CHESUNCOOK. 
115 
municate several observations of interest which he 
made, as a white man would have done, though they 
may have leaked out afterward. At another time, when 
we heard a slight crackling of twigs and he landed to 
reconnoitre, he stepped lightly and gracefully, stealing 
through the bushes with the least possible noise, in a 
way in which no white man does, — as it were, finding 
a place for his foot each time. 
About half an hour after seeing the moose, we pur¬ 
sued our voyage up Pine-Stream, and soon, coming to a 
part which was very shoal and also rapid, we took out 
the baggage, and proceeded to carry it round, while Joe 
got up with the canoe alone. We were just completing 
our portage and I was absorbed in the plants, admiring 
the leaves of the aster macrophyllus, ten inches wide, 
and plucking the seeds of the great round-leaved orchis, 
when Joe exclaimed from the stream that he had killed 
a moose. He had found the cow-moose lying dead, but 
quite warm, in the middle of the stream, which was so 
shallow that it rested on the bottom, w r ith hardly a third 
of its body above water. It was about an hour after it 
was shot,' and it was swollen with water. It had run 
about a hundred rods and sought the stream again, cut¬ 
ting off a slight bend. No doubt, a better hunter would 
have tracked it to this spot at once. I was surprised at 
its great size, horse-like, but Joe said it was not a large 
cow-moose. My companion went in search of the calf 
again. I took hold of the ears of the moose, while Joe 
pushed his canoe down stream toward a favorable shore, 
and so we made out, though with some difficulty, its long 
nose frequently sticking in the bottom, to drag it into 
still shallower water. It was a brownish black, or per¬ 
haps a dark iron-gray, on the back and sides, but lighter 
