THE MOOSE DEER. 53 
into painful floundcrings through deep snow-drifts, or yet 
more painful plungings and breakings through the sur- 
face crusted with glassy ice, when the trees on which to 
browse are few and far between, no sooner do the first 
snows begin to fall tham the Moose resort to one of two 
plans, each equally ingenious and equally adapted to the 
nature of the ground for which they are intended. If a 
bull intends wintering by himself, as sometimes occurs, 
wherefore we know not; he seeks out some hill, and 
crosses and recrosses it a hundred times from summit to 
base, and from base to summit, and then girdles it with 
a hundred of parallels, intersecting the perpendiculars, 
all of slowly made and deeply trodden foot-paths, 
trampled down and beaten again, after each fresh suc- 
ceeding snow-fall, till the whole snowy hill is cut up and 
checkered into a net-work of firm, hard-trotted paths, 
along which he can travel at whatever pace he lists, 
whether lazily lounge along to browse on the succulent 
shoots, or pounding away at his hard swinging trot, with 
his wide-spread hoofs crackling at every track, in tull 
flight from his pursuers, at a rate of eight or nine miles 
an hour, with the advantage still of feeding as he goes, 
snatching a juicy morsel from every favorite bush as he 
dashes along. 
When the Moose adopts this mode of wintering, unless 
the party of hunters is sufficiently strong to post a num- 
ber of persons on different stands along the Moose-paths 
to intercept him as he tracks their labyrinthine ways, it 
