142 
THE MAINE WOODS. 
Such were his distinctions. Both can move their horns. 
The broad flat blades are covered with hair, and are so 
soft, when the animal is alive, that you can run a knife 
through them. They regard it as a good or bad sign, if 
the horns turn this way or that. His caribou horns had 
been gnawed by mice in his wigwam, but he thought that 
the horns neither of the moose nor of the caribou were 
ever gnawed while the creature was alive, as some have 
asserted. An Indian, whom I met after this at Oldtown, 
who had carried about a bear and other animals of Maine 
to exhibit, told me that thirty years ago there were not 
so many moose in Maine as now; also, that the moose 
were very easily tamed, and would come back when once 
fed, and so would deer, but not caribou. The Indians of 
this neighborhood are about as familiar with the moose 
as we are with the ox, having associated with them for 
so many generations. Father Rasies, in his Dictionary 
of the Abenaki Language, gives not only a word for the 
male moose, ( oianbe ,) and another for the female, ( [kerar ,) 
but for the bone which is in the middle of the heart of 
the moose (!), and for his left hind-leg. 
There were none of the small deer up there; they are 
more common about the settlements. One ran into the 
city of Bangor two years before, and jumped through a 
window of costly plate glass, and then into a mirror, 
where it thought it recognized one of its kind, and out 
again, and so on, leaping over the heads of the crowd, 
until it was captured. This the inhabitants speak of as 
the deer that went a-shopping. The last-mentioned In¬ 
dian spoke of the lunxus or Indian devil, (which I take to 
be the cougar, and not the Gulo luscus ,) as the only animal 
in Maine which man need fear; it would follow a man, 
and did not mind a fire. He also said, that beavers 
