102 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS 
sniff the frozen wind, blowing down from those 
far summits, or dreams that filled his dark, un- 
blinking eyes? At any rate, he plunged down 
the mountainside, nipping a few twigs of striped 
maple for breakfast as he went, and followed the 
banks of a brawling little river that was foaming 
southward—up-stream. 
That next summer, from a camp in the wilder- 
ness of the lower Green Mountains, moose were 
reported, the first reported in the State for many 
years. There were scoffers who said it couldn’t 
be so. But these moose were shy. Nobody was 
chased up a tree, nobody was challenged on any 
of the few rough roads which cross the range. 
It was evident that Old Bill, penetrating deeper 
into a wilderness where men were fewer, was him- 
self lapsing into a condition of greater wildness. 
That next autumn deer hunters up in the big 
range to the east of Manchester, Vermont, the 
beautiful valley village where the golfers revel, 
reported “ a huge black deer, bigger than a cow.” 
They fired at this strange “ deer,” but they didn’t 
hit it. ‘That cow moose escaped, to call across the 
brown mirror of some mountain tarn, pungent 
