portions of British Columbia as well as in the adjoining territory of Alaska.

With great wisdom the Legislatures both of Canada and the States have taken the moose under their protection, but the great deer would be in no danger of extermination even if the law had overlooked him, as he has haunts still remote, and except in deep snow can take very fair care of himself; indeed, even as lately as 1887 I could have killed seven bull moose in six days’ hunting in Ontario had I been butcher enough to do so, whilst in 1891 I saw two canoes (big freight canoes) come down loaded with magnificent moose horns from a district where almost the only residents are a few Siwashes (Indians) and some Chinese miners! Where Chinese kill game, game must be fairly plentiful still.

Although as big as a haystack, the moose is not quite as easy to hit, nor is he everybody’s ‘meat.’ His favourite haunts are the dense thickets round lakes and about river-bottoms, the dark balsam groves, hardwood hills, and brulé patches of Ontario, and wherever the lily pads, moose wood, swamp maple, alder bushes, coarse grasses or mosses upon which he feeds are most luxuriant.

By some strange fatality, wherever things are most convenient for the moose they appear to be least convenient for the hunter. The scrub over which the moose looks without raising his ugly head closes over and drowns the unfortunate biped who tries to follow him; the fallen trees and huge logs which the moose takes comfortably in his stride must be climbed by the hunter, and yet, in spite of his size, when the big bull has answered your call and has come crashing through the alder and swamp tea to within twenty yards of you, he is likely enough to halt in the shadow, detect the fraud, and steal away without a sound.