and archaic-looking cedars, a thousand years old, thrust their sturdy shoulders firmly against the storms and the winds.  But the valleys, the trees and the glaciers, were only the mise-en-scene of that which constituted primarily the reason of my visiting this peninsula.  Here is the only wild herd of elk of any considerable size outside of the Yellowstone National Park, a most beautiful elk now separated from the Rocky Mountain species.  Besides this herd there are only a few survivors of the once innumerable herds of the Pacific Coast, one little bunch in California, and a few scattered individuals in the mountains of Oregon and Washington.  It is excessively hard to form any correct estimate of how many remain; probably there are at least a thousand, possibly several times that number.  At all events, there is a scattered herd large enough to insure the existence of the species if they might now be protected.  Unfortunately the sentiment of the community in the vicinity of the Olympics is just about what it was in Colorado in the seventies and in the early eighties—­almost complete apathy, so far as taking effective precaution is concerned, to prevent the killing of these animals in violation of the law.  I saw one superb herd south of the headwaters of the Elwha, and was informed that in the winter a large number come lower down into the valley of that river; here and elsewhere the finest specimens are slaughtered by head-hunters for the market, and by anyone, in fact, who may covet their hides or meat or their “tusks,” now unfortunately very valuable.

Presumably, in so killing them, picked specimens are selected.  Of course the finest bulls may not thus be systematically eliminated without causing the general deterioration of the herd.  Nature’s method of progress is by the survival of the fittest.  Man reverses this so soon as cupidity makes him the foe of wild animals.  The country here is an excessively hard one to get about in with stock, owing to its very rugged nature and to the scarcity of feed, so that there is slight danger of the extermination of these elk by sportsmen during the open season.  In the winter, however, the hunters have them at their mercy.  I was assured by one very level-headed man that, in the winter of 1902-3, two men killed seventeen elk from the Elwha herd.  Since the individuals who killed the elk are well known and are practically unmolested, the immunity which they enjoy tempts others to similar violation of the law.  More recently still, during this last winter, the game warden of Washington reports the finding of the carcasses of nineteen elk, killed for their tusks.