LUMBERERS.
cene, early morning; the sun pouring clear light over the snowy world, and upon Captain Argent in front of the hut, just emerged from his blankets and rugs.
'Why, Arthur, here's an elk walking up to the very hall door!'
Almost at the same minute Ina appeared among the distant trees, and fired. He had gone off on snow-shoes long before daybreak, to run down the moose he knew to be in the neighbourhood, had wounded a fine bull, and driven him towards his camp.
'Why didn't you finish him off on the spot,' asked Arthur, 'instead of taking all that trouble?'
'No cart to send for the flesh,' replied Ina significantly.
There might be a thousand pounds of that, covered with long coarse hair, and crested with the ponderous antlers. A hunch on the shoulders seemed arranged as a cushion support to these last; and in the living specimens seen afterwards by Arthur, they carried the huge horns laid back horizontally, as they marched at a long trot, nose in the air, and large sharp eyes looking out on all sides.
'It was a sharp idea to make the elk his own butcher's boy,' quoth Argent.
The massive thick lips formed the 'mouffle,' prized in the wilderness as a dainty: Arthur would have been ashamed to state his preference for a civilised mutton chop. Other elks shared the fate of this first; though it seemed a wanton waste of nature's bounties to slay the noble animals merely for their skins, noses, and tongues. Ina was callous, for he knew that thus perished multitudes every year in Canada West, and thousands of buffaloes in the Hudson's Bay territory. Arthur could not help recalling little Jay; and many a time her lesson kept his rifle silent, and spared a wound or a life.