smoke curl upward from the burning heap, he heard the call of a
moose to its mate or its challenge to a rival. The sound thrilled him as
no sound had for years. He longed to answer the summons. Accordingly,
one day he made a trip into the borders of the wilderness where a group
of slender birch trees huddled. Like Hiawatha he stripped one of a
section of its bark.

The next evening found him seated comfortably on the top rail of the
snake fence which separated his upland pasture from the closely
pressing forest. The sun had set, and a mellow twilight with a tang of
frost in the air was fast obscuring the black stumps and welding
together the clumps of blueberries and wild raspberries.

The man sat so still that gradually the small inhabitants of the
wilderness went fearlessly about their hunting or playing. If they
noticed him at all, perhaps they mistook him for a stake of the fence
upon which he sat. As he watched dreamily, the dusk grew deeper and the
first stars came out, one by one. Then the harvest moon appeared,
peeping over the tops of the firs and finally riding clear in the dark
sky, throwing a mysterious radiance over the clumps of juniper in the
pasture and trying vainly to penetrate the thick stand of second-growth
fir, spruce and maple at the edge of the forest.

Now the Hermit slowly raised to his lips the birch-bark trumpet which he
had fashioned. The next moment the brooding silence of the night was
startled by a harsh roar. The Hermit chuckled softly. "If there is a
moose within a mile he can't help hearing that," he thought.

He waited, his heart beating fast with excitement. The echoes rolled
for a moment among the hills, then died away, leaving the silence
unbroken.

Again he raised the trumpet to his lips and sent out a call into the
night. This time the sound had scarcely died away when an answering
challenge rolled from a pair of great lungs back in the wilderness. In
his excitement the man almost lost his perch upon the fence. "That's an
old bull, sure enough. Probably the same one that broke up the hunter's
camp," he said, speaking aloud, as is often the custom of those living
alone.

He listened a moment. Hearing no further sound, once more he raised his
trumpet, this time giving a low, seductive call. The effect was
immediate and unexpected. A short distance back in the forest there came
the crash of trampled undergrowth and, the next moment, a huge black
bulk detached itself from the