272 CANADIAN TURF RECOLLECTIONS 



of way. His eyes blazed with wrath at an intruder upon 

 his solitude and his bristling back hair and impatient 

 pawing warned me that the sooner I climbed a tree the 

 better chance I would have of living to relate the story. 

 It did not take me long to climb well up into the nearest 

 one, and I had just reached a safe height when his lord- 

 ship favored me with a few basso profundo samples that 

 would have been by no means pleasing music to listen to 

 in any closer company than from this elevated perch. He 

 walked around in a circle a good many times ; pawed up 

 quantities of earth and favored me with a lot of noise; 

 finally, with a parting roar that boded no good to any- 

 thing he ran foul of, he went away. 



Now, what would the interpreters of the law have 

 decided if I had killed this bull moose that attacked me 

 — not I him — I could easily have killed him, but I had 

 plenty of meat at camp and must confess I'm not partial 

 to bull moose meat of ancient calibre. A two-year-old 

 is as juicy a morsel as ever an epicure rolled over his 

 tongue. It is far more palatable than the choicest venison 

 and superior to tame beef, but it is an article that de- 

 cidedly deteriorates with age, and a mature bull, like my 

 visitor, with a spread of antlers over fifty inches', is a 

 tough customer to grapple with, dead or alive. If you 

 have never had an interview with a mad bull moose, then 

 you have missed seeing a creature mad in every hair of 

 his carcass; his eyes glitter a lurid red; his back hair 

 rises like quills on the fretful porcupine. He is in truth 

 a monarch of the wilds and a most impressive looker he 

 is. The cow moose is an ungainly looking animal, but a 

 big bull moose moving through the woods is a lordly 

 sight. I stood one morning on a rocky point and watched 

 a monster bull and two cows that had been disturbed by 

 some Indians who were hunting in the neighborhood. 

 They were coming along with that swift swinging pacing 

 gait that will carry them a hundred miles in a day when 

 the notion sends them off, and at the sound of the sharp 

 whistle I greeted the leader with, he half raised his head 

 to take a survey of the scene. It would have been a 



