He seemed to fancy that there would be no trouble at all about spinning along over the country, once he “got the hang of things.”
“I’m bound to pull off some stunts while we’re up here,” he remarked, as he sat and looked at his prized possessions, now fastened with the straps to the toes of his shoes, leaving the heels free; “and I only hope the snow gets knee-deep by morning. I’ve read about how hunters up here in Canada chase the moose when a crust forms on the deep snow, and I want to try it for myself.”
“That is reckoned the best time for hunting,” Phil explained; “though it doesn’t seem hardly fair to the caribou or the moose. You see, with their weight and their sharp hoofs they break through the crust at every jump, and flounder more or less in the drifts; while the hunter on his broad snow-shoes glides swiftly along, and can easily overtake the strongest of them.”
“How about those moose yards I’ve read about?” asked Ethan, who though a descendant of a New England family knew much less about big-game hunting than did Phil.
“Oh! they are found in New Brunswick, and parts of Canada as well,” the other explained. “When the snow gets very deep, so that the moose find it hard to move around in the woods, they make their way to some place previously selected, where they can feed on the tender shoots of certain trees. There they stay, trampling the snow down constantly, until the place looks like an enclosure surrounded by walls of snow.”
“Then that’s how it came to be called a moose yard, I suppose?” ventured Lub, who was listening to all of this talk, even though he did not profess to be very fond of hunting.
“Yes,” Phil continued; “and there are some hunters so low down in the scale as real sportsmen that if they ran upon one of these yards they would take advantage of the opportunity to slaughter every one of the moose in it, no matter if they numbered ten or a dozen.”
“But good gracious! isn’t there a law limiting the number of moose any one person can shoot in a year?” asked Lub.
“Of course there is, and it’s generally a single specimen, because moose are getting more and more scarce every season,” said Phil; “but what does the game law signify to these hogs? So long as they can feel pretty sure of not being found out there’s nothing too mean for them to do.”
“What a shame they can’t all be arrested, and sent up for a term of years,” Lub remarked, indignantly.