for deer. I guess you've tried that,
so you'll know what it's like--skeery kind o' work."

Neal nodded an eloquent assent, and Herb went on:--

"The third method is a dog's trick. It's following 'em on snowshoes over
deep snow. I've tried that once, and I'm blamed if I'll ever try it
again. It's butchery, not sport. The crust of snow will be strong enough
for a man to run on, but it can't support the heavy moose. The
creature'll go smashing through it and struggling out, until its slim
legs are a sight to see for cuts and blood. Soon it gets blowed, and can
stumble no farther. Then the hunter finishes it with an axe."

Disgust thickened the voices of the listening three, as with one accord
they raised an outcry against this cruel way of butchering a game
animal, without giving it a single chance for its life. When their
indignation had subsided, the hunter went on to describe the fourth and
last method of entrapping moose--the calling in which Dol was so
interested.

"P'raps you won't think this is fair hunting either," he said; "for it's
a trick, and I'll allow that there's times when it seems a pretty mean
game. Anyhow, I'd rather kill one moose by still-hunting than six by
calling. But if you want to try work that'll make your blood race
through your body like a torrent one minute, and turn you as cold as if
your sweat was ice-water the next, you go in for moose-calling. I guess
you know all about the matter, Cyrus; but as these Britishers do not,
I'll try and explain it to' em.

"Early in September the moose come up from the low, swampy lands where
they have spent the summer alone, and begin to pair. Then the
bull-moose, as we call the male, which is generally the most wide-awake
of forest creatures, loses some of his big caution, an' goes roaming
through the woods, looking for a mate. This is the time for fooling him.
The hunter makes a horn out o' birch-bark, somewheres about eighteen
inches long, through which he mimics the call of the cow-moose, to coax
the bull within reach of his rifle-shots."

"What is the call like?" asked Neal, his heart thumping while he
remembered that strange noise which had marked a new era in his
experience of sounds, as he listened to it at midnight by Squaw Pond.

"Sho! a man might keep jawing till crack o' doom, and not give you any
idea of it without you heard it," answered Herb Heal, the dare-all
moose-hunter. "The noise begins sort o' gently, like the lowing of a
tame cow