unswick amounts to an industry. I am uneasy about the
constant picking off of the largest and best breeding bulls of the
Mirimachi country, lest it finally reduce the size and antlers of the
moose of that region; but only the future can tell us just how that
prospect stands to-day.

In Alaska, our ever thoughtful and forehanded Biological Survey of the
Department of Agriculture has by legal proclamation at one stroke
converted the whole of the Kenai Peninsula into a magnificent moose
preserve. This will save _Alces gigas_, the giant moose of Alaska, from
extermination; and New Brunswick and the Minnesota preserve will save
_Alces americanus_. But in the northwest, we can positively depend upon
it that eventually, wherever the moose may legally be hunted and killed
by any Tom, Dick or Harry who can afford a twenty-dollar rifle and a
license, the moose surely will disappear.

The moose laws of Alaska are strict--toward sportsmen, only! The miners,
"prospectors" and Indians may kill as many as they please, "for food
purposes." This opens the door to a great amount of unfair slaughter.
Any coffee-cooler can put a pan and pick into his hunting outfit, go out
after moose, and call himself a "prospector."

I grant that the _real_ prospector, who is looking for ores and minerals
with an intelligent eye, and knows what he is doing, should have special
privileges on game, to keep him from starving. The settled miner,
however, is in a different class. No miner should ask the privilege of
living on wild game, any more than should the farmer, the steamboat man,
the railway laborer, or the soldier in an army post. The Indian should
have no game advantages whatever over a white man. He does not own the
game of a region, any more than he owns its minerals or its water-power.
He should obey the general game laws, just the same as white men. In
Africa, as far as possible, the white population wisely prohibits the
natives from owning or using firearms, and a good idea it is, too. I am
glad there is one continent on which the "I'm-just-as-good-as-you-are"
nightmare does not curse the whole land.

THE MUSK-OX.--Now that the north pole has been safely discovered, and
the south pole has become the storm-center of polar exploration, the
harried musk-ox herds of the farthest north are having a rest. I think
that most American sportsmen have learned that as a sporting proposition
there is about as much fun and glory in harrying a musk-ox herd