HIS WOODLAND HIGHNESS, THE MOOSE 
ville, guide and all-around good fellow, 
ring out through the woods—sometimes 
where a hoar frost glistened in tracks of 
moose by a brooklet’s muddy bank, some- 
times where a light snow-flurry played 
around us as we lay behind a screen of 
young firs or alder bushes hard by a wind- 
ing stream, and sometimes, mayhap, in the 
early hours of morning when we sat with 
but a leafy shelter in a heavy downpour of 
425 
us at Main’s, however, and the sight of a 
spikehorn feeding on lily pads we took as 
a harbinger of good fortune at last. A 
rough catamaran was soon put together 
and on it we poled to a little island three- 
quarters of a mile from the head of the lake. 
Here a half dozen firs were transplanted to 
a position where they would serve as a 
screen or “blind,” and before sunset the 
call from the birch-bark horn echoed over 

JIM MANDERVILLE SALTS THE HIDE 
rain—listening, always listening, for the 
answering grunt of a rambling bull that 
might come to the fatal call. On the 
eleventh day, Dame Fortune so far having 
frowned on us, we sat and debated—and 
debating sat, for over an hour, watching 
a cow moose with two calves feeding not 
200 yards away from us. Cows and spike- 
horns we had seen, but not a head worth 
the crack of a hunter’s rifle. 
After deliberating, Jim decided we should 
pack our duffle and start for Main’s Lake, a 
body of water three miles long—one of the 
largest lakes in the Mirimachi. “It’s 
good moose-ground,” said Jim, “but the 
lake’s so gol darn long and the water so 
deep that the odds are against calling a bull 
within gunshot.” That morning found 
the lake and the ridges beyond the lake to 
the lairs of the wild creatures of the forest. 
My heart thumped as an old bull grunted 
some distance away—the deep, hollow 
grunt that only the old bulls utter. But 
a cow near him, that also kept calling, won 
the day. Disappointed, weary and worn 
we ate a cold meal and were soon tucked 
under the blankets on our cold and lonely 
island. 
Next morning Jim called; next evening, 
and the morning after, with the same result 
—answering grunts, faint and far away, 
and the low moans of cows that lingered 
near and kept their mates back on the hills 
out of the way of harm. 
On the third evening a low reply to the 
call reached our ears, and a form suddenly 
