Part 14

It seemed too bad to disturb such comfort; but I wanted to know more about the surly old tyrant that had treated me with such scant courtesy; so I stole near him again, running up when his head disappeared, and lying quiet whenever he came up to breathe. He saw me at last when I was quite near, and leaped up with a terrible start. There was fear in his eyes this time. Here was the man-fish again, the creature that lived on land or water, and that could approach him so silently that the senses in which he had always trusted gave him no warning. He stared hard for a moment; then as the canoe glided rapidly straight towards him without fear or hesitation he waded out, stopping every instant to turn, and look, and try the wind, till he reached the fringe of woods beyond the grasses. There he thrust his nose up ahead of him, laid his big antlers back on his shoulders, and plowed straight through the tangle like a great engine, the alders snapping and crashing merrily about him as he went.

In striking contrast was the next meeting. I was out at midnight, jacking, and passed close by a point where I had often seen the big bull's tracks. He was not there, and I closed the jack and went on along the shore, listening for any wood folk that might be abroad. When I came back, a few minutes later, there was a suspicious ripple on the point. I opened the jack, and there was Umquenawis, my big bull, standing out huge and magnificent against the shadowy background, his eyes glowing and flashing in fierce wonder at the sudden brightness. He had passed along the shore within twenty yards of me, through dense underbrush,--as I found out from his tracks next morning,--yet so silently did he push his great bulk through the trees, halting, listening, trying the ground at every step for telltale twigs ere he put his weight down, that I had heard no sound, though I was listening intently in the dead hush that was on the lake.

It may have been curiosity, or the uncomfortable sense of being watched and followed by the man-fish, who neither harmed nor feared him, that brought Umquenawis at last to our camp to investigate. One day Noel was washing some clothes of mine in the lake when some subtle warning made him turn his head. There stood the big bull, half hidden by the dwarf spruces, watching him intently. On the instant Noel left the duds where they were and bolted along the shore under the bushes, calling me loudly to come quick and bring my rifle. When we went back Umquenawis had trodden the clothes into the mud, and vanished as silently as he came.

The Indians grew insistent at this, telling me of the hunter that had been killed, claiming now, beyond a doubt, that this was the same bull, and urging me to kill the ugly brute and rid the woods of a positive danger. But Umquenawis was already learning the fear of me, and I thought the lesson might be driven home before the summer was ended. So it was; but before that time there was almost a tragedy.

One day a timber cruiser--a lonely, silent man with the instincts of an animal for finding his way in the woods, whose business it is to go over timber lands to select the best sites for future cutting--came up to the lake and, not knowing that we were there, pitched by a spring a mile or two below us. I saw the smoke of his camp fire from the lake, where I was fishing, and wondered who had come into the great solitude. That was in the morning. Towards twilight I went down to bid the stranger welcome and to invite him to share our camp, if he would. I found him stiff and sore by his fire, eating raw-pork sandwiches with the appetite of a wolf. Almost at the same glance I saw the ground about a tree torn up, and the hoof marks of a big bull moose all about.--

"Hello! friend, what's up?" I hailed him.

"Got a rifle?" he demanded, with a rich Irish burr in his voice, paying no heed to my question. When I nodded he bolted for my canoe, grabbed my rifle, and ran away into the woods.

"Queer Dick! unbalanced, perhaps, by living too much alone in the woods," I thought, and took to examining the torn ground and the bull's tracks to find out for myself what had happened.

But there was no queerness in the frank, kindly face that met mine when the stranger came out of the bush a half hour later.--

"Th' ould baste! he's had me perrched up in that three there, like a blackburrd, the last tin hours; an' niver a song in me throat or a bite in me stomach. He wint just as you came--I thought I could returrn his compliments wid a bullet," he said, apologetically, as he passed me back the rifle.

Then, sitting by his fire, he told me his story. He had just lit his fire that morning, and was taking off his wet stockings to dry them, when there was a fierce crashing and grunting behind him, and a bull moose charged out of the bushes like a fury. The cruiser jumped and dodged; then, as the bull whirled again, he swung himself into a tree and sat there astride a limb, while the bull grunted and pushed and hammered the ground below with his sharp hoofs. All day long the moose had kept up the siege, now drawing off cunningly to hide in the bushes, now charging out savagely as the timber cruiser made effort to come down from his uncomfortable perch.

A few minutes before my approach a curious thing happened; which seems to indicate, as do many other things in the woods, that certain animals--perhaps all animals, including man--have at times an unknown sixth sense, for which there is no name and no explanation. I was still half a mile or more away, hidden by a point and paddling silently straight into the wind. No possible sight or sound or smell of me could have reached any known sense of any animal; yet the big brute began to grow uneasy. He left his stand under the tree and circled nervously around it, looking, listening, wigwagging his big ears, trying the wind at every step, and setting his hoofs down as if he trod on dynamite. Suddenly he turned and vanished silently into the brush. McGarven, the timber cruiser, who had no idea that there was any man but himself on the lake, watched the bull with growing wonder and distrust, thinking him possessed of some evil demon. In his long life in the woods he had met hundreds of moose, but had never been molested before.

With the rifle at full cock and his heart hot within him, he had followed the trail, which stole away, cautiously at first, a long swinging stride straight towards the mountain.--"Oh, 'tis the quare baste he is altogether!" he said as he finished his story.

AT THE SOUND OF THE TRUMPET

It was now near the calling season, and the nights grew keen with excitement. Now and then as I fished, or followed the brooks, or prowled through the woods in the late afternoon, the sudden bellow of a cow moose would break upon the stillness, so strange and uncertain in the thick coverts that I could rarely describe, much less imitate, the sound, or even tell the direction whence it had come. Under the dusk of the lake shore I would sometimes come upon a pair of the huge animals, the cow restless, wary, impatient, the bull now silent as a shadow, now ripping and rasping the torn velvet from his great antlers among the alders, and now threatening and browbeating every living thing that crossed his trail, and even the unoffending bushes, in his testy humor.

One night I went to the landing just below my tent with Simmo and tried for the first time the long call of the cow moose. He and Noel refused absolutely to give it, unless I should agree to shoot the ugly old bull at sight. Several times of late they had seen him near our camp, or had crossed his deep trail on the nearer shores, and they were growing superstitious as well as fearful.

There was no answer to our calling for the space of an hour; silence brooded like a living, watchful thing over sleeping lake and forest, a silence that grew only deeper and deeper after the last echoes of the bark trumpet had rolled back on us from the distant mountain. Suddenly Simmo lowered the horn, just as he had raised it to his lips for a call.

"Moose near!" he whispered.

"How do you know?" I breathed; for I had heard nothing.

"Don' know how; just know," he said sullenly. An Indian hates to be questioned, as a wild animal hates to be watched. As if in confirmation of his opinion, there was a startling crash and plunge across the little bay over against us, and a bull moose leaped the bank into the lake within fifty yards of where we crouched on the shore.

"Shoot! shoot-um quick!" cried Simmo; and the fear of the old bull was in his voice.

For answer there came a grunt from the moose--a ridiculously small, squeaking grunt, like the voice of a penny trumpet--as the huge creature swung rapidly along the shore in our direction.

"Uh! young bull, lil fool moose," whispered Simmo, and breathed a soft, questioning Whooowuh? through the bark horn to bring him nearer.

He came close to where we were hidden, then entered the woods and circled silently about our camp to get our wind. In the morning his tracks, within five feet of my rear tent pole, showed how little he cared for the dwelling of man. But though he circled back and forth for an hour, answering Simmo's low call with his ridiculous little grunt, he would not show himself again on the open shore.

I stole up after a while to where I had heard the last twig snap under his hoofs. Simmo held me back, whispering of danger; but there was a question in my head which has never received a satisfactory answer: Why does a bull come to a call anyway? It is held generally--and with truth, I think--that he comes because he thinks the sound is made by a cow moose. But how his keen ears could mistake such a palpable fraud is the greatest mystery in the woods. I have heard a score of hunters and Indians call, all differently, and have sometimes brought a bull into the open at the wail of my own bark trumpet; but I have never yet listened to a call that has any resemblance to the bellow of a cow moose as I have often heard it in the woods. Nor have I ever heard, or ever met anybody who has heard, a cow moose give forth any sound like the "long call" which is made by hunters, and which is used successfully to bring the bull from a distance.

Others claim, and with some reason, that the bull, more fearless and careless at this season than at other times, comes merely to investigate the sound, as he and most other wild creatures do with every queer or unknown thing they hear. The Alaskan Indians stretch a skin into a kind of tambourine and beat it with a club to call a bull; which sound, however, might not be unlike one of the many peculiar bellows that I have heard from cow moose in the wilderness. And I have twice known bulls to come to the chuck of an ax on a block; which sound, at a distance, has some resemblance to the peculiar chock-chocking that the bulls use to call their mates from a distance.

From any point of view the thing has contradictions enough to make one wary of a too positive opinion. Here at hand was a "lil fool moose" who knew no fear, and who might, therefore, enlighten me on the obscure subject. I told Simmo to keep on calling softly at intervals while I crept up into the woods to watch the effect.

It was all as dark as a pocket beyond the open shore. One had to feel his way along, and imitate the moose himself in putting his feet down. Spite of my precaution a bush whispered; a twig cracked. Instantly there was a swift answering rustle ahead as the bull glided towards me. He had heard the faint message and was coming to see if it were not his tantalizing mate, ready to whack her soundly, according to his wont, for causing him so much worry, and to beat her out ahead of him to the open where he could watch her closely and prevent any more of her hiding tricks.