FURTHER DAYS. 241 



At this camp we left our last buck-board with the horse 

 and man belonging to it, and had I only been able to fore- 

 see the experience through which the man whom we had 

 named Charlie because of the extraordinary resemblance he 

 bore to a mutual friend was shortly to pass, I would very 

 gladly have stayed with him. Some days after the French- 

 men had taken their departure, Charlie awoke early one 

 morning, and looking out from the ruinous log hut which 

 he and the horse occupied, he saw a very fine bull moose, 

 attracted, as he opined, by the presence of the horse, walk- 

 ing slowly across the clearing towards the hut. Charlie 

 appears for a time to have been interested in the " gros 

 gros orignal" but later felt' puzzled what to do, as the 

 moose continued to come nearer and nearer, and Charlie 

 had no weapon but a revolver, though, as he explained to 

 us afterwards, " If I had had a permission, I could have 

 killed him with that, he was so close/' The upshot of the 

 incident was tame, for Charlie frightened the moose away, 

 though he assured us " had it not fled when I shouted, I 

 should have fired, even without a permission." Questioned 

 as to the size of the bull, the repeated, " Gros, gros ! " and 

 his story was borne out by the tracks of a large moose that 

 Ed and I found on the other side of the river. 



However, we were blind to this impending event as we 

 bade good-bye to Charlie and made our way up the river 

 and across the lake, arriving a little before sunset at my 

 camp of the previous year, from which Ed and I had shot 

 three caribou. That night we were attacked by myriads 

 of biting insects, but whether they came out of the grass 

 on which we lay, or were an importation we brought with 

 us from the last outlying points of civilisation, we never 

 knew. 



On the following morning it was agreed that Ross, Ed, 

 and I should hunt the farther part of the ground, leaving 

 Howard, with Gagnon, on the nearer of the two look-outs. 



