THE MOOSE IN INDIAN MYTH 249 



Thoreau lacked knowledge of the Indian tongue, 

 and he lacked sympathetic interest in the subject 

 as well, so he gathered from his Indian guides 

 little to add to the published folk-lore of the red 

 men. In his Maine Woods Thoreau relates the 

 circumstances of a visit which he paid in 1853 to 

 Neptune, then, at 89 years of age, the head of the 

 Penobscot tribe. The old Indian gave an account 

 of the origin of the moose, as follows: "Moose 

 was whale once. Away down Merrimack way a 

 whale came ashore in a shallow bay. Sea went out 

 and left him, and he came up on land a moose. 

 What made them know he was a whale was that, 

 at first, before he began to run in bushes, he had 

 no bowels inside, but just like jelly fish."^ 



Campbell Hardy also quotes Micmacs in Nova 

 Scotia as saying that the moose originally came 

 from the sea. They believed that when too persist- 

 ently hunted the animals return to the ocean as 

 their natural refuge.^ Moose frequently swim 

 long distances. If a moose should be seen by the 

 unreasoning Indians swimming ashore from some 

 distant but unseen island, it would not be strange 

 if the red men should conclude that the mysterious 

 animal was amphibious. And if the creatures 



5 The Maine Woods, p. 200. 



^ Sporting Adventures in the New World (London, 1855), vol. i., p. 178. 



