and I got a long shot at the bull, the effect of which I could not judge of, as he still kept on, though slowly. A mile further on I caught him up again, and got another shot, after which the cow left the bull and went off at a trot, whilst he turned along the rocky ledge of a steep rocky hill¬ side covered with scattered trees.
I now found that I could go as fast as he could, but the slope was so steep that I could not get a side shot, and at last took aim at the tail, what Fred Carrington always called the Boer shot. This turned him straight down the steep slippery rocks, which lay at an angle of perhaps forty degrees, and which I was obliged to slide down on my back as I could not stand on the slope. At the bottom the elk stopped and faced me on a flat piece of bog, and when I approached to finish him made an attempt at a charge, the only time I ever saw an elk face his pursuers. I shot him dead as he staggered towards me at fifteen paces, and found that the wonderfully strong and hardy beast had no less than five 500-bore express bullets in various parts of his body, any one of which must have proved mortal.
This was an eighteen-pointer, but the horns were not very wide. It seems to me that an elk which has not developed a wide head in his younger days never gets one, though he may get a great many points as he gets old. The natives think one fresh point on each side is added every year, and in Norway a total of twenty-eight points is very rarely exceeded. There is, however, a shed horn in the house at Mo which has sixteen well-developed points. This is the finest single horn I have ever seen. The widest is one I bought of Herr Bruun, the well-known furrier of Trondhjem, which has eighteen points and is fifty-four inches wide. I have another eighteen- pointer fifty-two inches wide, and these two are the widest from Europe recorded by Ward. Whilst I am on this subject I may say that by far the finest Scandinavian heads axe from North Trondhjem amt, those from South Norway being much smaller. The shape and set of Scandi¬ navian heads differ a little from those found in Russia, which, as far as I have seen, usually form a more acute angle; and European heads generally are of a different type and smaller than American moose heads.
The last day of the season was again a very lucky one. There was on the farm of Mo, which we made our headquarters and usually hunted on Saturday or Monday, an elk which was well known by the unusual size of his tracks, and which was supposed to be the very big bull which Colonel Walker and Sir H. Pottinger had hunted on many occasions during previous seasons. I had been after him several times without success, and once when we thought we had him cornered on a ledge high up on the banks of the Salvand and tried to drive him out, he had run back, almost knocking down a driver. But both Elias and Erik, who was the local hunter, believed that he bore a charmed life, as Colonel Walker had wounded him several years ago and Sir H. Pottinger, who did not often miss, had once missed him. I had given up all hopes of getting a shot at him, and had started early to visit a distant part of the farm which we had never been able to reach.
Within a mile of the house we found quite fresh tracks of a cow and calf accompanied by a bull, which from the size of the footprints could only
