FURTHER DAYS. 259 



stop and wait. The smell of the bull was quite per- 

 ceptible even to the human nostrils, but all sounds had 

 ceased, and it was evident that both animals had become 

 suspicious and were listening. The silence was broken 

 by what we imagined to be the movement of the cow, 

 which had circled round with the manifest intention of 

 finding out the facts of her surroundings by getting to 

 windward of us. At this moment we heard the bull 

 again behind a thick bush within thirty yards, for the 

 cow must have communicated her alarm to him, and at 

 once there followed a series of crashes as the couple 

 decamped. Abandoning all precautions, we ran forward 

 in the hope of cutting off the moose, but failed to catch 

 sight of them, as their tracks showed us they had turned 

 and escaped over a wooded ridge, leaving us to retrace 

 our footsteps sorrowfully to the road, along which we 

 followed the buck-boards, reaching camp long after dark. 

 We were both much disappointed at our failure, the 

 more especially as, had the moose been in almost any 

 other part of the forest save the thicket into which they 

 had wandered, I should almost certainly have got a 

 shot ; and the matter was made still worse by the fact 

 that, as far as we could judge by the marks that the bull 

 in his flight had made with his horns on the trees and 

 bushes, he must have carried antlers with a very fine 

 spread. 



We marched next day from the Mort, or death of 

 the waters, where we parted with all the buck-boards 

 but one, the monotony of the morning being only 

 broken by the shooting of a few Canada grouse which 

 we killed with a toy-like *22 rifle. On arriving at the 

 river where Ed and I had waited for our waggoner the 

 previous year, we found my old camp tenanted by a 



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