individuals, in bits of rough country such as the Black Hills, the sand-hills of Nebraska, and certain patches of Bad Lands along the Little Missouri. Doubtless stragglers exist even yet in one or two of these localities. But by the time the great buffalo herds of the plains were completely exterminated, in 1883, the wapiti had likewise ceased to be a plains animal; the peculiar Californian form had also been well-nigh exterminated. The nature of its favorite haunts was the chief factor in causing it to suffer more than any other game in America, save the bison, from the persecution of hunters and settlers. The boundaries of its range have shrunk in far greater proportion than in the case of any of our other game animals, save only the great wild ox, with which it was once so commonly associated. The moose, a beast of the forest, and the caribou, which, save in the far North, is also a beast of the forest, have in most places greatly diminished in numbers, and have here and there been exterminated altogether from outlying portions of their range; but the wapiti, which, when free to choose, preferred to frequent the plains and open woods, has completely vanished from nine-tenths of the territory over which it roamed a century and a quarter ago. Although it was never found in any one place in such enormous numbers as the bison and the caribou, it nevertheless went in herds far larger than the herds of any other American game save the two mentioned, and was formerly very much more abundant within the area of its distribution than was the moose within the area of its distribution.