ently hunted by the method known as "calling." The hunter, with
the aid of a birch-bark megaphone, imitates the long-drawn call of the
cow, to attract the bull. Then, when a bull answers with his guttural
grunt of Oo-ah, Oo-ah, the Indian imitates that sound, too, to give the
first bull the impression that a second is approaching, and thus
provokes the first to hurry forward within range of the hunter's gun.
But when the rutting season is over, the hunting is done by snaring or
stalking or trailing. The moose derives its winter food principally
from browsing upon hardwood twigs, and when the deep snows of midwinter
arrive, he is generally to be found in a "yard" where such growth is
most abundant.
A moose yard is usually composed of a series of gutters from one foot
to eighteen inches wide, intersecting one another at any distance from
ten to fifty feet or more apart, and each gutter being punctured about
every three feet with a post hole in which the moose steps as it walks.
The space between the tracks is generally nothing but deep, soft snow,
anywhere from three to five feet in depth.
Beside the moose tracks that Oo-koo-hoo and I had seen that day was
much silver birch and red willow, and from the signs of freshly cropped
twigs we knew that the moose were not unusually tall, and we knew, too,
from the fact that the tracks were sharply defined as well as from
their ordinary size and that they were not deeply impressed in the
snow, that the moose were those of about three years old.
THE OWL TRACKS MOOSE
That night, as Oo-koo-hoo was in a talkative mood, he told me much
about the hunting of moose, as we sat before our snow-encircled fire in
the still, silent, sombre woods.
"We hunters usually take moose by shooting or snaring them, and the
first thing to do is to find a track, and if it is old, follow it up
until new signs appear. And now, my son, as you may some day want to
hunt moose on your own account, I shall tell you how to trail them and
what to do when you find them. Listen to my words and remember: As
soon as you find a fresh track, look toward the sun to learn the time
of day; for if it is between eight and nine on a winter morning the
moose will be feeding, as it seldom lies down until between ten and
three. If feeding, the track will zig-zag about, and for a time head
mainly up wind, until its feeding is nearly done, then if the wind is
from the right, the moose will turn to the left and ci
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