Although as big as a haystack, the moose is not quite as easy to hit, nor is he everybody’s ‘meat.’ His favourite haunts are the dense thickets round lakes and about river-bottoms, the dark balsam groves, hardwood hills, and brulé patches of Ontario, and wherever the lily pads, moose wood, swamp maple, alder bushes, coarse grasses or mosses upon which he feeds are most luxuriant.
By some strange fatality, wherever things are most convenient for the moose they appear to be least convenient for the hunter. The scrub over which the moose looks without raising his ugly head closes over and drowns the unfortunate biped who tries to follow him; the fallen trees and huge logs which the moose takes comfortably in his stride must be climbed by the hunter, and yet, in spite of his size, when the big bull has answered your call and has come crashing through the alder and swamp tea to within twenty yards of you, he is likely enough to halt in the shadow, detect the fraud, and steal away without a sound.
Like other deer, the moose seems slow to identify objects with his eyes, but there is no doubt about the keenness of his other senses. If it pleases him to answer your call, though his answer may be all but inaudible to you, you need not call again unless you like. Through a mile of brush which to you appears a pathless tangle he will steer straight to the square yard from which your call came, unless a bough should scrape against your overalls or a tiny puff of wind carry the faintest suggestion of your presence to him. If either of these things happen, the moose will make up his mind without stopping to think. In addition to the keenness of his senses the bull moose is credited with considerable pugnacity when pursued and ‘cornered,’ and he undoubtedly is a bit of a strategist, choosing his couch, for instance, invariably in such a position as to command the country all round. The Indians, when following a moose’s track, will, oftener than not, keep describing a succession of semicircles, so that, instead of walking in the bull’s tracks, they cut them from time to time. This is done to outwit the bull, who, they say, when he means to lie down will turn aside and walk back parallel to his trail, and lie down with his head towards his back tracks, so that either his eyes or his nose must give him warning of anyone who attempts to follow him.
There are three principal methods of hunting the moose besides the foul practice of snaring him with a loop in his run ways or of butchering him in his yards (i.e. in those camps and feeding grounds which moose stamp out for themselves in the deepest snows of winter). The favourite method (in Canada, at any rate) is ‘calling,’ a birch-bark horn being used night and morning to imitate either the cry of the bull or of the cow, and so lure a would-be mate or rival (as the case may be) to his ruin. September is the season of the rut in Lower Canada, and during the earlier part of this season the bull seems nearly beside himself with rage and unrequited passion, wandering constantly in search of a mate or a rival, and filling the woods with hoarse calls or hoarser challenges. About one man in a million is clever enough to mimic these calls, and if you are lucky enough either to be that man or his employer, you may take advantage of the moonlight and lie out behind some log or bush watching the skyline and listening while the half-breed (it will probably be a French half-breed) grunts and roars upon the horn, imitates the thrashing of the bull’s antlers amongst the alder-bushes. Experts disagree as to the amount of skill required to call a moose. Some say that any noise is good enough when he is really on the war-path, that the chopping of an axe or the bray of a donkey will ‘fetch’ him; others again affirm that the nicest accuracy is necessary in imitating every call, and I am bound to admit that, though I have never met a man who had seen a moose drawn to his ruin by the sound of chopping, I have more than once known that a moose owed his life to the fact that my overalls were made of a peculiarly harsh material from which the brush in passing managed to elicit a very penetrating sound.
If all goes well with the caller, it may be that at last he will hear, faint and far off, a hoarse response from the depths of the swamp below him, a response repeated from time to time, and growing each time nearer, until at last, if he can hear anything but the beating of his own heart, he will hear the scrub crunched under the foot of the advancing monster. As long as all goes well, the quiet night betrays the bull’s every movement to the hidden man, almost as clearly as if the hunter could watch the whole play with his naked eyes. Now the bull comes crashing up from the swamp through the alder-bushes, now he is standing listening half in doubt as to whether to come on or go back, but the half-breed is prepared for the emergency. Good as he is, he dare not try a call at such close quarters, but he strikes the horn against the scrub and the bull comes on again, thinking that he has heard the rattle of his enemy’s weapons.
When at last, with strangely little warning it seems to you, and much closer to you than you had expected, that monstrous form looms up against the half-light, remember to look at its shoulder, and try not to merit my Indian’s reproof to me when a bullet went six inches too high—‘All same again, you allus look at the horns instead of the bull, cap.’
Moose calling has almost every attribute of true sport. To succeed, a man must know the habits of his quarry and have admirable opportunities for studying them; if he ‘calls’ himself, he must have an excellent ear and be a perfect mimic, and for him the morning and the evening, moonlight and the grey of dawn, lend their beauty to the beauty of the silent woods. But for some men, ‘calling’ hardly gives the man enough to do. To these men I recommend still hunting over the hardwood hills about the time of the first snowfall, when there is enough snow to track in, with a good French Canadian half-breed as a guide. To my mind there is hardly any better sport on earth than to follow the great tracks through the new-fallen snow, through woods beautiful beyond all description with the beauty of a Canadian winter, over hardwood hills, and through patches of brulé, and then down into a bed of frozen willows, silvered by the frost, and jewelled by the sun, through swamps of tea-bush off which the frost falls in showers of crisp scales, until late in the afternoon you run up to your beast in a heavy grove of balsam, looking intensely black against the blinding purity of the snow. But for this sport you want young limbs and strong ones, and the wind and endurance of a temperate and clean liver. You want these for any sport worth the name.
There is yet another way of hunting moose, when the snows are down and the crust upon them is strong enough to bear a man on snow-shoes, but not strong enough to carry the moose. Of course, all the odds are against the animal, but still this is exciting sport, making tremendous demands upon the man’s endurance; and it is moreover when pursued in this way that the moose is said to turn ‘ugly’ and sometimes hunt the hunter. Provided that a man only kills old bulls, and not too many of them, I see no objection to this form of pursuit. The percentage of men who can run to within shooting distance of a bull moose when trying to escape through his native forest, even when the snow is at its worst for the bull, will never be very great, and the excitement of the sport must be intense. I have never yet had a chance of trying it.
Even when a man is in the best of luck, what he generally has to shoot at, and that in a hurry, is not a beast 8 ft. high, weighing 1,400 lbs., standing broadside on in the open, but a small piece of brown passing between the boles of the pine-trees in deep shadow, one or two hundred yards off. The Indian may tell him that what he sees is a moose. Nine men out of ten would not have discovered the fact for themselves.