THE MOOSE AND HIS HISTORY ii 



sixteen arrows out of twenty into the target, and 

 the ordinary musket twelve balls only."'^ 



The Indian's bow was not so long as the English- 

 man's, but he was very skilled in its use. Denys 

 wrote from Acadia in 1672 that its effective range 

 against moose was forty-five or fifty paces, a 

 range which offered less difHculty to the stealthy, 

 soft-footed Indian than to us who are accustomed 

 to walk on city pavements. 



The snares and pitfalls devised by the Indians, 

 and the barriers erected to guide driven game into 

 slaughter pens, as described by the earliest Euro- 

 pean visitors to America, show a marked resem- 

 blance to the contrivances in use for the same 

 purposes in medieval Europe. Necessity is the 

 mother of invention, and we need not wonder if 

 similar necessities produced similar inventions. 



The narratives of the earliest European ex- 

 plorers in America are given in the great folios 

 which Samuel Purchas published in 1625 under 

 the title Purchas His Pilgrimes. Quoting Sir 

 Ferdinando Gorges he thus describes the moose: 



"There is also a certaine Beast, that the Natives 

 call a Mosse, hee is as big bodied as an Oxe. . . . 

 His taile is longer then the Single"'* of a Deere, 



The Gun and Its Development, sixth edition (1897), p. 12. 

 »3 Ubi supra, vol. ii., pp. 420-423. ^4 The tail of a buck. 



