412 BIG GAME SHOOTING 
you heard a bough break several hundred yards below you, 
and a few minutes later you saw the warm lair from which an 
elk had stolen away ; but you never saw him, never even heard 
him, until he was well out of range. 
‘Hang the luck !’ you mutter ; in another hour the wind that 
rises about noon will get up and then the odds will be doubled 
against you. Will the luck never change? Well, yes. Just as 
you are deciding for the twentieth time that you never will 
hunt elk again, there is a long hollow whistle among the pines 
below you. The whistle is faint and far off, and if you had not 
been sitting down and at rest you would never have heard it: 
You have, asa matter of fact, failed to hear two or three similar 
whistles during the morning—whistles-which a better woods- 
man would have heard, and which even you would never have 
missed had you taken Sam’s advice and gone slow, See 
down once in a while to listen.’ 
You are not likely to see a motionless stag when you are 
scrambling through the brush, or to hear a bull’s stealthy tread 
upon the trail, or his distant call, whilst you are forcing your 
way through a barricade of burnt timber. 
Well, luck, which after all counts for more in hunting than 
all the skill and experience of the best hunter—luck has favoured 
you at last, and there the whistle comes again, and directly after 
it another, followed this time by deep, hoarse grunts, so deep 4 
and hoarse and so close to you that, as Sam puts it, ‘ your hair 4 
almost lifts your cap off your head.’ That last bull was within — 
five hundred yards of you, and there can be no doubt about his — 
size. Creeping forward, you look cautiously over the brow of — 
a little ridge on to a flat, where amongst the black, burnt stems — 
of the dead pines the tall jungle of fireweed is vivid with every — 
shade from fresh green to royal purple, scarlet, and orange, and — 
even as you look, without asound, a great head is pushed out a 
from a bunch of quaking asp. For what seems to you an age ~ 
the cow stares straight at you, and then, when you are almost 4 
in despair, moves quietly into the open followed by her calf. ~ 
In another moment the bull appears on the cow’s trail, without 
Te ee OTST era Re 
