This splendid deer affords a good instance of the difficulty of deciding what name to use in treating of our American game. On the one hand, it is entirely undesirable to be pedantic; and on the other hand, it seems a pity, at a time when speech is written almost as much as spoken, to use terms which perpetually require explanation in order to avoid confusion. The wapiti is not properly an elk at all; the term wapiti is unexceptionable, and it is greatly to be desired that it should be generally adopted. But unfortunately it has not been generally adopted. From the time when our backwoodsmen first began to hunt the animal among the foothills of the Appalachian chains to the present day, it has been universally known as elk wherever it has been found. In ordinary speech it is never known as anything else, and only an occasional settler or hunter would understand what the word wapiti referred to. The book name is a great deal better than the common name; but after all, it is only a book name. The case is almost exactly parallel to that of the buffalo, which was really a bison, but which lived as the buffalo, died as the buffalo, and left its name imprinted on our landscape as the buffalo. There is little use in trying to upset a name which is imprinted in our geography in hundreds of such titles as Elk Ridge, Elk Mountain, Elkhorn River. Yet in the books it is often necessary to call it the wapiti in order to distinguish it both from its differently named close kinsfolk of the Old World, and from its more distant relatives with which it shares the name of elk.