Coyotes are plentiful, but the elk evidently have no dread of them.  One day I crawled up to within fifty yards of a band of elk lying down.  A coyote was walking about among them, and beyond an occasional look they paid no heed to him.  He did not venture to go within fifteen or twenty paces of any one of them.  In fact, except the cougar, I saw but one living thing attempt to molest the elk.  This was a golden eagle.  We saw several of these great birds.  On one occasion we had ridden out to the foot of a great sloping mountain side, dotted over with bands and strings of elk amounting in the aggregate probably to a thousand head.  Most of the bands were above the snow line—­some appearing away back toward the ridge crests, and looking as small as mice.  There was one band well below the snow line, and toward this we rode.  While the elk were not shy or wary, in the sense that a hunter would use the words, they were by no means as familiar as the deer; and this particular band of elk, some twenty or thirty in all, watched us with interest as we approached.  When we were still half a mile off they suddenly started to run toward us, evidently frightened by something.  They ran quartering, and when about four hundred yards away we saw that an eagle was after them.  Soon it swooped, and a yearling in the rear, weakly, and probably frightened by the swoop, turned a complete somersault, and when it recovered its feet, stood still.  The great bird followed the rest of the band across a little ridge, beyond which they disappeared.  Then it returned, soaring high in the heavens, and after two or three wide circles, swooped down at the solitary yearling, its legs hanging down.  We halted at two hundred yards to see the end.  But the eagle could not quite make up its mind to attack.  Twice it hovered within a foot or two of the yearling’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 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 traveling 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.