OILPI]S' ON THE MAMMALIA OF NOVA SCOTIA. 115 



smoke of the gun is still lazily floating around, he picks up the 

 flakes of bloody hair, points out th€ blood spattered leaves, the 

 broad trail and the long slides in the wet moss, of the already 

 yielding limbs, and says in his quaint terse broken English, con- 

 trasting so favorably with what I have heard sportsmen call, 

 ^* white fellows' gab," " got it bad, worse sort." As indeed the 

 bull has this time, — right through the lungs cutting the great blood 

 vessels, have both bullets gone. A half hour's search shows you 

 your victim, sitting like a dog on his haunches, his mighty head all 

 too heavy for his trembling limbs, his tongue thrust out, and bloody ' 

 foam snorted from mouth and nostril, in convulsive throbs. This 

 is indeed sport of the highest order — yielding indeed in personal 

 dansrer to tio'er huntins: in the East ; but in endurance, in self- 

 denial, and restraint, in quickness of eye and promptness, and 

 precision of hand, but, above all in wild luxuriance of northern 

 scenery, — either magnificent hemlock or pine, sweet sylvan, lily 

 carpeted lakelet, — whirling rapids caught by a beaver dam, — or 

 vast, purple-berried barren — nobody's home but the owls or the 

 foxes — is second only to the chamois hunting on the Alps. 



There is a third kind of hunting which we will briefly notice — 

 following the deer on snow shoes. When the learned Lescarbot, 

 in 1606, was at Annapolis, he tells us the Indians took him to see 

 a moose pulled down by large dogs about two leagues in the forest. 

 The India: J 5 are gone, the Frenchmen have followed, yet the 

 moose and the big dogs still remain to the Saxon conquerors. 

 From that tiine this manner of chase has been handed down, and 

 two hundred and fifty years afterwards, I have seen the big dogs 

 pull down a moose on this very ground. From the last week in 

 February to the middle of March, the snows from being heated by 

 the warm suns, and frozen at night, acquire a ciTist, hard enough 

 to bear dogs, and men on snow shoes, but which the moose breaks 

 through. Whenever this takes place, a party of settlers form a 

 hunting party. Four or five men with eight or ten dogs, (a half 

 Nev/foundland crossed by a bull dog is the best, combining the 

 broad soft foot of the one with the courage of the other) leave their 

 homes by the dawn of a bright March morning. Each man 

 carries his gun, an axe, and eight or ten pounds of meat and hard 



