he calling season, and the nights grew keen with
excitement. Now and then as I fished, or followed the brooks, or prowled
through the woods in the late afternoon, the sudden bellow of a cow
moose would break upon the stillness, so strange and uncertain in the
thick coverts that I could rarely describe, much less imitate, the
sound, or even tell the direction whence it had come. Under the dusk of
the lake shore I would sometimes come upon a pair of the huge animals,
the cow restless, wary, impatient, the bull now silent as a shadow, now
ripping and rasping the torn velvet from his great antlers among the
alders, and now threatening and browbeating every living thing that
crossed his trail, and even the unoffending bushes, in his testy humor.

One night I went to the landing just below my tent with Simmo and tried
for the first time the long call of the cow moose. He and Noel refused
absolutely to give it, unless I should agree to shoot the ugly old bull
at sight. Several times of late they had seen him near our camp, or had
crossed his deep trail on the nearer shores, and they were growing
superstitious as well as fearful.

There was no answer to our calling for the space of an hour; silence
brooded like a living, watchful thing over sleeping lake and forest, a
silence that grew only deeper and deeper after the last echoes of the
bark trumpet had rolled back on us from the distant mountain. Suddenly
Simmo lowered the horn, just as he had raised it to his lips for a call.

"Moose near!" he whispered.

"How do you know?" I breathed; for I had heard nothing.

"Don' know how; just know," he said sullenly. An Indian hates to be
questioned, as a wild animal hates to be watched. As if in confirmation
of his opinion, there was a startling crash and plunge across the
little bay over against us, and a bull moose leaped the bank into the
lake within fifty yards of where we crouched on the shore.

"Shoot! shoot-um quick!" cried Simmo; and the fear of the old bull was
in his voice.

For answer there came a grunt from the moose--a ridiculously small,
squeaking grunt, like the voice of a penny trumpet--as the huge creature
swung rapidly along the shore in our direction.

"Uh! young bull, lil fool moose," whispered Simmo, and breathed a soft,
questioning _Whooowuh?_ through the bark horn to bring him nearer.

He came close to where we were hidden, then entered the woods and
circled silently about our camp to get our wind. In th