One morning, when the lads awoke at day-break, Ganawa was gone. The lads arose, started the fire in the tepee and boiled some fresh beaver meat. The night had been quite cold and some hot broth seemed good for breakfast.
The boys had guessed right that Ganawa had gone scouting for moose tracks, and in a short time he returned to tell the boys that during the night a young moose had crossed the lake near their camp and had travelled east against the wind.
“We must eat,” he said, “and then we must follow the moose. We must wear our warm winter moccasins and we must take our blankets, for no hunter can tell how far he may have to track a moose.”
It took some time before the hunters were ready to take the trail. “The moose may be [[203]]a long way ahead of us,” Ganawa told the lads, “because I cannot tell at what time of the night he passed our camp. We must follow him slowly and you, my sons, and the dog must travel a good way behind me so we do not scare him. If we scare him, he will start running and we shall lose him.”
The animal had been going at a walk. He had followed the general direction of a small spring stream that enters Lake Anjigami near the camp of the hunters. This spring brook heads in a spruce swamp about a mile from the lake. “If he has gone into that swamp it will be very difficult to follow him,” remarked Ganawa, as the hunters started on the trail.
It was found that the game had passed along the spruce swamp. At the end of the swamp it had turned leisurely a little more easterly until it came to a high ridge within sight of one of those small lakes which are scattered by the tens of thousands over a region north and south of Lake Superior.
On the high ridge the moose had fed on [[204]]the twigs of young poplar trees, breaking down some of them of the thickness of a man’s wrist. At the north end of the lake it had crossed the outlet and had stopped to feed on some low willows and juneberry bushes. It had not touched pin-cherry and choke-cherry, but it had fed freely on young white birches and on the bushy moose-maple, which never grows to tree size.
“How can an animal grow big and fat when it eats nothing but wood?” asked Ray.
“The little twigs, my son, which the moose eats are not all wood,” replied Ganawa. “There is much food in them and in the buds. Moose and deer live on browse in the winter, grouse and fool-hens live on buds, rabbits and mice live on bark, and if the squirrels have not enough hazelnuts and seeds they also eat buds.”
After they had cautiously followed the trail for about two hours, Ganawa sat down on a log.