RECREATION. 



SPRINTING FOR COVER. 



skin of his mother. It was truly pa- 

 thetic to note the little fellow's grief 

 at this. He would smell of the skin, 

 lie down on it, put his nose between 

 his feet and cry like a baby. Then 

 he would get up and walk around 

 it, nose it and caress it with his paws, 

 and apparently try to wake his moth- 

 er into life. The ordeal was so try- 

 ing to him and to us that we finally 

 quit opening this skin when we got 

 into camp. We rolled it up tightly in 

 heavy canvas and as soon as we 

 reached camp we put it up in some 

 tree where Ben could not find it. 

 Still, he would search through the 

 skins for his mother, and eventually 

 we had to keep them all out of his 

 sight. 1 have never seen, in all my 

 study of wild animals, anything half 

 so touching or so heartrending as 

 Ben's grief for his dead mother. 

 When Ben was about a month old, 



we killed a moose. We threw the 

 green skin over one of the packs, for 

 a few days, with the flesh side up. 

 It dried in the shape of the pack, 

 which, as you know, is an oval. One 

 night we threw this off carelessly, 

 and it lit with the edges on the ground 

 forming a complete house, or tent, 

 so to speak. When Ben was taken 

 off his horse he found this, raised 

 one end, crawled under, and from that 

 day to the time when we completed 

 our trip, late in the fall, the moose 

 skin was his tent. He knew it, and 

 apparently became as much at home 

 under it as any of us in our tents. 

 If any unusual disturbance were 

 made about camp, if a dog barked, 

 or if a short were fired, if a horse 

 neighed, or if any one of us, or a 

 stranger, came suddenly into camp, 

 Ben would make a dive for his tent, 

 grab one end of it with a forefoot, 



