326 THE TRAPPER. 



driven to us to be slaughtered, but our greatest pleasure 

 is to match our cunning and skill against the wonderful 

 instinct of the wild animals of the woods, and by untiring 

 patience, by hard work, and a perfect knowledge of their 

 habits and ways of life, to outmatch and capture them. 

 I don't know that I have ever enjoyed anything so much 

 as this first evening's paddle on our lake, on " my " lake, I 

 may say, for this noble sheet of water and the surround- 

 ing forests for 20 miles were my own for all practical 



purposes, as much as the Duke of 's deer forest in 



the Highlands belongs to his grace ; mine, not by right of 

 my enormous wealth, it is true, but my enjoyment of it 

 not the less sweet on this account. 



Twenty brooks and little rivers watering twenty little 

 valleys, discharge into my lake. As we pass the mouth 

 of one of them, Andrew's keen eye detects a beaver, but 

 on this our first evening we want nobler game, and spare 

 his life for the moment. Pursuing our way swiftly and 

 noiselessly along the edge of the lake, we hear a splashing. 

 " Me think-'em moose," whispers Andrew, whose practised 

 ear tells him it is not the splashing of ducks or of beaver. 

 Our canoe glides through the water like a ghostly craft 

 towards the point from which the noise seemed to pro- 

 ceed. Hardly does the bow round the point when we see, 

 in a little bay covered with water-lilies, a cow moose 

 standing up to her hocks in water. Andrew instantly 

 plants his paddle in the bottom, and holds the canoe as 

 steady as a rock, and shooting close over Toma's head, I 

 mortally wound the moose. Toma finishes her with his 

 single barrel, and the reports of our guns echo and rever- 

 berate round the lake, till it would seem that we were in 



