Report of Missouri Farmers'' Week. 119 



The moose is a great, magnificent, stately creature, but he 

 is absolutely stupid. He has not the same keen sense of self- 

 preservation many of our other wild animals have. A good 

 hunter can stalk a moose to within 50 yards on his feeding 

 ground and shoot him down as easily as he could shoot a cow 

 out here in a pasture field. The native guides in the moose 

 country frequently call with a birch bark horn, and the moose 

 in answering the call blunders up to within 25 yards of the con- 

 cealed hunter and his guide. At that distance he looks almost 

 as big as a load of hay, and all the hunter has to do is to point 

 the rifle in his direction and pull the trigger. That is not the 

 way the hunters put up the story when they come back; but it is 

 the truth all the same. I have been there and I know. 



The young moose is easily tamed, as well as the fawns of the 

 other members of the deer family, and is frequently broken to 

 drive in harness. 



A man in Roseau, Minn., had one when I was up there 

 years ago that he would frequently hitch up and drive to Pem- 

 bina, 52 miles from there, have him fed in the livery stable, 

 transact his business, then hook up the moose and drive home, 

 a distance of 104 miles for the round trip, and the moose would 

 come in on his long, swinging trot almost as gay and chipper 

 as he was in the morning when he started out. So if any of 

 you people are thinking of buying a driving horse or an auto- 

 mobile, I advise you to get a moose instead. He is a much 

 better roadster and much cheaper to board. 



Two boy friends of mine were photographing birds and 

 their nests some years ago on the Flattop mountains of Colo- 

 rado. I don't know why they call them the Flattop unless it is 

 because they are not flat on top. It is a very rough country. 

 The boys were about a hundred yards apart at one time in the 

 morning and one of them had gone into a clump of bushes to 

 look for the nest of a certain bird which he had seen about there. 

 He heard his friend whistle and knew this meant something, so 

 he slipped out to the edge of his cover just as these two great 

 rams came along. They walked within thirty feet of him. He 

 pressed the bulb and got this beautiful picture. The game 

 went on down the trail and never knew they had been near a 

 human being, and the boy tells me he would not give this pic- 

 ture for the heads of any dozen rams he might have killed and 

 hung up on his walls at home. 



