Then when we reached our hunting-ground and came up with our game at last, though, truth to tell, the sport as sport was poor enough, there was yet a wild delightful triumph in overtaking and slaying a gigantic animal that had never seen the face of man. The chase was exciting, invigorating, bracing; the idea grand, heroic, Scandinavian.
“An elk came out of the pine-forest;
He snuffed up east, he snuffed up west,
Stealthy and still;
His mane and his horns were shaggy with snow,
I laid my arrow across my bow,
Stealthily and still;
The bowstring rattled—the arrow flew,
And it pierced his blade-bone through and through,
Hurrah!