My blankets were warm, and it was only after a great deal of wavering hesitation that I could pluck up courage to roll out of them in the penetrating cold of early morning. On the second morning, as we made our way through dew-soaked underbrush to the lake, we came out upon a little glade, at the farther end of which stood a caribou. He sprang away as he saw us, but halted behind a bush to reconnoitre—the victim of a fatal curiosity, for it gave me my opportunity and I brought him down. Although he was large in body, he had a very poor head. I spent a busy morning preparing the skin, but in the afternoon we were again at the lake watching for moose. We spent several fruitless days there.
One afternoon a yearling bull moose appeared: he had apparently lost his mother, for he wandered aimlessly around for several hours, bewailing his fate. This watching would have been pleasant enough as a rest-cure, but since I was hunting and very anxious to get my game, it became a rather irksome affair. However, I could only follow Saint Augustine’s advice, “when in Rome, fast on Saturdays,” and I resigned myself to adopting Willie’s plan of waiting for the game to come to us instead of pursuing my own inclination and setting out to find the game. Luckily, I had some books with me, and passed the days pleasantly enough reading Voltaire and Boileau. There was a beaver-house at one end of the lake, and between four and five the beaver would come out and swim around. I missed a shot at one. Red squirrels were very plentiful and would chatter excitedly at us from a distance of a few feet. There was one particularly persistent little chap who did everything in his power to attract attention. He would sit in the conventional squirrel attitude upon a branch, and chirp loudly, bouncing stiffly forward at each chirp, precisely as if he were an automaton.
When we decided that it was useless to hunt this lake any longer, we went back to the river to put in a few days hunting up and down it. I got back to the camp in the evening and found Thompson there. He had had no luck and intended to leave for the settlement in the morning. Accordingly, the next day he started downstream and we went up. We hadn’t been gone long before we heard what we took to be two shots, though, for all we knew, they might have been a beaver striking the water with his tail. That night, when we got back to camp, we found that, on going round a bend in the river about a mile below camp, Thompson had come upon a bull and a cow moose, and had bagged the bull.
The next morning it was raining as if it were the first storm after a long drought, and as we felt sure that no sensible moose would wander around much amid such a frozen downpour, we determined to put in a day after beaver. In one of my long tramps with Bill we had come across a large beaver-pond, and at the time Bill had remarked how easy it would be to break the dam and shoot the beaver. I had carefully noted the location of this pond, so managed successfully to pilot Willie to it, and we set to work to let the water out. This breaking the dam was not the easy matter I had imagined. It was a big pond, and the dam that was stretched across its lower end was from eight to ten feet high. To look at its solid structure and the size of the logs that formed it, it seemed inconceivable that an animal the size of a beaver could have built it. The water was above our heads, and there was a crust of ice around the edges. We had to get in and work waist-deep in the water to enlarge our break in the dam, and the very remembrance of that cold morning’s work, trying to pry out logs with frozen fingers, makes me shiver. It was even worse when we had to stop work and wait and watch for the beavers to come out. They finally did, and I shot two. They were fine large specimens; the male was just two inches less than four feet and the female only one inch shorter. Shivering and frozen, we headed back for camp. My hunting costume had caused a good deal of comment among the guides; it consisted of a sleeveless cotton undershirt, a many-pocketed coat, a pair of short khaki trousers reaching to just above my knees, and then a pair of sneakers or of high boots—I used the former when I wished to walk quietly. My knees were always bare and were quite as impervious to cold as my hands, but the guides could never understand why I didn’t freeze. I used to hear them solemnly discussing it in their broken French.
I had at first hoped to get my moose by fair stalking, without the help of calling, but I had long since abandoned that hope; and Willie, who was an excellent caller, had been doing his best, but with no result. We saw several cow moose, and once Willie called out a young bull, but his horns could not have had a spread of more than thirty-five inches, and he would have been quite useless as a museum specimen. Another time, when we were crawling up to a lake not far from the river, we found ourselves face to face with a two-year-old bull. He was very close to us, but as he hadn’t got our wind, he was merely curious to find out what we were, for Willie kept grunting through his birch-bark horn. Once he came up to within twenty feet of us and stood gazing. Finally he got our wind and crashed off through the lakeside alders.
As a rule, moose answer a call better at night, and almost every night we could hear them calling around our camp; generally they were cows that we heard, and once Willie had a duel with a cow as to which should have a young bull that we could hear in an alder thicket, smashing the bushes with his horns. Willie finally triumphed, and the bull headed toward us with a most disconcerting rush; next morning we found his tracks at the edge of the clearing not more than twenty yards from where we had been standing; at that point the camp smoke and smells had proved more convincing than Willie’s calling-horn.
Late one afternoon I had a good opportunity to watch some beaver at work. We had crawled cautiously up to a small lake in the vain hope of finding a moose, when we came upon some beaver close to the shore. Their house was twenty or thirty yards away, and they were bringing out a supply of wood, chiefly poplar, for winter food. To and fro they swam, pushing the wood in front of them. Occasionally one would feel hungry, and then he would stop and start eating the bark from the log he was pushing. It made me shiver to watch them lying lazily in that icy water.
I had already stayed longer than I intended, and the day was rapidly approaching when I should have to start down-river. Even the cheerful Willie was getting discouraged, and instead of accounts of the miraculous bags hunters made at the end of their trips, I began to be told of people who were unfortunate enough to go out without anything. I made up my mind to put in the last few days hunting from the Popple Cabin, so one rainy noon, after a morning’s hunt along the river, we shouldered our packs and tramped off to the little cabin from which Bill and I had hunted. Wirre was with us, and we left him to dry out the cabin while we went off to try a late afternoon’s hunt. As we were climbing the hill from which Bill and I used to watch the little pond, Willie caught sight of a moose on the side of a hill a mile away. One look through our field-glasses convinced us it was a good bull. A deep wooded valley intervened, and down into it we started at headlong speed, and up the other side we panted. As we neared where we believed the moose to be, I slowed down in order to get my wind in case I had to do some quick shooting. I soon picked up the moose and managed to signal Willie to stop. The moose was walking along at the edge of the woods somewhat over two hundred yards to our left. The wind was favorable, so I decided to try to get nearer before shooting. It was a mistake, for which I came close to paying dearly; suddenly, and without any warning, the great animal swung into the woods and disappeared before I could get ready to shoot.
Willie had his birch-bark horn with him and he tried calling, but instead of coming toward us, we could hear the moose moving off in the other direction. The woods were dense, and all chance seemed to have gone. With a really good tracker, such as are to be found among some of the African tribes, the task would have been quite simple, but neither Willie nor I was good enough. We had given up hope when we heard the moose grunt on the hillside above us. Hurrying toward the sound, we soon came into more open country. I saw him in a little glade to our right; he looked most impressive as he stood there, nearly nineteen hands at the withers, shaking his antlers and staring at us; I dropped to my knee and shot, and that was the first that Willie knew of our quarry’s presence. He didn’t go far after my first shot, but several more were necessary before he fell. We hurried up to examine him; he was not yet dead, and when we were half a dozen yards away, he staggered to his feet and started for us, but he fell before he could reach us. Had I shot him the first day I might have had some compunction at having put an end to such a huge, handsome animal, but as it was I had no such feelings. We had hunted long and hard, and luck had been consistently against us.
Our chase had led us back in a quartering direction toward camp, which was now not more than a mile away; so Willie went to get Wirre, while I set to work to take the measurements and start on the skinning. Taking off a whole moose hide is no light task, and it was well after dark before we got it off. We estimated the weight of the green hide as well over a hundred and fifty pounds, but probably less than two hundred. We bundled it up as well as we could in some pack-straps, and as I seemed best suited to the task, I fastened it on my back.