WILD ANIMALS AND MEN 221 



victor walks off with his hard-won spouse. The young — either 

 one or two, but generally two after the mother's first experience 

 — are born in May, in some secluded spot, and the calves soon 

 begin to follow their mother about, and they follow her, too, 

 into their second year. Horns begin to grow on the young 

 bull before he is a year old, but they are mere knobs until he 

 is a year and a half old, when spikes form; by the third year 

 he is supplied with antlers. The perfect antlers of a big 

 bull sometimes measure seventy inches across, yet every 

 winter — in January or February — the horns are shed. During 

 the mating season moose are frequently hunted by the method 

 known as "calling. " The hunter, with the aid of a birch-bark 

 megaphone, imitates the long-drawn call of the cow, to attract 

 the bull. Then, when a bull answers with his guttural grunt of 

 Oo-ah, Oo-ah, the Indian imitates that sound, too, to give the 

 first bull the impression that a second is approaching, and thus 

 provokes the first to hurry forward within range of the hunter's 

 gun. But when the rutting season is over, the hunting is done 

 by snaring or stalking or trailing. The moose derives its 

 winter food principally from browsing upon hardwood twigs, 

 and when the deep snows of midwinter arrive, he is generally to 

 be found in a "yard" where such growth is most abundant. 



A moose yard is usually composed of a series of gutters from 

 one foot to eighteen inches wide, intersecting one another at 

 any distance from ten to fifty feet or more apart, and each 

 gutter being punctured about every three feet with a post hole 

 in which the moose steps as it walks. The space between the 

 tracks is generally nothing but deep, soft snow, anywhere from 

 three to five feet in depth. 



Beside the moose tracks that Oo-koo-hoo and I had seen that 

 day was much silver birch and red willow, and from the signs of 

 freshly cropped twigs we knew that the moose were not un- 

 usually tall, and we knew, too, from the fact that the tracks were 

 sharply defined as well as from their ordinary size and that they 



