Disgust thickened the voices of the listening three, as with one accord they raised an outcry against this cruel way of butchering a game animal, without giving it a single chance for its life. When their indignation had subsided, the hunter went on to describe the fourth and last method of entrapping moose—the calling in which Dol was so interested.
“P’raps you won’t think this is fair hunting either,” he said; “for it’s a trick, and I’ll allow that there’s times when it seems a pretty mean game. Anyhow, I’d rather kill one moose by still-hunting than six by calling. But if you want to try work that’ll make your blood race through your body like a torrent one minute, and turn you as cold as if your sweat was ice-water the next, you go in for moose-calling. I guess you know all about the matter, Cyrus; but as these Britishers do not, I’ll try and explain it to’ em.
“Early in September the moose come up from the low, swampy lands where they have spent the summer alone, and begin to pair. Then the bull-moose, as we call the male, which is generally the most wide-awake of forest creatures, loses some of his big caution, an’ goes roaming through the woods, looking for a mate. This is the time for fooling him. The hunter makes a horn out o’ birch-bark, somewheres about eighteen inches long, through which he mimics the call of the cow-moose, to coax the bull within reach of his rifle-shots.”
“What is the call like?” asked Neal, his heart thumping while he remembered that strange noise which had marked a new era in his experience of sounds, as he listened to it at midnight by Squaw Pond.
“Sho! a man might keep jawing till crack o’ doom, and not give you any idea of it without you heard it,” answered Herb Heal, the dare-all moose-hunter. “The noise begins sort o’ gently, like the lowing of a tame cow. It seems, if you’re listening to it, to come rolling—rolling—along the ground. Then it rises in pitch, and gets impatient and lonely and wild-like, till you think it fills the air above you, when it sinks again and dies away in a queer, quavery sound that ain’t a sigh, nor a groan, nor a grunt, but all three together.
“The call is mostly repeated three times; and the third time it ends with a mad roar as if the lady-moose was saying to her mate, ‘Come now, or stay away altogether!’”
“Joe Flint was right, then!” exclaimed Neal, in high excitement. “That’s the very noise I heard in the woods near Squaw Pond, on the night when we were jacking for deer, and our canoe capsized.”
“P’raps it was,” answered Herb, “though the woods near Squaw Pond ain’t much good for moose now. They’re too full of hunters. Still, you might have heard the cow-moose herself calling, or some man who had come across the tracks of a bull imitating her.”
“But if the bull has such sharp ears, can’t he tell the real call from the sham one?” asked Dol.
“Lots of times he can. But if the hunter is an old woodsman and a clever caller, he’ll generally fool the animal, unless he makes some awkward noise that isn’t in the game, or else the moose gets his scent on the breeze. One whiff of a man will send the creature off like a wind-gust, and earthquakes wouldn’t stop him. And though he sneaks away so silently when he hears anything suspicious, yet when he smells danger he’ll go through the forest at a thundering rush, making as much noise as a demented fire-brigade.”