Moose -Hunting in Canada. 197 



noises that filled my head. It is extraordinary how small noises 

 become magnified when the ear is kept at a great tension for any 

 length of time, and how the head becomes filled with all kinds of 

 fictitious sounds ; and it is very remarkable also how utterly impos- 

 sible it is to distinguish between a loud noise uttered at a distance 

 and a scarcely audible sound close by. After listening very in- 

 tently amidst the profound silence of a quiet night in the forest for 

 an hour or so, the head becomes so surcharged with blood, owing, I 

 presume, to all the faculties being concentrated on a single sense, that 

 one seems to hear distant voices, the ringing of bells, and all kinds 

 of strange and impossible noises. A man becomes so nervously 

 alive to the slightest disturbance of the almost awful silence of a 

 still night in the woods, that the faintest sound — the cracking of 

 a minute twig, or the fall of a leaf, even at a great distance — will 

 make him almost jump out of his skin. He is also apt to make 

 the most ludicrous mistakes. Toward morning, about day-break, 

 I have frequently mistaken the first faint buzz of some minute fly, 

 within a foot or so of my ear, for the call of moose two or three 

 miles off. 



About ten o'clock, the Indian gave it up in despair and came 

 down the tree ; we rolled ourselves up in our rugs, pulled the hoods 

 of our blanket coats over our heads, and went to sleep. I awoke liter- 

 ally shaking with cold. It was still the dead of night, and the stars 

 were shining with intense brilliancy, to my great disappointment, for 

 I was in hopes of seeing the first streaks of dawn. It was freezing 

 very hard, far too hard for me to think of going to sleep again. So 

 I roused the Indian, and suggested that he should try another call or 

 two. 



Accordingly, we stole down to the edge of the little point of wood 

 in which we had ensconced ourselves, and in a few minutes the forest 

 was reechoing the plaintive notes of the moose. Not an answer, 

 not a sound — utter silence, as if all the world were dead ! broken 

 suddenly and horribly by a yell that made the blood curdle in one's 

 veins. It was the long, quavering, human, but unearthly scream of 

 a loon on the distant lake. After what seemed to be many hours, 

 but what was in reality but a short time, the first indications of dawn 

 revealed themselves in the rising of the morning star, and the slightest 

 possible paling of the eastern sky. The cold grew almost unbearable. 

 13* 



