Habits, Haunts and Anecdotes of the Moose and Illustrations from Life

by Charles Albert Jones

Many are the stories told by the guides about the unsuccessful sportsmen who lack the moral courage to go home empty-handed. So accustomed have the guides become to this sort of thing that they take it for granted, unless instructed to the contrary, that they are to kill the game their employer is to take home with him, provided he does not meet with success in the early part of the hunt.

Another guide has to say of visiting sportsmen: "Some of them shoot all right, of course, but others are regular Spaniards. I had a fellow up this way last fall that thought he was death on anything walking on four legs, and that his gun was the best shooting tool ever turned out of a gun factory. I paddled him right up to a bull moose standing in the water one day, and he fired every shot in his magazine at it without rumpling a hair.

"He didn't know enough to stop pumping the lever when all his shells were gone, and just about then I chipped in with my rifle and put a ball through the moose's shoulder that dropped him handy to the bank. The sportsman was in the act of pulling the trigger of his empty gun, when he saw the moose fall, and he didn't for a moment doubt but what he had killed him. He felt so good that he rose right up in the canoe and yelled, and the next thing I knew the canoe kind of slid out from under us and over we went into four feet of mud and water."

BULL MOOSE IN CARIBOU LAKE.
Photographed from Life.

A New York sportsman had his guide call a moose into the East Branch thoroughfare one evening just before dark, and the guide tells of his difficulty in pointing him out to the sportsman, who happened to be nearsighted. The moose walked right out into the water away from the concealment of the bushes and stopped. The guide nudged the sportsman and whispered to shoot.

"Shoot what?" said the sportsman in a louder tone than was prudent under the circumstances. "I don't see anything to shoot."

"Shoot the moose," he whispered again, "there he stands under that broken-topped spruce."

The lawyer craned his neck and peered into every shadow but the right one. Two or three rods below the moose was a clump of bushes growing out beyond the general shore line. The lawyer finally singled this out as the moose and opened fire. He was perfectly cool, and every one of his shots went straight to the centre of the object at which he was firing.