The boy had been a genius at imitating the voices of English birds and animals; many a trick had he played on his schoolfellows with his carols and howls. And his proficiency in this line was a good foundation on which to work.
“You’ll get there, boy,” said Herb, surveying him with approval, as he stood outside the camp-door with the moose-horn to his lips. “Make believe that there’s a moose on the opposite shore of the lake now, and give the whole call, from start to finish.”
Whereupon Dol slowly carried his head to left and right, as he had seen the guide do on the previous night, raising and lowering the horn until it had described an enormous figure of eight in the air, while he groaned, sighed, rasped, and bellowed with a plaintive intensity of expression, which caused his brother and his friend to shriek with laughter.
“You’ll get there, Kid,” repeated the woodsman, with a great triumphant guffaw. “You’ll be able to give a fetching call sooner than either of the others. But be careful how you use the trick, or you’ll be having the breath kicked out of you some day by a moose’s forefeet.”
For days afterwards, the birch-bark horn was rarely out of Dol Farrar’s hands. The boy was so entranced with the new musical art he was mastering, which would be a means of communication between him and the behemoth of the woods, that he haunted the edges of the forest about the clearing, keeping aloof from his brother and friend, practising unceasingly, sometimes under Herb’s supervision, sometimes alone. He learned to imitate every sound which the guide made, working in touching quavers and inflections that must tug at the heart-strings of any listening moose. He learned to give the call, squatting Indian fashion, in a very uncomfortable position, behind a screen of bushes. He learned to copy, not the cow’s summons alone, but the bull’s short challenge too; and to rasp his horn against a tree, in imitation of a moose polishing its antlers for battle.
And now, for the first time, Dol Farrar of Manchester regarded his education as complete. He was prouder of this forest accomplishment, picked up in the wilds, than of all triumphs over problems and ’ologies at his English school. He had not been a laggard in study, either.
But the finishing of Dol’s education had one bad result. If there happened to be another moose travelling through the adjacent forests, he evidently thought that all this random calling was too much of a good thing, had his suspicions aroused, and took himself oft to wilder solitudes. Though the guide tried his powers in persuasive summons every night at various calling-places, he could not again succeed in getting an answer.
At last, on a certain evening, after supper, a solemn camp-council was held around an inspiring fire, and Herb Heal suggested that if his party were really bent on seeing a moose again, before they turned their faces homeward, they had better rise early the following morning, shoulder their knapsacks, and set out to do a few days’ hunting amid the dense woods near the base of Katahdin.
“I killed the biggest bull-moose I ever saw, on Togue Ponds, in that region,” said the guide meditatively; “and I got him in a queer way. I b’lieve I promised to tell you that yarn.”
“Of course you did!”