it, with its shriveled ears that were once living trumpets, its bulging
eyes that were once so small and keen, and its huge muzzle stretched out
of all proportion, it is but misplaced, misshapen ugliness. It has no
more, and scarcely any higher, significance than a scalp on the pole of
a savage's wigwam. Only in the wilderness, with the irresistible push of
his twelve-hundred pound, force-packed body behind it, the crackling
underbrush beneath, and the lofty spruce aisles towering overhead, can
it give the tingling impression of magnificent power which belongs to
Umquenawis the Mighty in his native wilds. There only is his head at
home; and only as you see it there, whether looking out in quiet majesty
from a lonely point over a silent lake, or leading him in his terrific
rush through the startled forest, will your heart ever jump and your
nerves tingle in that swift thrill which stirs the sluggish blood to
your very finger tips, and sends you quietly back to camp with your
soul at peace--well satisfied to leave Umquenawis where he is, rather
than pack him home to your admiring friends in a freight car.

Though Umquenawis be lord of the wilderness, there are two things, and
two things only, which he sometimes fears: the smell of man, and the
spiteful crack of a rifle. For Milord the Moose has been hunted and has
learned fear, which formerly he was stranger to. But when you go deep
into the wilderness, where no hunter has ever gone, and where the bang
of a rifle following the roar of a birch-bark trumpet has never broken
the twilight stillness, there you may find him still, as he was before
fear came; there he will come smashing down the mountain side at your
call, and never circle to wind an enemy; and there, when the mood is on
him, he will send you scrambling up the nearest tree for your life, as a
squirrel goes when the fox is after him. Once, in such a mood, I saw him
charge a little wiry guide, who went up a spruce tree with his snowshoes
on; and never a bear did the trick quicker, spite of the four-foot webs
in which his feet were tangled.

We were pushing upstream, late one afternoon, to the big lake at the
headwaters of a wilderness river. Above the roar of rapids far behind,
and the fret of the current near at hand, the rhythmical _clunk_,
_clunk_ of the poles and the _lap_, _lap_ of my little canoe as she
breasted the ripples were the only sounds that broke the forest
stillness. We were silent, as men always a