“What do you mean, Bob?” Walter asked sternly. “You did not fire at small game in caribou season, in a hunting country?”
With that Bob exploded. “Wake up, Walter, and hear the birdies sing. I’ve got a moose, a peach, twelve hundred pounds, Blanc says. You’re a nice lot of Rip Van Winkles not to hear a shot within two miles. I potted him the first thing, almost at the landing, beaned him with one shot; he dropped like a log.”
Whether he wore skirts or wings mattered little to the cub now. Life was a trumpet peal, and he gambolled about the wilderness with his gray curtain flying, callous to criticism. It took most of the next day to arranger the moose comme il faut, as the guides delicately put it, for the shot had finished a mighty life.
“We’ll have to sit up nights and eat,” Bob considered, regarding the huge pacquetons of meat done up in a hide, and then his eyes fell on the head and antlers.
It was a fine head and the panaches were forty points.
“Hully gee!” the cub gurgled, and caracoled on all fours, with that mixture of child into the man which sometimes makes an eighteen-year-old boy startling. “Won’t the fellows be stunned when they lay their eyes on that? Won’t that look delicious on the wall of my house in the ‘Hutch’ next winter! I wish those boys were here to help eat.”
And his long legs, still as in early youth the most emotional features of his physique, described ellipses.
“Bob,” Walter remonstrated, “wait till you get your natural clothing before you jump so much. Your legs gleam not wisely but too well.”
And Bob chuckled, but calmed down.
“I guess that’s good dope,” he acknowledged—“dope” being Yaleish for “advice”—and then he went on: “Ginger!” he brought out explosively. “I’m glad those fellows aren’t due for a while yet, till I shed my ball gown. Just picture to yourself if they’d been on this trip.” His head went back and his big laugh rang up through the trees, ending in a projection of a bark and a bleat as if he could not get it all out. Bob’s laugh ranked with his legs as a safety valve for his spirits, and both worked overtime. “Think if those fellows had seen me this way—Buck and Donnie and Hal Harriman—why, I’d never have heard the last of it.”