nd carrying upon his crown a pair of
broad, flat-branched antlers, weighing sixty pounds! Although truly an
animal of the deer kind, he lacks those graceful shapes and proportions
that characterise most of his congeners; and his mode of progression--a
sort of shambling trot--is awkward in the extreme. While the animal is
in the act of running, its long split hoofs strike together, giving out
a series of singular sounds that resemble the crackling of castanets.
In the elk countries of North America the native Indians prize the
skins--dressing them into a soft pliable leather. The flesh is also
eaten; but it is inferior to the venison of either the fallow or red
deer.

The elk belongs equally to the Old and New Worlds. His range is the
wooded countries of high latitudes in the north, both of Europe and
Asia; and in America he is found in similar situations. In the latter
continent he is called the Moose; and the name Elk is there erroneously
given to another and more southern species--the Wapiti--to be noticed
presently.

In North America the range of the elk may be defined by regarding the
boundary-line of the United States and Canada as its southern limit.
Formerly elks were met with as far south as the Ohio--now they are rare
even in Wisconsin. In Canada, and northward to the shores of the Arctic
Sea, wherever timber is plenteous, the great moose deer dwell. They
roam in small herds--or perhaps only families, consisting of six or
seven individuals--and feed chiefly on the leaves of plants and trees.
Their legs are so long, and their necks so short, that they cannot graze
on the level ground, but, like the giraffes of Africa, are compelled to
browse on the tops of tall plants, and the twigs and leaves of trees, in
the summer; while in the winter they feed on the tops of the willows and
small birches, and are never found far from the neighbourhood where such
trees grow. Though they have no fore-teeth in their upper jaw, yet they
are enabled somehow or other to crop from the willows and birch trees
twigs of considerable thickness, cutting them off as clean as if the
trees were pruned by a gardener's shears.

The moose is a sly animal, and in early winter all the craft of the
hunter is required to capture it. In summer it is easier to do so:
these animals are then so tormented with mosquitoes and gnats, that they
become almost heedless of the approach of their more dangerous enemy,
man. In winter the hunter fo