THE AMERICAN-SC AN DIN AVIAN REVIEW 
743 
even time to get his gun off his shoulder before it was gone; but he 
had noticed one thing, and that was that the animal had very large 
and quite extraordinary antlers. There were a great many branches 
upon one of them, and fewer on the other; and he had never seen that 
on a moose before. 
But he knew what sort of an animal this was. It was a magic 
moose which had frequented this desolate mountain valley for count¬ 
less years, a moose which no hunter and no dog had succeeded in bring¬ 
ing down. Long tales were told about this wonderful animal, and it 
was the firm belief of hunters over the mountain plateau that it was 
unlucky to hunt the magic moose. They could tell how one man had 
broken an arm while hunting it, how another was all but drowned in 
a river he had to cross after this moose. 
Peter has also hunted this mysterious animal with which the dog 
never manages to keep up. The moose outdistances the dog, swims 
across one lake after another, climbs up and down mountain after 
mountain, indeed the magic moose clambers about mountains like a 
fox. But now Peter means to follow the tracks of yesterday evening, 
and he will not give up as long as he has a bite of food left, or as long 
as the dog is able to crawl; for it is Peter’s way to grow more eager 
the longer he hunts without result. His energy has gathered strength 
during his fruitless hunting this autumn. He means to follow the 
moose with the curious horns—if need be, into the infernal regions. He 
takes his oath on this, and when the coffee is made he has breakfast, 
locks the door, and sets off up the wooded slope to the mountain with 
its naked sides, on which here and there a glacier lies shining like silver 
in the light of the rising sun. 
* * * 
It is now evening. Peter Varpet has hunted the magic moose 
from sunrise to sunset. Storm has followed the animal from sky-line 
to sky-line, but it has never stood long enough for Peter to come up 
to it. Now he is sitting upon a mountain-top, so drenched with per¬ 
spiration that he has not a dry thread upon his body; and far away 
to the north, where the sky still glows after the setting of the sun, he 
can hear the last short barks of his dog. He raises his gun and fires 
straight up into the air; and half an hour later Storm joins him, and 
together they make their way to a deserted sseter and creep in. 
There are two skin rugs here, hut even beneath them Peter shivers 
with cold; he makes up a big fire, but he still shivers with cold. It 
seems as if his very body had ceased to develop heat; the cold comes 
from within. During the night a head-ache comes on and he begins 
to cough. There is a pain, too, in his left side that will not go, how¬ 
ever much he rubs and rubs. When he draws a breath it is as if some¬ 
thing were lying at the back of the left lung and preventing it from 
taking in the air. 
