Most of us, as we grow older, grow to care relatively less for sport than for the splendid freedom and abounding health of outdoor life in the woods, on the plains, and among the great mountains; and to the true nature lover it is melancholy to see the wilderness stripped of the wild creatures which gave it no small part of its peculiar charm. It is inevitable, and probably necessary, that the wolf and the cougar should go; but the bighorn and white goat among the rocks, the blacktail and wapiti grouped on the mountain-side, the whitetail and moose feeding in the sedgy ponds—these add beyond measure to the wilderness landscape, and if they are taken away they leave a lack which nothing else can quite make good. So it is of those true birds of the wilderness, the eagle and the raven, and, indeed, of all the wild things, furred, feathered, and finned. A peculiar charm in the chase of the wapiti comes from the wild beauty of the country in which it dwells. The moose lives in marshy forests; if one would seek the white goat or caribou of the northern Rockies, he must travel on foot, pack on back; while the successful chase of the bighorn, perhaps on the whole the manliest of all our sports, means heart-breaking fatigue for any but the strongest and hardiest. The prongbuck, again, must be followed on the desolate, sun-scorched plains. But the wapiti now dwells amid lofty, pine-clad mountains, in a region of lakes and streams. A man can travel in comfort while hunting it, because he can almost always take a pack-train with him, and the country is usually sufficiently open to enable the hunter to enjoy all the charm of distant landscapes. Where the wapiti lives the spotted trout swarm in the brooks, and the woodgrouse fly upward to perch among the tree-tops as the hunter passes them. When hunting him there is always sweet cold water to be drunk at night, and beds of aromatic fir boughs on which to sleep, with the blankets drawn over one to keep out the touch of the frost. He must be followed on foot, and the man who follows him must be sound in limb and wind. But his pursuit does not normally mean such wearing exhaustion as is entailed by climbing cliffs all day long after the white goat. Whoever has hunted the wapiti, as he looks at his trophies will always think of the great mountains with the snow lying in the rifts in their sides; of the splashing murmur of rock-choked torrents; of the odorous breath of the pine branches; of tents pitched in open glades; of long walks through cool, open forests; and of great camp-fires, where the pitchy stumps flame like giant torches in the darkness.