“I don’t care,” said Don, doggedly. “He’s got an elephant’s ears.”
“Do an elephant’s ears stick straight out from his head, and does he carry horns?” demanded Curtis, as soon as he could speak. “Elephants don’t run wild in this country—at least I never heard of any being seen about here. It’s a moose, easy enough. I saw his horns through the alders, and I tell you they are beauties. If you were a taxidermist now, you could provide an ornament for your father’s hall or dining-room that would be worth looking at.”
It was a moose, sure enough, as the boys found when they paddled around the bushes and landed on the bank above them. There he lay, shot through the brain, and looking larger than he did when he was alive. His shape was clumsy and uncouth, but his agility must have been something wonderful; his expiring effort certainly was. He lay fully six feet from the bank, which was about five feet in height. The place where he had been feeding, which was pointed out to the boys by the muddy water and by the trampled lilies and pickerel grass, was thirty feet from the foot of the bank; so the moose, with a ball in his brain, must have cleared at least thirty-six feet at one jump. His long, slender legs did not look as though they were strong enough to support so ponderous a body, to say nothing of sending it through the air in that fashion.
“Do you know that I was afraid of him?” said Don, after he had feasted his eyes upon his prize and entered in his note-book some measurements he had made. “When he was staring at me through those bushes, I thought I had never seen so savage a looking beast in all my life.”
“He was savage, and you had good reason to be afraid of him,” answered Curtis, quickly. “If you had wounded him he would have trampled us out of sight in the brook before we knew what hurt us. When his horns are in the velvet the moose is a timid and retiring animal; but after his antlers are fully grown, and he has sharpened and polished them by constant rubbing against the trees, he loses his fear of man and everything else, and would rather fight than eat. Now you would like to have Bert and the rest see him, I suppose. Well, if you will stay here and watch him, I will go down and bring them up. We’ll camp here to-night, for we shall have to cut the moose up before we can take him away. He’s heavy, and weighs close to seven or eight hundred pounds.”
Don agreeing to this proposition, Curtis stepped into the canoe and paddled toward the pond, not forgetting to leave the axe they had brought with them so that his companion could start a fire and build a shanty during his absence. But Don was in no hurry to go to work. He was so highly elated at his success that he could not bring his mind down to anything. For a long time he sat on the ground beside the moose, wondering at his gigantic proportions and verifying the measurements he had taken, and it was not until he heard voices in the brook below him that he jumped to his feet and caught up the axe. He had a cheerful fire going when his friends arrived, but there were no signs of a shanty.
“Look here,” shouted Bert, as he drew his canoe broadside to the bank. “You were good, enough to keep your moose until we could have a look at him, and so I brought my trophies along. You needn’t think you are the only one who has gained honors to-day. What do you think of that?”
As Bert said this, he and Hutton lifted a queer looking animal from the bottom of the canoe and threw it upon the bank. It was about as large as an ordinary dog, rather short and strongly built, with sharp, tufted ears and feet that were thickly padded with fur. Its claws were long and sharp, and so were the teeth that could be seen under its upraised lip. Its back was slightly arched, and as it lay there on the bank it looked a good deal like an overgrown cat that was about to go into battle. Don had never seen anything like it before.
“What in the world is it?” he exclaimed.
“That’s just the question I asked myself when I stumbled on him and his mate a little while ago,” said Bert. “It’s a luciver.”