i8o HUNTING CAMPS. 



" Heading to camp ! Are you sure ? " 



" Yes/' replied Ed. 



" Then we'll never see that moose again, Ed ! " 



"Why? How?" 



" Because I made him out to be heading the other way, 

 and my shots must have passed in front of him ! " 



" Oh, why were you not turned round before he came 

 in ? He was our moose ; that's the meanest thing ever 

 happened to me in the woods ! " 



Well, there was no help for it ; regrets were useless, 

 and without more talk we retired to rest. I do not think 

 either of us slept much. With the first dawn we were in 

 the canoe, and before it was light enough for proper ex- 

 amination were upon the scene of the fiasco. It is enough 

 to say that we found all three bullets in a pine tree. 



So much for misfortune. I have described these two 

 incidents with the idea of showing that moose-calling has 

 its difficulties, the chief being the semi or more than semi 

 darkness in which the shot is taken. Frequently the animal 

 must be fired at when two or three hundred yards away, as 

 he so rarely answers the call until after the gloaming, when 

 every instant makes the light less favourable, and to shoot 

 the moment the bull appears is very important and necessary. 



Perhaps it was disappointments of this kind that origi- 

 nally suggested jacking, by which trick a moose can be shot 

 on the darkest night. Yet I am not sure that success in 

 big-game shooting, in retrospect, is so interesting as occa- 

 sional failure. Finality kills imagination, and it is ever 

 the finest head whose horns we never measure. 



Imagine now a beautiful afternoon in another late 

 October. On the right runs an historic river, on the left 

 scattered patches of pine and juniper dot a tawny ridge, 

 the leaves are turning, for Kabibonokka had 



" Painted all the leaves with scarlet, 

 Stained the leaves with red and yellow." 



