Mozo

“ When the canoe emerged from the stream into the pond the hunter and guide were surprised enough to see, at the edge, in shallow water, a large bull moose. The animal was up to his back feeding on the lily roots, splashing his great head about, and having no fear, in his lonely retreat, of being interrupted by hunters. The wind, being in the right direction, gave the men an advantage, as the moose could not scent them. The guide approached cautiously, never taking his paddle from the water as he propelled the light craft along. ”

“ As the last one struck he went down, the shot breaking his shoulder blade—another victim of the 30-30.
The experience of a young New Yorker will serve to exemplify both the uncertainty of moose calling and the manner in which it is prosecuted. He was hunting in the Bear River woods, accompanied by one of the most expert guides of that section. Two nights of calling proved fruitless. The sportsman frankly told his guide he had no faith in it, and that he did not believe a moose would come to the call of a man. ”

“ Mose had never had the fortune to see a moose. It would be just his luck, he thought, with a half-grin, to see one now, when he had no gun, and was quitting the woods forever.
Hark! there was the noise again, below and ahead of him now, but still to the left. He thought he almost saw a dark object push through the bushes, hardly a dozen yards away.
Mose leaped lightly down upon the moss at the base of his perch, and crept cautiously along under the ledge of rock, the cover of which would protect him quite to within a few feet of these bushes. ”

“ He turned on his heel, erect, dignified, and walked away amid the roars of my gleeful comrades.
IX
One by one my companions sought their blankets, leaving the shadows, the dying embers, the slow-rising moan of the night wind to me. Old Moze got up from among the other hounds and limped into my tent, where I heard him groan as he lay down. Don, Sounder, and Ranger were fast asleep in well-earned rest. Shep, one of the pups, whined and impatiently tossed his short chain. ”

“ In the first place, your modern hunter goes out with a guide; and two men make ten times as much noise as one, and spread far more terror. Next, the hunter is eager to see, to shoot, to kill; his excitement gets into his skin, gets into the guide and the call, and a sensitive moose probably feels this contagion of excitement as he draws near it; though it might be hard to explain why or how. As Simmo the Indian says, “Moose don’t know how he know somet’ing ”

“ Multitudes of birds of every shape and hue, daily passed before his eyes. At last he fell in with a company who were crossing the desert in a caravan, and many strange sights were seen by Mozam. Nothing awakened his wonder so much as the gigantic ostriches that ran much swifter than horses over the sands. “Surely,” thought he, “what creature is more capable of revealing any knowledge or mystery to man than this—what bird could be one-half so wonderful; this must be the creature that is to exercise such an influence over my fortunes.” ”

“ One of the slow migrations of the moose-folk, which take place only at intervals of many years, had set in. Drifting down from the Far North, scattered herds had invaded the old bear’s northernmost range. Like the witch-hazel, which blooms last of all the shrubs, the love-moon of the moose rises in the fall. The males of that folk take hardly the stress and strain of courtship. Bad-tempered at the best, a bull-moose is a devil unchained in September. As the hunter’s moon waxes in the frosty sky, he neither rests, eats, or sleeps, but wanders night and day through the woods in search of a mate. ”

“ Every animal has a sign language as plain as print. The trapper has hardly entered the forest before he begins to read this language. Broad hoof-marks are on the muskeg—quaking bog, covered with moss—over which the moose can skim as if on snow-shoes, where a horse would sink to the saddle. Park-like glades at the heads of streams, where the moose have spent the summer browsing on twigs and wallowing in water holes to get rid of sand flies, show trampled brush and stripped twigs and rubbed bark. ”

“ So the chief told her what the wise ones of the nation had said about Walking Moose. He did not know that, as usual, their wise words were nothing more than a clever fiction to mystify the warriors and retain the awe of the laity for the dark arts. To soothe the injured pride of the chiefs they had said that the prowess of Walking Moose was due to magic; that he could not be killed in battle, or by the spilling of blood, or by fire; that starvation only could kill him, and that within bowshot of his own village. ”

“ Every year the great, slow-witted animal must renew his head-gear. He must lose the deformity, his pride, and cultivate another. In spring, when the first anemone trembles to the vernal breeze, the moose nods welcome to the wind, and as he nods feels something rattle on his skull. ”

“ Don't forget this. We're bound to lose each other. Look out for the spikes and branches on the trees. If the dogs split, whoever follows the one that trees the lion must wait there till the rest come up. Off now! Come, Sounder; Moze, you rascal, hyah! Come, Don, come, Puppy, and take your medicine."
Except Moze, the hounds were all trembling and running eagerly to and fro. When Sounder was loosed, he led them in a bee-line to the trail, with us cantering after. Sounder worked exactly as before, only he followed the lion tracks a little farther up the ravine before he bayed. ”

“ Below him the noisy, hurrying waters were churned into foam over innumerable hidden rocks; to the rear lay the wilderness, green, shadowy and mysterious.
The moose was a magnificent beast, the ridge of his shoulders rising to a height of little less than seven feet. His great antlers, the admiration and desire of every hunter in the Little Vermilion country, showed a spread of almost six feet from tip to tip. As if carved from the rock the big moose stood, his eyes on the distant waters, only his ears moving slightly to test the wind. ”

“ The pair went crashing onward, making their way toward the distant waterways and marshes. Long before you heard the crashing of the underbrush you knew, if you were experienced in wood-lore, that moose were on the trail, because the moose when it travels has a way of striking its hoofs together with a sharp, clicking sound like the striking of castanets, and the sharp sound heralds their coming. But for all the moose is himself noisy, he is perhaps the very keenest one in the forest to detect the approach of an intruder, for he readily takes alarm at the mere cracking of a twig. ”

“ The sound made by this birchbark trumpet resembles the call of the female moose, and when the male hears it he comes to see what it means. Like his human brothers, Mr. Moose is a dutiful husband and comes when his wife calls him. Everybody sit still now and see if he comes.”
Again he sent the call echoing through the woods. The watchers strained ears and eyes, but nothing happened. ”

“ But this time he had smeared himself from head to foot with moose dung, and he knew that it would take a keener nose than Strong Hand’s to detect him.
Strong Hand had not killed [113] that day, and as he drew near his cave, the strong smell of moose came to him from a thicket on the left of the runway.
Ears and nose twitching and eyes alert he turned cautiously into the thicket. Almost in his face there was a loud twanging jar, and at the same instant a pain like fire darted through his entrails, and he knew that he had been struck to death. ”

“ Perhaps the tenderness as well as the wild passion of the animal gets into the hunter's blood, and tips his fingers at times with an exquisite kindness—as one has noted in a lion fondling her young, or in tigers as they sport upon the sands of the desert. This boy had seen his father shoot a splendid moose, and, as it lay dying, drop down and kiss it in the neck for sheer love of its handsomeness. Death is no insult. ”

“ And I have the hounds coming fine. They mind me now, but they're mystified. For the life of them they can't understand what I mean. I don't blame them. Wait till, by good luck, we get a cougar in a tree. When Sounder and Don see that, we've lion dogs, boys! we've lion dogs! But Moze is a stubborn brute. In all my years of animal experience, I've never discovered any other way to make animals obey than by instilling fear and respect into their hearts. I've been fond of buffalo, horses and dogs, but sentiment never ruled me. When animals must obey, they must—that's all, and no mawkishness! ”

“ He wagged his tail, and flopped down to pant and pant, as if to say: "What's wrong with you guys?"
"Boys, for two cents I'd go back and put Jude on that trail. It's just possible that Moze treed a lion. But—well, I expect there's more likelihood of his chasing the lion over the rim; so we may as well keep on. The strange thing is that Sounder wasn't with Moze. There may have been two lions. You see we are up a tree ourselves. I have known lions to run in pairs, and also a mother keep four two-year-olds with her. ”

“ The Indians and half-breeds of the far North stalk the wary Moose where he beds himself down after a night of browsing, but so acute is his hearing and sense of smell and so great his cunning that only the trained woodsman can hope for success. Leaving his feed-trail abruptly, the Moose moves off to one side down the wind so that any one trailing him will be surely scented, and there beds himself down for the day. ”

“ BULL MOOSE Monograph Number Five in The Mentor Reading Course
Imagine an animal standing between six and seven feet high at the shoulders, its legs four feet long, its neck and body covered with a heavy thatch of coarse, purplish gray hair, and its huge head crowned with massive antlers spreading from five to six feet in width! That is the moose (Alces americanus) . It is the largest animal of the deer family. The only way to appreciate a moose is to see an adult animal alive and full of strength, striding through the forests of Canada or Alaska. ”

“ Athabasca trades to-day the skins of nearly 2000 moose in a single year. Few animals are more unshapely than this giant deer. His neck slopes down from the shoulder, ending in a head as large as a horse—a head which ends in a nose curled like a camel’s—a nose delicious to the taste, but hideous to the eye. The ears are of enormous length. Yet, ugly as are the nose and ears of the moose, they are his chief means of protection against his enemy, and in that great ungainly head there lurks a brain of marvellous cunning. ”

“ We were in wonderful moose country now; the uninvaded wild, where in trackless bog and swamp, or on the lonely and forgotten islands the she-moose [Pg 102] secludes herself to bear and rear her young. That Charlie and Del were more absorbed in the possibility of getting a sight of these great, timid, vanishing visions of animal life—and perhaps a longer view of a little black, bleating calf—than in any exploration for the other end of the Shelburne River was evident. ”

“ I was once sitting on the shore of a lake at twilight, wholly intent on following the antics of a bull moose I had called into the open. He was on the other side of a small bay, ranging up and down, listening, threshing the bushes with his antlers, blowing his penny-trumpet at intervals,—in a dozen impatient ways showing what a young and foolish moose he was. A veteran would have kept to the cover till he had located what he came for. ”

“ The head is large, the mane short and thick, and the horns knotty and heavy. The body, which is short and clumsy, is mounted on tall legs. The motion of the animal is a sort of shambling trot. The moose inhabits the northern parts of both Europe and America. Its flesh is much liked by the hunters, and much resembles beef.
The moose attains to a large size, particularly the male, which sometimes weighs eleven or twelve hundred pounds.56 Their skins, when dressed properly, make a soft, thick, pliable leather, which is useful for many purposes. Sometimes the moose is attacked by wolves. ”

“ He saw moose tracks, and he was there to follow them, which he did long and wearily, for a day, and at night he slept in an abandoned camp. Again on the next day he followed them, seeing them sometimes on the soft, green moss, again at the side of a stream, or in some boggy place. At times they were lost on a rocky slope, or in a region of hard ground. There was no snow to aid the hunter, and the tracking of moose in such a country without it called for the best traits of the seasoned sportsman,—patience and endurance. ”

“ William Long, in his very interesting book called Beasts of the Field, describes how he once called a moose. The moose is a very huge kind of stag, with an ugly, bulging kind of nose. He lives in the forests of North America and Canada, and is very hard to get near; and is pretty dangerous when he is angry.
Mr. Long was in a canoe fishing when he heard a moose bull calling in the forest—so just for fun he went ashore and cut a strip of bark off a birch tree and rolled it up so as to make a kind of megaphone, With this he proceeded to imitate the roaring grunt of the bull moose. ”

“ Moose, hearing the call, rushes in the direction of the sound. The poor fellow is often shot, thus lured into close proximity with his enemies.
The moose loves the water and is a fine swimmer. He enjoys wading, and spends much of the summer time in the water, swimming and browsing water plants. So baby moose spends his first summer, enjoying nature, finding out what is good to eat and what is to be left alone, growing like the proverbial weed, and getting acquainted with life. ”