As before stated, I could have had my choice out of the herd, but my only pack-horse was loaded so that I could have carried but a small piece of meat, and was unwilling to waste so grand a creature for the little I could save from him.
The antlers of the bull elk grow to a great size. He sheds them in February of each year. The new horn begins to grow in April. During the summer it is soft and pulpy and is covered with a fine velvety growth of hair; it matures and hardens in August; early in September he rubs this velvet off and is then ready to try conclusions with any rival that comes in his way. The rutting season over, he has no further use for his antlers until the next autumn, and they drop off. Thus the process is repeated, year after year, as regularly as the leaves grow and fall from the trees. But it seems a strange provision of nature that should load an animal with sixty to seventy-five pounds of horns, for half the year, when weapons of one-quarter the size and weight would be equally effective if all were armed alike.
I have in my collection the head of a bull elk, killed in the Shoshone Mountains, in Northern Wyoming, the antlers of which measure as follows:
Length of main beam, 4 feet 8 inches; length of brow tine, 1 foot 6-1/2 inches; length of bes tine, 1 foot 8-1/2 inches; length of royal tine, 1 foot 7 inches; length of surroyal, 1 foot 8-1/2 inches: circumference around burr, 1 foot 3-1/4 inches; circumference around beam above burr, 12 inches; circumference of brow tine at base, 7-1/2 inches; spread of main beams at tips, 4 feet 9 inches. They are one of the largest and finest pairs of antlers of which I have any knowledge. The animal when killed would have weighed nearly a thousand pounds.
The elk is strictly gregarious, and in winter time, especially, the animals gather into large bands, and a few years ago herds of from five hundred to a thousand were not uncommon. Now, however, their numbers have been so far reduced by the ravages of "skin hunters" and others that one will rarely find more than twenty-five or thirty in a band.