LETTER XIX. 223 



was ours still, I argued ; but who knew what 

 surface ice, sudden thaw, or fresh snowfall to- 

 morrow might bring ? No, Jocko ; on, on, my 

 friend ; even a moose cannot travel for ever with- 

 out resting. We soon found this was so, for in the 

 deep woods round the lake, two or three knolls 

 bore traces of the mid-day siestas, here of one, 

 there of a gang, of the great bulls. Unfor- 

 tunately we found, too, that some of the beasts 

 had got our wind and gone. In these balsam 

 labyrinths, the moose seemed all round us, and it 

 was impossible to avoid alarming some of them. 

 With the obstinacy of my race, I insisted on 

 sticking to the bull whose track I had first struck 

 at 8 a.m., and as luck would have it, at about 

 5 p.m. I was rewarded. Creeping wearily to the 

 top of a knoll, I saw him standing below me in 

 the twilight, still as a stone, so still that it 

 seemed almost incredible that the great creature 

 which must have been moving within a couple of 

 hundred yards of me was really flesh and blood, 

 and not some monstrous forest shadow. There 

 is only one beast in the world which shares with 

 the moose that weird and old-world look which 

 is so peculiar to him, that rough, striking, though 

 uncouth outline of figure which suggests that he 

 and the Rocky Mountain goat are two of Nature's 

 first-born, made in the days when the gray world 



