Wonderful stories of hunting, tracking, and the outdoors by President Theodore Roosevelt. "In January, I started on a five weeks' cougar hunt from Meeker in Northwest Colorado. My companions were Mr. Philip B. Stewart and Dr. Gerald Webb, of Colorado ... Read more

Wonderful stories of hunting, tracking, and the outdoors by President Theodore Roosevelt. "In January, I started on a five weeks' cougar hunt from Meeker in Northwest Colorado. My companions were Mr. Philip B. Stewart and Dr. Gerald Webb, of Colorado Springs. We reached Meeker on January 11th, after a forty-mile drive from the railroad, through the bitter winter weather; it was eighteen degrees below zero when we started. At Meeker, we met John B. Goff, the hunter, and left town the next morning on horseback for his ranch, our hunting beginning that same afternoon, when after a brisk run our dogs treed a bobcat. After a fortnight Stewart and Webb returned, Goff and I staying out three weeks longer. It is a high, dry country, where the winters are usually very cold, but the snow not under ordinary circumstances very deep. It is wild and broken in character, the hills and low mountains rising in sheer slopes, broken by cliffs and riven by deeply cut and gloomy gorges and ravines. The sage-brush grows everywhere upon the flats and hillsides. Large open groves of pinyon and cedar are scattered over the peaks, ridges, and table-lands. Tall spruces cluster in the cold ravines. Cottonwoods grow along the stream courses, and there are occasional patches of scrub-oak and quaking asp. The entire country is taken up with cattle ranges wherever it is possible to get a sufficient water-supply, natural or artificial. Some thirty miles to the east and north the mountains rise higher, the evergreen forest becomes continuous, the snow lies deep all through the winter, and such Northern animals as the wolverine, lucivee, and snow-shoe rabbit are found. This high country is the summer home of the Colorado elk, and of the Colorado blacktail deer, which are still very plentiful. In winter both elk and deer come down to the lower country, through a part of which I made my hunting trip." Less