It was now near the calling season, and the nights grew keen with excitement. Now and then as I fished, or followed the brooks, or prowled through the woods in the late afternoon, the sudden bellow of a cow moose would break upon the stillness, so strange and uncertain in the thick coverts that I could rarely describe, much less imitate, the sound, or even tell the direction whence it had come. Under the dusk of the lake shore I would sometimes come upon a pair of the huge animals, the cow restless, wary, impatient, the bull now silent as a shadow, now ripping and rasping the torn velvet from his great antlers among the alders, and now threatening and browbeating every living thing that crossed his trail, and even the unoffending bushes, in his testy humor.
One night I went to the landing just below my tent with Simmo and tried for the first time the long call of the cow moose. He and Noel refused absolutely to give it, unless I should agree to shoot the ugly old bull at sight. Several times of late they had seen him near our camp, or had crossed his deep trail on the nearer shores, and they were growing superstitious as well as fearful.
There was no answer to our calling for the space of an hour; silence brooded like a living, watchful thing over sleeping lake and forest, a silence that grew only deeper and deeper after the last echoes of the bark trumpet had rolled back on us from the distant mountain. Suddenly Simmo lowered the horn, just as he had raised it to his lips for a call.
“Moose near!” he whispered.
“How do you know?” I breathed; for I had heard nothing.
“Don’ know how; just know,” he said sullenly. An Indian hates to be questioned, as a wild animal hates to be watched. As if in confirmation of his opinion, there was a startling crash and plunge across the little bay over against us, and a bull moose leaped the bank into the lake within fifty yards of where we crouched on the shore.
“Shoot! shoot-um quick!” cried Simmo; and the fear of the old bull was in his voice.
For answer there came a grunt from the moose—a ridiculously small, squeaking grunt, like the voice of a penny trumpet—as the huge creature swung rapidly along the shore in our direction.
“Uh! young bull, lil fool moose,” whispered Simmo, and breathed a soft, questioning Whooowuh? through the bark horn to bring him nearer.
He came close to where we were hidden, then entered the woods and circled silently about our camp to get our wind. In the morning his tracks, within five feet of my rear tent pole, showed how little he cared for the dwelling of man. But though he circled back and forth for an hour, answering Simmo’s low call with his ridiculous little grunt, he would not show himself again on the open shore.