It is most discouraging, after tracking your game for hours at a time, to finally have to give it up on account of darkness setting in. Lighting your pipe, you retrace your steps to camp and await the coming of the morrow, when the routine of the previous day is gone over. It is the quiet, careful man who succeeds in tracking, as the breaking of a twig or the brushing of one's coat against a tree will jump your game, and in his fright he travels many miles before stopping.
He is an exceptionally keen-scented animal, and mark you well as to the general direction of the wind before leaving camp, as to work along with it is fatal. Miles before you have seen him he smells you and immediately increases the distance from his would-be foe.
TWIN MOOSE CALVES, THREE DAYS OLD.
(Taken at the Headwaters of the Liverpool River, Nova Scotia.)
Photographed from Life.
When the rutting season is at its height, along about the first of October, and the days warm, another method of moose-hunting is brought into play,—that of imitating the call of the cow with a birch horn about eighteen inches in length. There are many expert moose-callers in Maine and the Canadian Provinces, though they have by no means a monopoly of this accomplishment. The sound is most peculiar, and can only be acquired by long practice. The most expert callers are those who have taken lessons from nature,—that is, have been close to a female moose when she was calling the male. At least one in three of the Maine guides can call moose. With his birch horn, and seated beside some lake on a quiet evening, he sends back into the forest or across some shallow logan the weird "woo-oo-oo, woo-woo-oo" of the cow moose calling the bull. If there be a bull within hearing he will respond with a deep grunt. He will then tear along through the woods in the direction of the call, and perhaps splash out with a great noise into the shallow water where he expects to find a mate answering his amorous advances.
Ordinarily the moose is a silent animal, being very careful not to make a noise. Old guides have said that in spite of his great spread of horns he will pass quietly through a thick growth. Generally, if seen in summer at the edge of a lake or stream, he slips noiselessly into the woods, but when the rutting season begins he casts his discretion to the winds and responds to the call of the cow with noisy disregard of consequences. He is also quarrelsome at such times, and should another bull happen to trespass on what he considers his territory there may be trouble. The rutting season is generally over by the first week in October, and the bulls will not answer the calls after that, unless the weather should hold very warm. Most guides claim that during the rutting season the bulls have a wide range, but that the cows remain in one neighborhood.
While yarded moose are very methodical in their habits: they have, however, a single eye to one object, the detection of any intruder, therefore it is only by a knowledge of their habits that they can be approached by the hunter. It is their keen sense of hearing and smell that are to be guarded against, for as a rule, when the animal can see the hunter, he can also see the moose, and his capture becomes simply a question of marksmanship. It is certainly a unique sport and has few successful aspirants.
Of the two, still hunting is usually the more successful and the greater number of moose are secured in that way. In the late fall, the coming of the first snow doubles one's chances of success as every step of the animal is shown. In tracking he usually goes through the worst places possible for him to find, which adds to one's discomfort and lessens one's chances of a shot.
