A full-grown male moose is from 7 to 8 feet high at the shoulder, and from 10 to 12 feet high at the tip of the magnificent antlers when standing erect, and is from 800 to 1,200 pounds in weight. The broad palmate antlers with numerous sharp points sometimes measure 8½ feet or more from tip to tip. The does are without antlers, and are still more ungainly than the long-legged and apparently awkward males. Stringent laws are now enforced for the protection of the moose in all of the inhabited portions of its range, and it is likely to survive and to continue to tempt the sportsman to traverse the wild regions it inhabits for several generations to come.
_The Wapiti._--Next in size to the moose, and in many ways the grandest of the deer tribe not only of America, but of the world, is the wapiti or American elk. In language not pedantic, W. A. Perry speaks as follows of this noble animal: "Monarch of the wilderness, lord of the mountain, king of the plain, what hunter who has sought thee in thy pine-embowered home whose heart-beat does not quicken and whose eye does not brighten at the mention of thy name! For with it comes the recollection of boundless prairies, grass-robed and flower-decked; of pine-clad, snow-capped mountains; of sweet breezes, gentle melodies, and grand trophies. I once heard an Indian speak his last words, and they were these: 'To-morrow, in the Spirit Land, again shall I chase the wapiti.'"
Although the wapiti is one of the typical animals of the boreal region, in its primitive freedom it overstepped the boundaries of the life-zones which science seeks to define, and marched southward far into the austral region. It was found at the coming of the white man in nearly all parts of what is now the United States, and extended from the table-land of north-central Mexico northward to the fifty-sixth or fifty-seventh degree of latitude, or about the position of Lake Athabasca. Its northern range thus overlapped the region inhabited by the moose and caribou, while at the south it was exposed to the attacks of the jaguar. As civilization advanced across the continent, the wapiti slowly retreated, and in diminished numbers it now lives in the wildest portion of the Pacific mountains to the north of Snake River and the Columbia. It is still abundant in the Olympic Mountains of Washington, the Bitter Root Mountains of Idaho, and in Montana. A large herd finds protection in the Yellowstone National Park, but in winter, when migrating southward, is exposed to most destructive attacks from both white and Indian hunters. Among the mountains of the mainland in British Columbia and the central and more rugged portion of Vancouver Island it is still the "king of the wilderness."