Outdoor pastimes of an American hunterRoosevelt, Theodore
General
Outdoor pastimes of an American hunter
Roosevelt, Theodore
Hunting -- United States; Hunting -- West (U.S.)
head, again flew off and again returned. Finally the yearling trotted
off after the rest of the band, and the eagle returned to the upper air.
Later we found the carcass of a yearling, with two eagles, not to
mention ravens and magpies, feeding on it; but I could not tell whether
they had themselves killed the yearling or not.
Here and there in the region where the elk were abundant we came upon
horses, which for some reason had been left out through the winter. They
were much wilder than the elk. Evidently the Yellowstone Park is a
natural nursery and breeding-ground of the elk, which here, as said
above, far outnumber all the other game put together. In the winter, if
they cannot get to open water, they eat snow; but in several places
where there had been springs which kept open all winter, we could see by
the tracks that they had been regularly used by bands of elk. The men
working at the new road along the face of the cliffs beside the
Yellowstone River near Tower Falls informed me that in October enormous
droves of elk coming from the interior of the Park and travelling
northward to the lower lands had crossed the Yellowstone just above
Tower Falls. Judging by their description, the elk had crossed by
thousands in an uninterrupted stream, the passage taking many hours. In
fact nowadays these Yellowstone elk are, with the exception of the
Arctic caribou, the only American game which at times travel in immense
droves like the buffalo of the old days.
[Illustration:
ELK IN SNOW
]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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