"Help! Help!" Jimmy was shouting, kicking wildly as he roared. "Keep off me, you wild elephant! Somebody shoot him, quick, before he steps on me!"
"Here, stop that kicking, if you want to be helped up, do you hear, Jimmy!" exclaimed Frank, who had hastened to the assistance of the comrade in distress. "Are you much hurt; and did the beast trample on you any?"
Jimmy began to feel of his legs and arms, and upon discovering himself apparently as sound as a dollar, grinned sheepishly. Meanwhile the two guides had hastened, with the help of Ned and Jack, to gather the fire together again. Teddy had snatched up the nearest rifle and was down on one knee, peering out through the semi-darkness as though anticipating a return rush on the part of the unknown monster that had created such confusion in the camp.
"No great damage done, after all, seems like, if Jimmy says he's all right," remarked Ned, now beginning to let a broad smile creep over his face, for seeing Jimmy doubled up had been a ludicrous spectacle not soon to be forgotten.
"But what in creation was it that put the kibosh all over me like that?" demanded the one who had been knocked over by the mad rush of the invader.
Ned glanced toward Francois, and the voyageur simply said:
"Bull moose—him very much mad, charge camp like that!"
"Well, I should think he must have been," Frank Shaw declared. "Why, if we'd had a little more warning we might have met him with a volley of hot lead that'd have laid him out dead. Now that Francois says so, I do believe he looked pretty much on the order of a monstrous moose bull. I certainly saw his horns, and they were full grown, because the rutting season is long since past."
"But what makes a moose get his mad up?" Jack asked. "We didn't do a single thing to rile him, that I know of, but were sitting here as easy as you please, when all at once he charges through the camp. Why, say, he nearly carried off some of our property, when he knocked down that tent. Look at the rip his horns made in the tanned canvas, would you? Some more sewing for Teddy here, to mend the rip."
"Francois, do bull moose often act in that way?" asked Teddy, still gripping the repeating rifle, as though not fully convinced that their would be no repetition of the savage onslaught.