THE MOOSE DEEE. 53 



.'nful flounderings tlirougli deep snow-drifts, or yet 



gainful plongings and breakings through the sur- 



crusted with glassy ice, when the trees on which to 



>wse are few and far between, no sooner do the first 

 snows begin to fall than the Moose resort to one of two 

 plans, each equally ingenious and equally adapted to the 

 nature of the ground for which they are intended. If a 

 bull intends wintering by himself, as sometimes occurs, 

 where'fore we know not ; he seeks out some hill, and 

 crosses and recrosses it a hundred times from summit to 

 base, and from base to summit, and then girdles it with 

 a hundred of parallels, intersecting the perpendiculars, 

 all of slowly made and deeply trodden foot-paths, 

 trampled down and beaten again, after each fresh suc- 

 ceeding snow-fall, till the whole snowy hill is cut up and 

 checkered into a net-work of firm, hard-trotted paths, 

 along which he can travel at whatever pace he lists, 

 whether lazily lounge along to browse on the succulent 

 shoots, or pounding away at his hard swinging trot, with 

 his wide-spread hoofs crackling at every track, in lull 

 flight from his pursuers, at a rate of eight or nine miles 

 an hour, with the advantage still of feeding as he goes, 

 snatching a juicy morsel from every favorite bush as he 

 dashes along. 



When the Moose adopts this mode of wintering, unless 

 the party of hunters is sufficiently strong to post a num- 

 ber of persons on different stands along the Moose-paths 

 to intercept him as he tracks their labyrinthine ways, it 



