To which his wife retorted with calm superiority: “Ye’re a bigger fool’n even I took ye fer, Jabe Smith.”
But the young bull did not come back that winter, nor the following summer, nor the next year, nor the next. Neither did any Indian or hunter or 140 lumberman have anything to report as to a bull moose of great stature, with a long white slash down his side. Either his quest had carried him far to other and alien ranges, or some fatal mischance of the wild had overtaken his inexperience. The latter was Jabe’s belief, and he concluded that his ungainly favourite had too soon taken the long trail for the Red Men’s land of ghosts.
Though Jabe Smith was primarily a lumberman and backwoods farmer, he was also a hunter’s guide, so expert that his services in this direction were not to be obtained without very special inducement. At “calling” moose he was acknowledged to have no rival. When he laid his grimly-humourous lips to the long tube of birch-bark, which is the “caller’s” instrument of illusion, there would come from it a strange sound, great and grotesque, harsh yet appealing, rude yet subtle, and mysterious as if the uncomprehended wilderness had itself found voice. Old hunters, wise in all woodcraft, had been deceived by the sound––and much more easily the impetuous bull, waiting, high-antlered and eager, for the love-call of his mate to summon him down the shore of the still and moon-tranced lake.
When a certain Famous Hunter, whose heart took pride in horns and heads and hides––the trophies won by his unerring rifle in all four corners of earth––found his way at last to the tumbled wilderness that lies about the headwaters of the Quah Davic, it was naturally one of the great New Brunswick moose that he was after. Nothing but the noblest antlers that New Brunswick forests bred could seem to him worthy of a place on those walls of his, whence the surly front of a musk-ox of the Barren Grounds glared stolid defiance to the snarl of an Orinoco jaguar, and the black, colossal head of a Kadiak bear was eyed derisively by the monstrous and malignant mask of a two-horned rhinoceros. With such a quest upon him, the Famous Hunter came, and naturally sought the guidance of Jabe Smith, whom he lured from the tamer distractions of a “timber cruise” by double pay and the pledge of an extravagant bonus if the quest should be successful.
The lake, lying low between its wooded hills, was like a glimmering mirror in the misty October twilight when Jabe and the Famous Hunter crept stealthily down to it. In a dense covert beside the water’s edge they hid themselves. Beside them stretched the open ribbon of a narrow water-meadow, through which a slim brook, tinkling faintly over its pebbles, slipped out into the stillness. Just beyond the mouth of the brook a low, bare spit of sand jutted forth darkly upon the pale surface of the lake.
“IT WAS NOT UNTIL THE MOON APPEARED ... THAT JABE BEGAN TO CALL.”