I
The harvest moon hung globed and honey-coloured
over the glassy wilderness lake. In the unclouded
radiance the strip of beach and the sand-spit jutting
out from it were like slabs of pure ivory between the
mirroring steel-blue of the water and the brocaded
dark of the richly-foliaged shore.
Behind a screen of this rich foliage-great
drooping leaves of water-ash and maple-sat
the figure of a man with his back against a tree, almost
indistinguishable in the confusion of velvety shadows.
His rifle leaning against the tree-trunk beside him,
a long, trumpet roll of birch-bark in his hands, he
peered forth through the leaves upon the shining stillness,
while his ears listened so intently that every now
and then they would seem to catch the whisper of his
own blood rushing through his veins. But from
the moonlit wilds came not a sound except, from time
to time, that vast, faint, whispering sigh, inaudible
to all but the finest ears, in which the ancient forest
seems to breathe forth its content when there is no
wind to jar its dreams.
Joe Peddler had settled himself in
a comfortable position in his hiding-place in order
that he might not have to move. He was out to
call moose, and he knew the need of stillness.
He knew how far and how inexplicably the news of an
intruder would travel through the wild; but he knew
also how quickly the wild forgets that news, if only
the intruder has craft enough to efface himself.
If only he keeps quite still for a time, the vigilant
life of the wild seems to conclude that he is dead,
and goes once more about its furtive business.
Presently Joe Peddler reached out
for his rifle and laid it across his knees. Then
he raised the trumpet of birch-bark to his lips and
uttered through it the strange, hoarse cry of the
cow-moose calling to her mate. It was a harsh
note and discordant, a sort of long-drawn, bleating
bellow; yet there was a magic in its uncouth appeal
which made it seem the one appropriate voice of those
rude but moon-enchanted wilds.
Joe Peddler was such an expert with
the birch-bark horn that his performance with it could
deceive not only the bull, but also the wary cow,
or a cow-stalking bear, or, at times, even an experienced
and discriminating fellow-woodsman. He would
call twice or thrice, and stop and listen for several
minutes, confident that on such a glamorous night
as this he would not have long to wait for a response
to his lying call.
And he had not. When the bull-moose
comes to the call of the cow, he comes sometimes noisily
and challengingly, with a crashing of underbrush and
a defiant thrashing of his great antlers upon branch
and tree as he pounds through them. At other
times he comes as softly as the flight of an owl.
Peddler looked out upon the empty
whiteness of the beach. He dropped his eyes for
a second to the velvet shadows beside him, where a
wood-mouse, blundering almost upon his outstretched
leg, had fled with a tiny squeak of terror. When
he looked out again, there in the centre of the beach,
black and huge against the pallid radiance, towered
a moose bull, with his great overhanging muzzle uplifted
as he peered about him in search of the utterer of
that call.
The great bull had a noble pair of
antlers, a head for any hunter to be proud of, but
Joe Peddler never raised his rifle. Instead of
rejoicing at this response to his deceitful lure,
a frown of impatience crossed his face. The strict
New Brunswick game laws allowed but one bull in a
season to fall to the rifle of any one hunter.
Joe Peddler was in search of one particular bull.
He had no use for the great beast towering so arrogantly
before him, and nothing was further from his thoughts
than to put a bullet into that wide-antlered head.
The bull was plainly puzzled at finding
no cow upon the beach to greet him, after all those
calls. Presently he grew angry, perhaps thinking
that a rival had reached the scene ahead of him.
He fell to pawing the sand with one great, clacking
hoof, grunting and snorting so loudly that any rival
within half a mile of the spot would have heard him
and hastened to accept the challenge. Then he
strode up to the nearest bush and began thrashing
at it viciously with his antlers.
The disappointed animal now had his
back toward the thicket wherein Peddler lay hidden.
Yielding to his humour, the woodsman once more lifted
the birch-bark tube to his lips, with a sly grin, and
gave another call.
He was hardly prepared for the effect.
The bull wheeled like a flash, and instantly, with
not a half second’s hesitation, came charging
upon the thicket at full run.
The situation was an awkward one,
and Peddler cursed himself for a blundering idiot.
He sprang noiselessly to his feet and raised his rifle.
But first he would try an experiment, in the hope of
saving the beast from his bullet.
“You git out o’ that!”
he ordered very sharply and clearly. “Git,
I tell ye!”
The bull stopped so abruptly that
his hooves ploughed up the sand. Decidedly there
was something very strange about that thicket.
First it gave forth the call of his mate. Then
it spoke to him with the voice of a man. And
there was something in that voice that chilled him.
While one might, perhaps, count ten, he stood there
motionless, staring at the inexplicable mass of foliage.
The arrogant light in his eyes flickered down into
fear. And then, his heart crumbling with panic,
he leapt aside suddenly with a mighty spring and went
crashing off through the woods as if all the fiends
were clawing at his tail.
Peddler chuckled, stretched himself,
and settled down to try his luck again. For another
couple of hours he kept it up patiently, calling at
intervals, and throwing his utmost art into the modulations
of the raucous tube. But never a reply could
he charm forth from the moonlit solitudes. At
last he grew intolerably sleepy.
“Guess old lop-horn must be
off on some other beat to-night,” he muttered,
getting to his feet with a mighty yawn. “It’s
me fer me bunk.” And with
the rifle under one arm, the birch-bark tube under
the other, he strode off down the shining beach to
the alder-fringed inlet where his canoe was hidden.
As he paddled swiftly through the
moonlight down toward the lower end of the lake, where
he had his camp on a high, dry knoll beside the outlet,
Peddler mused upon the object of his quest. It
was no ordinary moose, however noble of antler, that
had brought him out here to the remote and all but
unknown tangle of lakes and swamps which formed the
source of the north fork of the Ottanoonsis.
This bull, according to the stories of two Indian
trappers, was of a size quite unprecedented in the
annals of the modern moose; and Peddler, who had seen
its mighty hoof-prints in the mud beside the outlet,
was quite ready to credit the tale. They were
like the tracks of a prehistoric monster. But
it was not for the stature of him that Peddler was
hunting the giant bull. According to the story
of the Indians, the beast’s antlers were like
those of no other bull-moose ever seen. The right
antler was colossal in its reach and spread, a foot
or more, at least, beyond the record, but quite normal
in its shape. The left, on the contrary, was
not only dwarfed to less than half the normal size,
but was so fantastically deformed as to grow downwards
instead of upwards. Of a head such as this, Joe
Peddler was determined to possess himself before some
invading sportsman from England or the States should
forestall him.
Arriving at the outlet of the lake,
he pulled up the canoe at a natural grassy landing-place
below his camp, and pushed his way some hundred yards
or so along the shore through the bushes to a spring
which he had discovered that morning. Your woodsman
will go far out of his way to drink at a cold spring,
having a distaste for the rather vapid water of the
lakes and streams. He threw himself flat upon
the stony brink and reached down his thirsty lips.
But just as he swallowed the first
delicious gulp of coolness, there came a sudden huge
crashing in the brushwood behind him. In one breath
he was on his feet. In the next he had cleared
the pool in a leap, and was fleeing madly for the
nearest tree, with a moose that looked as big as an
elephant at his heels.
The nearest tree, a young birch, was
not as big as he could have wished, but he was not
taking time just then to pick and choose. He whirled
himself round the trunk, sprang to the first branch,
swung up, and scrambled desperately to gain a safe
height. He gained it, but literally by no more
than a hair’s breadth. As the black monster
reached the tree, it checked itself abruptly, and
in almost the same instant lifted its right fore-hoof
high above its head and struck like a flash at Peddler’s
foot just disappearing over a branch. It missed
the foot itself, but it shaved the stout cowhide larrigan
that covered the foot, slicing it as if with a knife.
Peddler drew himself farther up and then looked down
upon his assailant with interest.
“I guess I’ve found ye
all right, old lop-horn,” he drawled, and spat
downward, not scornfully, but contemplatively, as if
in recognition, upon that strangely stunted and deformed
left antler. “But gee! Them Injuns
never said nothin’ about yer bein’ so black
an’ so almighty spry. I wisht, now, ye’d
kindly let me go back to the canoe an’ git me
gun!”
But any such quixotic courtesy seemed
far from the giant’s intention. As soon
as he realized that his foe was beyond the reach of
striking hoof or thrusting antler, he set himself,
in the pride of his strength and weight, to the task
of pushing the tree over. Treating it as if it
were a mere sapling, he reared himself against it,
straddling it with his fore-legs, and thrust at it
furiously in the effort to ride it down. As the
slim young trunk shook and swayed beneath the passion
of the onslaught, Peddler clung to his perch with
both arms and devoutly wished that he had had time
to choose a sturdier refuge.
For perhaps five minutes the giant
pushed and battered furiously against the tree, grunting
like a locomotive and tearing up the earth in furrows
with his hinder hooves. At length, however, he
seemed to conclude that this particular tree was too
strong for him. He backed off a few yards and
stood glaring up at Peddler among the branches, snorting
contemptuously and shaking his grotesquely misshapen
antlers as if daring his antagonist to come down.
Peddler understood the challenge just as clearly as
if it had been expressed in plainest King’s English.
“Oh, yes,” said he grimly,
“I’ll come down all right, bime-by.
An’ ye ain’t agoin’ to like it one
leetle bit when I do; now, mind, I’m tellin’
ye!”
For perhaps a half-hour the giant
bull continued to rave and grunt and paw about the
tree with a tireless vindictiveness which filled his
patient prisoner with admiration, and hardened him
inexorably in his resolve to possess himself of that
unparalleled pair of antlers. At last, however,
the furious beast stopped short and stood motionless,
listening intently. Peddler wondered what he was
listening to. But presently his own ears also
caught it-the faint and far-off call of
a cow-moose from the upper end of the lake. Forgetting
his rage against Peddler, the bull wheeled about with
the agility of a cat and went crashing off up the
lake shore as fast as he could run. Stiff and
chilled-for the air of that crisp October
night had a searching bite in it-Peddler
climbed down from his perch. First, being tenacious
of purpose, he hurried to the spring and finished
his interrupted drink. Then, returning to the
canoe, he stood for a few moments in hesitation.
Should he follow up the trail at once? But it
was already near morning, and he was both dead-tired
and famished. He believed that the bull, not
being in any alarm, would not journey far that night
after meeting his mate, but rather would seek some
deep thicket for a few hours’ sleep. He
picked up the rifle and strode off to his camp, resolved
to fortify himself well for a long trail on the morrow.
II
Wise though Peddler was in the ways
of the wild folk, he found himself at fault in regard
to this particular bull, whose habits seemed to be
no less unique than his stature and his antlers.
Taking up the trail soon after sunrise, he came in
due time to the spot, near the head of the lake, where
the bull had joined the calling cow. From this
point the trail of the pair had struck straight back
from the lake towards the range of low hills which
formed the watershed between the eastern and south-westward
flowing streams. About noon Peddler came to the
place where the cow, wearied out by so strenuous a
pace, had lain down to sleep in a thicket. The
bull, however, driven by his vehement spirit, had
gone on without a pause.
All day Peddler followed doggedly
upon that unwavering trail. He crossed the ridge,
descended to the broken and desolate eastern levels,
and came, towards sunset, upon another wide and tranquil
lake. Feeling sure that his quarry, unaware of
the pursuit, would linger somewhere about this pleasant
neighbourhood, Peddler found himself a mossy nest on
the cup-shaped top of a boulder and settled down for
a couple of hours’ sleep. He little guessed
that the bull, having doubled back on a parallel with
his own trail, had been following him stealthily for
a good half hour, not raging now, but consumed with
curiosity.
Just as the moon was rising over the
low black skyline, jagged with fir-tops, Peddler woke
up. Creeping through the bushes, he betook himself
to a hiding-place which his quick eye had already marked
down, close to the beach, a roomy, flat ledge at the
foot of a rock, with a screen of young spruce before
it. From behind another clump of spruce, not
fifty paces distant, the lop-horned bull, standing
moveless as a dead tree, watched him with an intense
and inquiring interest. His fury of the preceding
night, and even the memory of it, seemed to have been
blotted from his mind.
But when, a few minutes later, from
that shadowy covert, where he could just make out
the crouching form of the man, the call of a cow breathed
forth upon the stillness, the great bull’s eyes
and nostrils opened wide in amazement. What could
a moose-cow be thinking about to remain so near the
dangerous neighbourhood of a man? But, no, his
eyes assured him that there was no cow in the man’s
hiding-place. Where, then, could she be?
He stared around anxiously. She was nowhere in
sight. He sniffed the windless night air.
It bore no savour of her. He waved forward his
great, sensitive ears to listen. And again came
the call, the voice, undoubtedly, of the moose-cow.
There could be no question about it
this time. It came from the thicket. Had
there been any least note of fear in that call, the
giant bull would have rushed at once to the rescue
of the unseen fair, concluding that the man had her
hidden. But now, the utterance was simply that
of an untroubled cow. Therefore, for the moment,
the great bull was chiefly puzzled. Keeping within
the shadows, and moving as imperceptibly as if he
were himself but one of the blackest of them, he stole
nearer and nearer yet, till he could plainly see every
detail within the man’s hiding-place. There
was assuredly nothing there but rock and moss and
bush and the crouching figure of the man himself, staring
forth upon the moonlit beach and holding a curious
roll of bark to his mouth. Nevertheless, in that
same moment there came again the hoarse cry of the
cow.
It came indisputably from that crouching
form of a man, from that roll of bark at the man’s
mouth.
This was a mystery, and the wiry black
hair along the neck and shoulders of the bull began
to rise ominously. A slow, wondering rage awoke
in his heart. It was that element of wonder alone
which for the moment restrained him from rushing forward
and trampling the mysterious cheat beneath his hooves.
A red spark kindled in his eyes.
All undreaming of the dread watcher
so close behind him, Peddler set his lips to the lying
tube of bark and gave his call again and yet again,
with all the persuasiveness of his backwoods art.
He felt sure that his efforts were convincing.
They were, indeed, all of that. They were so
consummate a rendering of the cow-moose’s voice
that they perfectly convinced a huge and hungry bear,
which was at that moment creeping up from the other
side of the rock upon the unsuspecting hunter’s
hiding-place.
The bear knew that its only chance
of capturing so swift and nimble a quarry as the moose-cow
lay in stealing upon her like a cat and taking her
by surprise in one instantaneous rush. He never
doubted for a moment that the cow was there behind
the rock. When he was within a dozen feet of
those persuasive sounds, his crouched form suddenly
rose up, elongated itself like a dark and terrible
jack-in-the-box, and launched itself with a swish
through the encircling branches.
Before Peddler’s wits had time
fully to take in what was happening, his trained instinct
told him what to do. Half rising to his feet as
he snatched up his rifle, he swung about and fired
from the hip at the vague but monstrous shape which
hung for an instant above him. The shot went
wide, for just as his finger pressed the trigger, a
great black paw smote the weapon from his grasp and
hurled it off among the bushes.
With a contortion that nearly dislocated
his neck, Peddler hurled himself frantically backwards
and aside, and so just escaped the pile-driver descent
of the other paw.
He escaped it for the instant; but
in the effort he fell headlong, and jammed himself
in a crevice of the rock so awkwardly that he could
not at once extricate himself. He drew up his
legs with an involuntary shudder, and held his breath,
expecting to feel the merciless claws rake the flesh
from his thighs.
But nothing touched him; and the next
moment there broke out an astounding uproar behind
him, a very pandemonium of roars and windy gruntings,
while the crashing of the bushes was as if the forest
were being subdued beneath a steam-roller. Consumed
with amazement, he wrenched himself from the crevice
and glanced round. The sight that met his eyes
made him clamber hastily to the top of the rock, whence
he might look down from a more or less safe distance
upon a duel of giants such as he had never dared hope
to witness.
When the bear found that it was no
cow-moose, but a man that he was springing upon, he
was so taken aback that, for a second or two, he forbore
to follow up his advantage. To those two seconds
of hesitation Joe Peddler owed his escape.
Before the massive brute, now boiling
with rage at having been so deceived, had sufficiently
made up his mind to fall upon that prostrate figure
in the crevice, something that seemed to him like a
tornado of hooves and antlers burst out of the bushes
and fell upon him. The next moment, with a long,
red gash half-way down his flank, he was fighting
for his life.
The gigantic moose had been just upon
the verge of rushing in to silence those incomprehensible
and deceiving calls, when the towering form of the
bear burst upon his vision. Here at last was something
to focus his wrath. Already angry, but still
dampened by bewilderment, his anger now exploded into
a very madness of rage. There was the ancient,
inherited feud between his tribe and all bears.
As a youngster, he had more than once escaped, as
by a miracle, from the neck-breaking paw of a bear,
had more than once seen a young cow struck down and
ripped to pieces. Now to this deep-seated hate
was added another incentive. His mind confused
by fury to protect his mate, he dimly felt that the
mystery which had been tormenting him was the fault
of this particular bear. The man was forgotten.
A cow had been calling to him. She had disappeared.
Here was the bear. The bear had probably done
away with the cow. The cow should be terribly
avenged.
The bear-which was one
of the biggest and fiercest of his kind in all the
northern counties-had fought moose, both
bulls and cows, before. But he had never before
faced such an antagonist as this one, and that first
slashing blow from the bull’s knife-edged fore-hoof
had somewhat flurried him. Sitting back poised,
with his immense hindquarters gathered under him,
and his fore-paws uplifted, he parried the smashing
strokes of his assailant with the lightning dexterity
of a trained boxer. His strength of shoulder
and forearm was so enormous that if he could have
got a stroke in flat, at right angles to the bone,
he would have shattered the bull’s leg to splinters.
But his parrying blows struck glancingly, and did
no more than rip the hair and hide.
After a few minutes of whirlwind effort
to batter down that impregnable guard, the bull jumped
back as nimbly, for all his bulk, as a young doe startled
from her drinking. His usual method of attack,
except when fighting a rival bull, was to depend upon
his battering fore-hooves. But now he changed
his tactics. Lowering his head so that his vast
right antler stood out before him like a charge of
bayonets, he launched himself full upon his adversary.
With all his weight and strength behind
it, that charge was practically irresistible, if fairly
faced. But the bear was too wise to face it fairly.
He swung aside, clutched the lowered antler, and held
fast, striving to pull his enemy down.
But the bull’s strength and
impetus were too great, and the bear was himself thrown
off his balance. Even then, however, he might
probably have recovered himself and once more established
the battle upon even terms. But he had not reckoned-he
could not have been expected to reckon-upon
the unprecedented weapon of that little down-drooping
left antler. Not for nothing was the giant bull
lop-horned. The dwarfed and distorted antler
hung down like a plough-share. And the bear attempted
no defence against it. Keen-spiked, it caught
him in the belly and ploughed upward. In a paroxysm
he fell backwards. The bull, swinging his hindquarters
around without yielding his advantage for a second,
lunged forward with all his force, and the deadly
little plough was driven home to the bear’s
heart.
Peddler, from his post on top of the
rock, shouted and applauded in wild excitement, and
showered encomiums, no less profane than heartfelt,
upon the victorious bull. For a minute or two
the bull paid no attention, being engrossed in goring
and trampling his victim in an effort to make it look
less like a bear than an ensanguined floor-rug.
At last, as if quite satisfied with his triumph, he
lifted his gory head and eyed that voluble figure
on top of the rock. It looked harmless.
“Gee, but ye kin fight!”
said Peddler, glowing with admiration. “An’
ye’ve saved my scalp fer me this
night, fer sartain. Guess I’ll hev
to let ye keep them lop-sided horns o’ yourn,
after all!”
The bull snorted at him scornfully
and turned his head to take another prod at the unresponsive
remnants of his foe. Then, paying no further
heed to the man on the rock, and craving assuagement
to the fiery smart of his wounds, he strode down into
the lake and swam straight out, in the glitter of
the moon-path, toward the black line of the farther
shore.