The Wilderness Hunter

CHAPTER IV. On the Cattle Ranges; the Prong-Horn Antelope

ON THE CATTLE RANGES; THE PRONG-HORN ANTELOPE

Riding to the Round-up--The Open Plains--Sights and Sounds--Gophers, Prairie Dogs, Sharp-tail Grouse, Antelope--The Cow-camp--Standing Night Guard--Dawn--Make an Antelope Hunt--An Easy Stalk--A Difficult Stalk--Three Antelope Shot--The Plains Skylark--The Meadow-Lark--The Mocking-bird--Other Singers--Harsher Wilderness Sounds--Pack Rats--Plains Ferret, Its Ferocity--The War Eagle--Attacks Antelope--Kills Jack-Rabbit--One Shot on Wing with Rifle

CHAPTER V. Hunting the Prong-Buck; Frost, Fire, and Thirst

HUNTING THE PRONG-BUCK; FROST, FIRE, AND THIRST

Hunting the Prong-Buck--Long Shots--Misses--Winter Weather--A Hunt in December--Riding in the Bitter Cold--The Old Hunter’s Tepee--A Night in a Line Camp--An Antelope Herd--Two Bucks Shot--Riding Back to Ranch--The Immigrant Train--Hunting in Fall--Fighting Fire--A Summer Hunt--Sufferings from Thirst--Swimming Cattle Across a Swollen Stream--Wagon Trip to the Black Hills--The Great Prairies--A Prong-buck Shot--Pleasant Camp--Buck Shot in Morning--Continue our Journey--Shooting Sage Fowl and Prairie Fowl with Rifle

CHAPTER VI. Among the High Hills; the Bighorn or Mountain Sheep

AMONG THE HIGH HILLS; THE BIGHORN OR MOUNTAIN SHEEP

A Summer on the Ranch--Working Among the Cattle--Killing Game for the Ranch--A Trip After Mountain Sheep--The Bad Lands--Solitary Camp--The Old Horse Manitou--Still-hunt at Dawn--Young Ram Shot--A Hunt in the Rocky Mountains--An Old Bighorn Stalked and Shot--Habits of the Game

CHAPTER VII. Mountain Game; the White Goat

MOUNTAIN GAME; THE WHITE GOAT

A Trip to the Big Hole Basin--Incidents of Travel with a Wagon--Camp Among the Mountains--A Trip on Foot After Goats--Spruce Grouse--Lying Out at Night--A Climb over the High Peaks--Two Goats Shot--Weary Tramp Back--A Hunt in the Kootenai Country--Hard Climbing Among the Wooded Mountains--Goat Shot on Brink of Chasm--Ptarmigan for Supper--Goat Hunting Very Hard Work--Ways and Habits of the Goats--Not much Decrease in Numbers

CHAPTER VIII. Hunting in the Selkirks; the Caribou

HUNTING IN THE SELKIRKS; THE CARIBOU

A Camp on Kootenai Lake--Traveling on Foot Through the Dense Forests--Excessive Toil--Water Shrew and Water Thrush--Black Bear Killed--Mountain Climbing--Woodchucks and Conies--The Indian Ammál--Night Sounds--A Long Walk--A Caribou Killed--A Midwinter Trip on Snowshoes in Maine--Footprints on the Snow--A Helpless Deer--Caribou at Ease in the Deep Drifts

CHAPTER IX. The Wapiti or Round-Horned Elk

THE WAPITI OR ROUND-HORNED ELK

A Hunt in the Bitter Root Mountains--A Trip on Foot--Two Bull Elk Fighting--The Peacemaker--All Three Shot--Habits of the Wapiti--Their Bugling--A Grand Chorus--Shooting a Bull at Sunrise--Another Killed near the Ranch--Vanishing of the Elk--Its Antlers--The Lynx--Porcupine--Chickarees and Chipmunks--Clark’s Crow--Lewis’ Woodpecker--Whiskey-jack--Trout--The Yellowstone Canyon

CHAPTER X. An Elk-Hunt At Two-Ocean Pass

AN ELK-HUNT AT TWO-OCEAN PASS

In the Shoshones--Traveling with a Pack-train--Scenery--Flowers--A Squaw-man--Bull Elk Shot in Rain while Challenging--Storm--Breaking Camp in Rain--Two-Ocean Pass--Our Camp--A Young Ten-pointer Shot--The Mountains in Moonlight--Blue Grouse--Snowshoe Rabbits--Death of a Master Bull--The Tetons--Following a Bull by Scent--Ill Luck--Luck Changes--Death of Spike Bull--Three Bulls Killed--Traveling Home--Heavy Snowstorm--Bucking Horse--Various Hunts Compared--Number Cartridges Used--Still-hunting the Elk

CHAPTER XI. The Moose; the Beast of the Woodland

THE MOOSE; THE BEAST OF THE WOODLAND

The Moose of the Rocky Mountains--Its Habits--Difficult Nature of Its Haunts--Repeated Failures while Hunting It--Watching a Marsh at Dawn--A Moose in the Reeds--Stalking and Shooting Him--Traveling Light with a Pack-train--A Beaver Meadow--Shooting a Big Bull at Dawn--The Moose in Summer, in Winter--Young Moose--Pugnacity of Moose--Still-hunting Moose--Rather More Easy to Kill than Whitetail Deer--At Times a Dangerous Antagonist--The Winter Yards--Hunting on Snowshoes--A Narrow Escape--A Fatal Encounter

CHAPTER XII. Hunting Lore

HUNTING LORE

Game Which Ought Not to Be Killed--Killing Black Bear with a Knife--Sports with Rod and Shot-gun--Snowshoeing and Mountaineering--American Writers on Out-door Life--Burroughs--Thoreau--Audubon, Coues, etc.--American Hunting Books--American Writers on Life in the Wilderness: Parkman, Irving--Cooper on Pioneer Life--American Statesmen and Soldiers Devoted to the Chase--Lincoln, Jackson, Israel Putnam--A Letter from Webster on Trout-fishing--Clay--Washington--Hunting Extracts from Washington’s Diaries--Washington as a Fox-hunter

APPENDIX

PREFACE

For a number of years much of my life was spent either in the wilderness or on the borders of the settled country--if, indeed, “settled” is a term that can rightly be applied to the vast, scantily peopled regions where cattle-ranching is the only regular industry. During this time I hunted much, among the mountains and on the plains, both as a pastime and to procure hides, meat, and robes for use on the ranch; and it was my good luck to kill all the various kinds of large game that can properly be considered to belong to temperate North America.

In hunting, the finding and killing of the game is after all but a part of the whole. The free, self-reliant, adventurous life, with its rugged and stalwart democracy; the wild surroundings, the grand beauty of the scenery, the chance to study the ways and habits of the woodland creatures--all these unite to give to the career of the wilderness hunter its peculiar charm. The chase is among the best of all national pastimes; it cultivates that vigorous manliness for the lack of which in a nation, as in an individual, the possession of no other qualities can possibly atone.

No one, but he who has partaken thereof, can understand the keen delight of hunting in lonely lands. For him is the joy of the horse well ridden and the rifle well held; for him the long days of toil and hardship, resolutely endured, and crowned at the end with triumph. In after years there shall come forever to his mind the memory of endless prairies shimmering in the bright sun; of vast snow-clad wastes lying desolate under gray skies; of the melancholy marshes; of the rush of mighty rivers; of the breath of the evergreen forest in summer; of the crooning of ice-armored pines at the touch of the winds of winter; of cataracts roaring between hoary mountain masses; of all the innumerable sights and sounds of the wilderness; of its immensity and mystery; and of the silences that brood in its still depths.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

SAGAMORE HILL, June, 1893.

THE WILDERNESS HUNTER

CHAPTER I. The American Wilderness; Wilderness Hunters and Wilderness Game

THE AMERICAN WILDERNESS; WILDERNESS HUNTERS AND WILDERNESS GAME

Manifold are the shapes taken by the American wilderness. In the east, from the Atlantic Coast to the Mississippi Valley, lies a land of magnificent hardwood forest. In endless variety and beauty, the trees cover the ground, save only where they have been cleared away by man, or where toward the west the expanse of the forest is broken by fertile prairies. Toward the north, this region of hardwood trees merges insensibly into the southern extension of the great sub-arctic forest; here the silver stems of birches gleam against the sombre background of coniferous evergreens. In the southeast again, by the hot, oozy coasts of the South Atlantic and the Gulf, the forest becomes semi-tropical; palms wave their feathery fronds, and the tepid swamps teem with reptile life.

Some distance beyond the Mississippi, stretching from Texas to North Dakota, and westward to the Rocky Mountains, lies the plains country. This is a region of light rainfall, where the ground is clad with short grass, while cottonwood trees fringe the courses of the winding plains streams; streams that are alternately turbid torrents and mere dwindling threads of water. The great stretches of natural pasture are broken by gray sage-brush plains, and tracts of strangely shaped and colored Bad Lands; sun-scorched wastes in summer, and in winter arctic in their iron desolation. Beyond the plains rise the Rocky Mountains, their flanks covered with coniferous woods; but the trees are small, and do not ordinarily grow very closely together. Toward the north the forest becomes denser, and the peaks higher; and glaciers creep down toward the valleys from the fields of everlasting snow. The brooks are brawling, trout-filled torrents; the swift rivers foam over rapid and cataract, on their way to one or the other of the two great oceans.

Southwest of the Rockies evil and terrible deserts stretch for leagues and leagues, mere waterless wastes of sandy plain and barren mountain, broken here and there by narrow strips of fertile ground. Rain rarely falls, and there are no clouds to dim the brazen sun. The rivers run in deep canyons, or are swallowed by the burning sand; the smaller watercourses are dry throughout the greater part of the year.

Beyond this desert region rise the sunny Sierras of California, with their flower-clad slopes and groves of giant trees; and north of them, along the coast, the rain-shrouded mountain chains of Oregon and Washington, matted with the towering growth of the mighty evergreen forest.

The white hunters, who from time to time first penetrated the different parts of this wilderness, found themselves in such hunting grounds as those wherein, long ages before, their Old-World forefathers had dwelled; and the game they chased was much the same as that their lusty barbarian ancestors followed, with weapons of bronze and of iron, in the dim years before history dawned. As late as the end of the seventeenth century the turbulent village nobles of Lithuania and Livonia hunted the bear, the bison, the elk, the wolf, and the stag, and hung the spoils in their smoky wooden palaces; and so, two hundred years later, the free hunters of Montana, in the interludes between hazardous mining quests and bloody Indian campaigns, hunted game almost or quite the same in kind, through the cold mountain forests surrounding the Yellowstone and Flathead lakes, and decked their log cabins and ranch houses with the hides and horns of the slaughtered beasts.

Zoologically speaking, the north temperate zones of the Old and New Worlds are very similar, differing from one another much less than they do from the various regions south of them, or than these regions differ among themselves. The untrodden American wilderness resembles both in game and physical character the forests, the mountains, and the steppes of the Old World as it was at the beginning of our era. Great woods of pine and fir, birch and beech, oak and chestnut; streams where the chief game fish are spotted trout and silvery salmon; grouse of various kinds as the most common game birds; all these the hunter finds as characteristic of the New World as of the Old. So it is with most of the beasts of the chase, and so also with the fur-bearing animals that furnish to the trapper alike his life work and his means of livelihood. The bear, wolf, bison, moose, caribou, wapiti, deer, and bighorn, the lynx, fox, wolverine, sable, mink, ermine, beaver, badger, and otter of both worlds are either identical or more or less closely kin to one another. Sometimes of the two forms, that found in the Old World is the larger. Perhaps more often the reverse is true, the American beast being superior in size. This is markedly the case with the wapiti, which is merely a giant brother of the European stag, exactly as the fisher is merely a very large cousin of the European sable or marten. The extraordinary prong-buck, the only hollow-horned ruminant which sheds its horns annually, is a distant representative of the Old-World antelopes of the steppes; the queer white antelope-goat has for its nearest kinsfolk certain Himalayan species. Of the animals commonly known to our hunters and trappers, only a few, such as the cougar, peccary, raccoon, possum (and among birds the wild turkey), find their nearest representatives and type forms in tropical America.

Continue reading The Wilderness Hunter free in the Wunder reader →