air, and he charged
wrathfully down the knoll. The moose, with his heavy-muzzled head
stuck straight out scornfully before him, and his antlers laid flat
along his back, strode down to the encounter with a certain deadly
deliberation. He was going to fight. There was no doubt whatever on
that score. But he had not quite made up his wary mind as to how he
would deal with this unknown and novel adversary.

They looked not so unequally matched, these two, the monarch of the
Western plains, and the monarch of the northeastern forests. Both had
something of the monstrous, the uncouth, about them, as if they
belonged not to this modern day, but to some prehistoric epoch when
Earth moulded her children on more lavish and less graceful lines. The
moose was like the buffalo in having his hind-quarters relatively
slight and low, and his back sloping upwards to a hump over the
immensely developed fore-shoulders. But he had much less length of
body, and much less bulk, though perhaps eight or ten inches more of
height at the tip of the shoulder. His hair was short, and darker than
that of his shaggy rival, being almost black except on legs and belly.
Instead of carrying his head low, like the buffalo, for feeding on the
level prairies, he bore it high, being in the main a tree-feeder. But
the greatest difference between the two champions was in their heads
and horns. The antlers of the moose formed a huge, fantastic, flatly
palmated or leaflike structure, separating into sharp prongs along the
edges, and spreading more than four feet from tip to tip. To compare
them with the short, polished crescent of the horns of Last Bull was
like comparing a two-handed broadsword to a bowie-knife. And his head,
instead of being short, broad, ponderous, and shaggy, like Last
Bull's, was long, close-haired, and massively horse-faced, with a
projecting upper lip heavy and grim.

Had there been no impregnable steel barrier between them, it is hard
to say which would have triumphed in the end, the ponderous weight and
fury of Last Bull, or the ripping prongs and swift wrath of the moose.
The buffalo charged down the knoll at a thundering gallop; but just
before reaching the fence he checked himself violently. More than once
or twice before had those elastic but impenetrable meshes given him
his lesson, hurling him back with humiliating harshness when he dashed
his bulk against them. He had too lively a memory of past
discomfitures to risk a fresh