The sun had gone down, and that mile back to camp, crawling over dead falls and tripping on stones, was one of the longest I have ever walked. The final descent down the almost perpendicular hillside was the worst. When I fell, the skin was so heavy and such a clumsy affair that I couldn’t get up alone unless I could find a tree to help me; but generally Willie would start me off again. When I reached the cabin, in spite of the cold night-air, my clothes were as wet as if I had been in swimming. After they had taken the skin off my shoulders, I felt as if I had nothing to hold me down to earth, and might at any moment go soaring into the air.
Next morning I packed the skin down to the main camp, about three miles, but I found it a much easier task in the daylight. After working for a while on the skin, I set off to look for a cow moose, but, as is always the case, where they had abounded before, there was none to be found now that we wanted one.
The next day we spent tramping over the barren hillsides after caribou. Willie caught a glimpse of one, but it disappeared into a pine forest before we could come up with it. On the way back to camp I shot a deer for meat on our way down the river.
I had determined to have one more try for a cow moose, and next morning was just going off to hunt some lakes when we caught sight of an old cow standing on the opposite bank of the river about half a mile above us. We crossed and hurried up along the bank, but when we reached the bog where she had been standing she had disappeared. There was a lake not far from the river-bank, and we thought that she might have gone to it, for we felt sure we had not frightened her. As we reached the lake we saw her standing at the edge of the woods on the other side, half hidden in the trees. I fired and missed, but as she turned to make off I broke her hind quarter. After going a little distance she circled back to the lake and went out to stand in the water. We portaged a canoe from the river and took some pictures before finishing the cow. At the point where she fell the banks of the lake were so steep that we had to give up the attempt to haul the carcass out. I therefore set to work to get the skin off where the cow lay in the water. It was a slow, cold task, but finally I finished and we set off downstream, Wirre in one canoe and Willie and myself in the other. According to custom, the moose head was laid in the bow of our canoe, with the horns curving out on either side.
Bringing out the trophies of the hunt
We had been in the woods for almost a month, and in that time we had seen the glorious changes from summer to fall and fall to early winter, for the trees were leafless and bare. Robinson’s lines kept running through my head as we sped downstream through the frosty autumn day:
“Come away! come away! there’s a frost along the marshes,
And a frozen wind that skims the shoal where it shakes the dead black water;