“I’m—I’m all right,” sang out Dol, though his voice shook, as did every twig of his hemlock, which the moose was assaulting again. “But he’s frantic to get at me.”
“Never mind. He can’t do it, you know. Only don’t you go turning dizzy or losing your balance. Ha! you old spindle-legged monster, stand off from that tree. Take a turn at mine now, for a change. You can’t shake me down, if you butt till midnight.”
Garst’s last sentences were hurled at the moose. The Bostonian, having reached a safe height, thrust his face out from his screen of branches, waving first an arm, and then a leg, at the besieging foe, hoping that the force of those battering antlers would be directed against his hemlock, so that his friend’s nerves might get a chance to recover.
The ruse succeeded. The moose, reminded that there was a second enemy, charged the other tree; stood off for a minute to get breath, then charged it again, snorting, bellowing, and knocking his jaws together with a crunching, chopping noise.
“Ha! that’s how he makes the row like a man with an axe—by hammering his jaws on each other. Well, well! but this is a regular picnic, Dol,” sang out Cyrus jubilantly, caring nothing for the shocks, and forgetting camp, water, peril, everything, in his joy at getting a chance to leisurely study the creature he had come so far to visit.
“I owe you something for this, little man!” he carolled on in triumph, as he watched every wild movement of the moose. “This is a show we’ll only see once in our lives. It’s worth a hundred dollars a performance. Butt and snort till you’re tired, you ‘Awful Jabberwock!’”—this to the bull-moose. “We’ve come hundreds of miles to see you, and the more you carry on the better we’ll be pleased.”
Indeed, the wrathful king of forests seemed in no hurry to cut short his pantomime. He ramped and raged, tearing from one tree to another, expending paroxysms of force in vain attempts to overturn one or the other of them. The ground seemed to shake under his thundering hoofs. His eyes were full of green fire; his nostrils twitched; the black tassel or “bell” hanging from his shaggy throat shook with every angry movement; his muffle, the big overhanging upper lip, was spotted with foam.
As he gulped, grunted, snorted, and roared, his uncouth, guttural noises made him seem more than ever like a curious creature of earth’s earliest ages.
“We came pretty near to being goners, Dol, I tell you!” carolled Cyrus again from his high perch in the hemlock, carrying on a by-play with the enemy between each sentence. “How in the name of wonder did you manage such a call? It would have moved the heart-strings of any moose. I was lying flat, you know, peeping through a little gap in the bushes, and you had scarcely taken the horn from your mouth when I saw the old fellow come stamping out of the woods. My! wasn’t he a sight? He stood for a minute looking about for the fancied cow; then he bellowed, and started towards the knoll. I knew we had better run for our lives. As soon as he saw us he gave chase.”
“And ‘the fancied cow’ should go tumbling down the knoll like a rolling jackass, and smash that grand horn to bits!” lamented Dol, who now sat serenely on his bough, with a firm clasp of the hemlock trunk, and a reckless enjoyment of the situation which far surpassed his companion’s.