MOOSE HUNTING IN THE BACKWOODS HI 



other, Joe, was a hunter and trapper, accomplished in all sorts 

 of woodcraft. He possessed the keen eye of an eagle, and that 

 born instinct which enabled him to read the pathless forest as an 

 open book, and confidently interpret every movement of unseen 

 animals. 



\ Bronze-coloured men, they were mostly silent and with emotion- 

 less- faces, save when the fierce joy of the chase burned in their 

 bosoms. Yet they are not heroes, for they have many human 

 weaknesses. One is for ' fire- water ', which makes demons of them 

 for the time being. Another, even more serious, is an uncontrollable 

 excitability in the presence of big game, which is an incomprehen- 

 sible thing to the white man, seeing that long custom should have 

 made them cool in the presence of moose, or caribou, or bear. 



But let me give them their due. These two men had fought 

 their way with birch-bark canoe up the fierce rapids of the Nepisiquit 

 River, and set me down at the lower end of a long, canal-like reach 

 of the upper stream, a hundred miles from the village at the river's 

 mouth. 



With this most primitive, yet most effective, of all contrivances 

 for alternate lake and stream navigation, they had braved the 

 impetuous river, and with spike-pole and paddle had triumphed 

 over its troubled and angry waters. 



We made camp on an interesting spot, where the river took a 

 great bend to the north, towards a range of mountains from whose 

 loins sprang two other noble streams the Tobique and the 

 Miramichi. 



After a day spent in the construction of camp and of such luxuries 

 as table and benches and sideboard (not omitting the hunter's 

 ambrosial bed, made of the tender tips of the balsam fir, spread six 

 inches deep), we started upstream, with three days' rations, for 

 Portage Brook Meadows, where Joe was quite sure we would meet 

 big game. After twelve miles of smooth river, often split into a 

 dozen channels by small islands, and presenting most charming 

 vistas, we drew our canoe ashore on a narrow beach of gravel, just 

 below where a mountain torrent stormed into the channel of the 

 river. Following for half a dozen, miles a forest trail, which was 

 well indented in places with the sharp, triangular track of the moose, 

 and also that of the black bear (so like the impress of a human foot), 

 we emerged on a plain with a cup-like setting in an amphitheatre 

 of bare hills. A glance at intersecting moose paths, where the soil 

 was cut up like a cattle corral, showed us at once that we had not 

 journeyed here in vain. 



After building a shelter at some distance from the meadows, 

 for fear of alarminer anv wanderine moose, we cooked our suooer and 



