The dying animal lay in the middle of the trail, which was an old, half-obliterated logger’s road, running straight east into the glow of the spring sunrise. The young birches and poplars, filmed 126 with the first of the green, crowded close upon the trail, with, here and there, a rose-blooming maple, here and there, a sombre, black-green hemlock, towering over the thick second growth. The early air was fresh, but soft; fragrant with the breath of opening buds. Faint mists streamed up into the sunlight along the mossy line of the trail, and the only sounds breaking the silence of the wilderness were the sweetly plaintive calls of two rain-birds, answering each other slowly over the treetops. Everything in the scene––the tenderness of the colour and the air, the responses of the mating birds, the hope and the expectancy of all the waking world––seemed piteously at variance with the anguish of the stricken mother and her young, down there in the solitude of the trail.
Presently, in the undergrowth beside the trail, a few paces beyond the deadfall, a twig snapped sharply. Admonished by that experience of a thousand ancestral generations which is instinct, the calf lifted his big awkward ears apprehensively, and with a shiver drew closer to his mother’s crushed body. A moment later a gaunt black bear thrust his head and shoulders forth from the undergrowth, and surveyed the scene with savage, but 127 shrewd, little eyes. He was hungry, and to his palate no other delicacy the spring wilderness could ever afford was equal to a young moose calf. But the situation gave him pause. The mother moose was evidently in a trap; and the bear was wary of all traps. He sank back into the undergrowth, and crept noiselessly nearer to reconnoitre. In his suspicious eyes even a calf might be dangerous to tamper with, under such unusual conditions as these. As he vanished the calf shuddered violently, and tried to climb upon his mother’s mangled body.
In a few seconds the bear’s head appeared again, close by the base of the deadfall. With crafty nose he sniffed at the great timber which held the moose cow down. The calf was now almost within reach of the deadly sweep of his paw; but the man-smell was strong on the deadfall, and the bear was still suspicious. While he hesitated, from behind a bend in the trail came a sound of footsteps. The bear knew the sound. A man was coming. Yes, certainly there was some trick about it. With a grunt of indignant disgust he shrank back again into the thicket and fled stealthily from so dangerous a neighbourhood. Hungry as he was, he had no wish to try conclusions with man.
The woodsman came striding down the trail hurriedly, rounded the turn, and stopped abruptly. He understood at a glance the evil work of the game poachers. With indignant pity, he stepped forward and drew a merciful knife across the throat of the suffering beast. The calf shrank away and stood staring at him anxiously, wavering between terror and trust.
For a moment or two the man hesitated. Of one thing he was certain: the poachers who had set the deadfall must not profit by their success. Moreover, fresh moose-meat would not be unappreciated in his backwoods cabin. He turned and retraced his steps at a run, fearing lest some hungry spring marauders should arrive in his absence. And the calf, more than ever terrified by his mother’s unresponsiveness, stared after him uneasily as he vanished.
For half an hour nothing happened. The early chill passed from the air, a comforting warmth glowed down the trail, the two rain-birds kept whistling to each other their long, persuasive, melancholy call, and the calf stood motionless, waiting, with the patience of the wild, for he knew not what. Then there came a clanking of chains, a trampling 129 of heavy feet, and around the turn appeared the man again, with a pair of big brown horses harnessed to a drag-sled. The calf backed away as the man approached, and watched with dull wonder as the great log was rolled aside and his mother’s limp, crushed form was hoisted laboriously upon the sled. This accomplished, the man turned and came to him gently, with hand outstretched. To run away would have been to run away from the shelter of his mother’s presence; so, with a snort of apprehension, he submitted to being stroked and rubbed about the ears and neck and throat. The sensation was curiously comforting, and suddenly his fear vanished. With his long, mobile muzzle he began to tug appealingly at a convenient fold of the man’s woollen sleeve. Smiling complacently at this sign of confidence, the man left him, and started the team at a slow walk up the trail. With a hoarse bleat of alarm, thinking he was about to be deserted, the calf followed after the sled, his long legs wobbling awkwardly.
From the first moment that she set eyes upon him, shambling awkwardly into the yard at her husband’s heels, Jabe Smith’s wife was inhospitable toward the ungainly youngling of the wild. She 130 declared that he would take all the milk. And he did. For the next two months she was unable to make any butter, and her opinions on the subject were expressed without reserve. But Jabe was inflexible, in his taciturn, backwoods way, and the calf, till he was old enough to pasture, got all the milk he wanted. He grew and throve so astonishingly that Jabe began to wonder if there was not some mistake in the scheme of things, making cows’ milk the proper nutriment for moose calves. By autumn the youngster was so big and sleek that he might almost have passed for a yearling.
Jabe Smith, lumberman, pioneer and guide, loved all animals, even those which in the fierce joy of the hunt he loved to kill. The young moose bull, however, was his peculiar favourite––partly, perhaps, because of Mrs. Smith’s relentless hostility to it. And the ungainly youngster repaid his love with a devotion that promised to become embarrassing. All around the farm he was for ever at his heels, like a dog; and if, by any chance, he became separated from his idol, he would make for him in a straight line, regardless of currant bushes, bean rows, cabbage patches or clothes-lines. This strenuous directness did not further endear him to Mrs. 131 Smith. That good lady used to lie awake at night, angrily devising schemes for getting rid of the “ugly brute.” These schemes of vengeance were such a safety-valve to her injured feelings that she would at last make up her mind to content herself with “takin’ it out on the hide o’ the critter” next day, with a sound hickory stick. When next day came, however, and she went out to milk, the youngster would shamble up to greet her with such amiable trust in his eyes that her wrath would be, for the moment, disarmed, and her fell purpose would fritter out in a futile “Scat, you brute!” Then she would condone her weakness by thinking of what she would do to the animal “some day.”
That “some day,” as luck would have it, came rather sooner than she expected. From the first, the little moose had evinced a determination to take up his abode in the kitchen, in his dread of being separated from Jabe. Being a just man, Jabe had conceded at once that his wife should have the choosing of her kitchen guests; and, to avoid complications, he had rigged up a hinged bar across the kitchen doorway, so that the door could safely stand open. When the little bull was not at Jabe’s heels, and did not know where to find him, his 132 favourite attitude was standing in front of the kitchen door, his long nose thrust in as far as the bar would permit, his long ears waving hopefully, his eyes intently on the mysterious operations of Mrs. Jabe’s housework. Though she would not have acknowledged it for worlds, even to her inmost heart, the good woman took much satisfaction out of that awkward, patient presence in the doorway. When things went wrong with her, in that perverse way so trying to the careful housewife, she could ease her feelings wonderfully by expressing them without reserve to the young moose, who never looked amused or attempted to answer back.