ist to tackle when she was in earnest.
This one seemed to him to be very much in earnest. He hesitated and
stopped his rush when about halfway down the bank. Caution began to
cool his vengeful humor. After all, it seemed there was really no luck
for him in a fawn-colored calf. He'd try a red one or a
black-and-white one next time. As he came to this conclusion, the
indignant moose came to shore. Whereupon, he wheeled with a grunt and
made off, just a little faster, perhaps, than was _quite_ consistent
with his dignity, into the darkness of the fir thickets. The moose,
with the coarse hair standing up stiffly along her neck, shook herself
and stood glaring after him.

"Through the summer and autumn the calf found it altogether delightful
being a moose. As the cold began to bite her hair began to thicken up
a protection against it; but, nevertheless, with her thin, delicate
skin she felt it painfully. After the first heavy snowfall she had a
lot of trouble to get food, having to paw down through the snow for
every mouthful of withered grass. When the snow got to be three or
four feet deep, and her foster mother, along with a wide-antlered bull,
three other cows, and a couple of youngsters had trodden out a 'moose
yard' with its maze of winding alleys, her plight grew sore. All along
the bottom edges of these alleys she nibbled the dead grass and dry
herbage, and she tried to browse, like her companions, on the twigs of
poplar and birch. But the insufficient, unnatural food and the sharp
cold hit her hard. She would huddle up beneath her mother's belly or
crowd down among the rest of the herd for warmth, but long before
Christmas she had become a mere bag of bones."

The Child shivered sympathetically. But, remembering the Snowhouse
Baby, he could not help inquiring:

"Why didn't she make herself a house in the snow?"

"Didn't know enough!" answered Uncle Andy shortly. "Did you ever hear
of any of the cow kind having sense enough for that? Well, it's a
pretty sure thing, you may take it, that she would never have pulled
through the winter if something unexpected hadn't happened to change
her luck.

"It was the farmer--the one who had owned her mother, and who, of
course, really owned her, too.

"With his hired man and a team of two powerful backwoods horses and a
big sled for axes and food, he had come back into the woods to cut the
heavy spruce timber which grew around the lake. A half-mile back fr