“Quit laughing, boys,” he said, recovering prudence directly he had let out his yell. “Quit laughing, I say, or we may call moose here till crack o’ doom without getting an answer. I guess they’re all off to the four winds a’ready, scared by our fooling.”
Chapter XIX.
Treed By a Moose
“I told you so, boys,” breathed the guide two hours later, with an overwhelming sigh of regret, after he had given his most fetching calls in vain. “I told you so. There ain’t anything bigger’n a buck-rabbit travelling. That tormented row we made scared every moose within hearing.”
Herb was standing on the ground, horn in hand, screened by the great shadows of a clump of hemlocks; the three were perched upon branches high above him, a safe post of observation if any moose had answered.
“You may as well light down now,” he continued, turning his face up, though the boys were invisible; “I ain’t a-going to try any more music to-night. I guess we’ll stretch ourselves for sleep early, to get ready for a good day’s work to-morrow. An eight-mile tramp will bring us to the first heavy growth about the foot of Katahdin, and I’ll promise you a sight of a moose there.”
His companions dropped to earth; and the four sought the shelter of their tent, which had been pitched a few hundred yards from the calling-place. Some dull embers smouldered before it; for Herb, even while preparing supper, had kept the camp-fire very low, lest any wandering clouds of smoke should interfere with the success of his calling.
Now he heaped it high, throwing on without stint withered hemlock boughs and massive logs, which were soon wrapped in a sheet of flame, making an isle of light amid a surrounding sea of impenetrable darkness.
Many times during the night the watchful fellow arose to replenish this fire, so that there might be no decrease in the flood of heat which entered the tent, and kept his charges comfortable. Once, while he was so engaged, the placid sleepers whom he had noiselessly quitted were aroused to terror—sudden, bewildering night-terror—by a gasping cry from his lips, followed by the leaping and rushing of some brute in flight, and by a screech which was one defiant note of unutterable savagery.
“Good heavens! What’s that?” said Cyrus.