ain, he continued his
course through the woods.

As he proceeded, the timber became thinner. The scrub-pines gave place
to poplar-trees, with here and there an undergrowth of willows. The
trees stood far apart, and the willows grew only in clumps or "islands,"
so that the view was nearly open for many hundred yards around. Basil
walked on with all the silence and watchfulness of a true "still"
hunter--for, among backwoodsmen, this species of hunting is so called.
He ascended a low hill, and keeping a tree in front of him, looked
cautiously over its crest. Before him, and stretching from the bottom of
the hill, was a level tract of considerable extent.

It was bounded on one side by the edge of the lake, and on all the
others by thin woods, similar to those through which the hunter had been
for some time travelling. Here and there, over the plain, there stood
trees, far apart from each other, and in nowise intercepting the view
for a mile or more. The ground was clear of underwood, except along the
immediate edge of the lake, which was fringed by a thicket of willows.

As Basil looked over the hill, he espied a small group of animals near
the interior border of the willows. He had never seen animals of the
same species before, but the genus was easily told. The tall antlered
horns, that rose upon the head of one of them, showed that they were
deer of some kind; and the immense size of the creature that bore them,
together with his ungainly form, his long legs, and ass-like ears, his
huge head with its overhanging lip, his short neck with its standing
mane, and, above all, the broad palmation of the horns themselves, left
Basil without any doubt upon his mind that the animals before him were
moose-deer--the largest, and perhaps the most awkward, of all the deer
kind.

The one with the antlers was the male or bull-moose. The others were the
female and her two calves of the preceding year. The latter were still
but half-grown, and, like the female, were without the "branching horns"
that adorned the head of the old bull. They were all of a dark-brown
colour--looking blackish in the distance--but the large one was darker
than any of the others.

Basil's heart beat high, for he had often heard of the great moose, but
now saw it for the first time. In his own country it is not found, as it
is peculiarly a creature of the cold regions, and ranges no farther to
the south than the northern edge of the United States territory