56 AMERICAN GAME. 



Rifles are hunted up, and bullets run, snow-shoes are 

 buckled on, and the green-horns excite great sport for 

 the old stagers, by kicking their own shins, and tumbling 

 on their own noses at every second stride. Blankets, and 

 baskets of provision, not forgetting the ammunition, the 

 spirit-flasks, the tobacco-pipes, and the tea-kettle, are 

 packed upon the tobogins, or Indian sledges, made of 

 light wood, to be drawn by the red-hunters through the 

 open forests, and then away for the wild, broad, bound- 

 less snow-clad wilderness the hard tramp by day, the 

 blazing camp-fire, the leafy bed, the fragrant pipe, and 

 the flowing bowl at nigiit, and the sleep as sound and as 

 warm beside the roaring pyre, with an untented heaven 

 above, and a temperature 40 degrees below you, as 

 though it were taken in a silken chamber, pillowed on 

 down and canopied with velvet. 



And now the yard is reached, and one, or perhaps two 

 deliberate and murderous shots are fired, and then away 

 through the treacherous snow-drifts, away over the de- 

 ceitful ice-crusts flounder the huge beasts at their speed 

 in mortal terror. Away, hard on their traces, flying on 

 fleet snow-shoes, follow the impetuous and shouting 

 hunters. 



Sometimes for days that headlong chase endures, the 

 weary beasts and worn-out men, lying up or encamping, 

 perhaps not a quarter of a mile asunder, when light fails 

 them and they can run no longer, and with the break of 

 . dawn renewing the wild career for life or death, for de- 



