120 MOOSE HUNTING IN NOVA SCOTIA 



as if a stick were being drawn sharply across an iron paling ; now 

 there is a shower of falling debris as the game in a fit of fury shreds 

 bark and foliage from opposing branches ; now a battle with some 

 gaunt fire-killed pine stem suggests the hurling of a cartload of 

 rocks to the ground. ' Biggest row of all ' occurs when some rival 

 bull is encountered and the mossy swamp is torn up as if by the 

 ploughshare,, while two huge bodies go swaying this way and 

 that in doubtful and protracted conflict. 



Moose hunting is pursued at the best season of the year in the 

 Canadian forest, when the air is bracing and the skies usually bright 

 and clear. The beauty of the changing woods it is hard to exaggerate. 

 It is thus described in McGregor's British America : 



' Two or three frosty nights in the decline of autumn transform 

 the boundless verdure of a whole empire into every possible tint 

 of brilliant scarlet, rich violet, every shade of bronze and brown, 

 vivid crimson and glittering yellow. The stern inexorable fir tribes 

 alone maintain their sombre green. All others on mountains 

 or in valleys burst into the most glorious vegetable beauty, and 

 exhibit one of the most enchanting and splendid panoramas on 

 earth/ 



Both the deer and native hunter strangely enthrall the imagin- 

 ation. The moose, in his whole make-up, seems to belong to a 

 remote and antediluvian period of time. The Micmac Indian, 

 carrying one along the waterways in his curiously fairy-like craft, 

 an invention for lake and river travel which has never been equalled, 

 strikes one as the ideal savage in his primitive state, and as an 

 equally puzzling anachronism. Time seems to have run backwards 

 and fetched the age of stone among these glorious vistas of boundless 

 dark-green forest, breezy hills, and bright, wood-embosomed lakes. 



When the moose has once heard a call which attracts him, he 

 can travel to the exact spot from a distance of at least two miles 

 without a repetition of the sound. No more cunning or wary animal 

 exists in the American forests, nor any of greater strength and 

 endurance and of nobler and more impressive appearance. Startling 

 is the giant stride of his stilt-like limbs, enabling him to get away 

 from danger at a tremendous pace even across the face of country 

 strewn with seemingly impassable tangles of fallen timber. Mar- 

 vellous is the keenness of his capacious nostril, up which a man can 

 thrust his arm, while his hearing is wonderfully acute. Not the 

 slightest noise out of the common can escape the great yellow ears, 

 incessantly poised to catch the faintest signal of danger. Even 

 on a wild and windy day, when the trees and dry limbs are cracking 

 in the gale, should the hunter snap ever so small a stick, the deer 

 will start at the sound, at once distinguishing it from the ordinary 



