230 
THE MAINE WOODS. 
Caucomgomoc Fiver, were serenaded by wolves while 
moose-hunting by moonlight. It was a sudden burst, as 
if a hundred demons had broke loose, — a startling sound 
enough, which, if any, would make your hair stand on 
end, and all was still again. It lasted but a moment, and 
you’d have thought there were twenty of them, when 
probably there were only two or three. They heard it 
twice only, and they said that it gave expression to the 
wilderness which it lacked before. I heard of some men 
who, while skinning a moose lately in those woods, were 
driven off from the carcass by a pack of wolves, which 
ate it up. 
This of the loon — I do not mean its laugh, but its 
looning — is a long-drawn call, as it were, sometimes 
singularly human to my ear, — hoo-hoo-ooooo , like the 
hallooing of a man on a very high key, having thrown 
his voice into his head. I have heard a sound exactly 
like it when breathing heavily through my own nostrils, 
half awake at ten at night, suggesting my affinity to the 
loon; as if its language were but a dialect of my own, 
after all. Formerly, when lying awake at midnight in 
those woods, I had listened to hear some words or syl¬ 
lables of their language, but it chanced that I listened in 
vain until I heard the cry of the loon. I have heard it 
occasionally on the ponds of my native town, but there 
its wildness is not enhanced by the surrounding scenery. 
I was awakened at midnight by some heavy, low-fly¬ 
ing bird, probably a loon, flapping by close over my 
head, along the shore. So, turning the other side of my 
half-clad body to the fire, I sought slumber again. 
Tuesday, July 28 . 
When we awoke we found a heavy dew on our blan- 
