a huge dark body, keeping carefully to leeward all the time and making
the big, unconscious creature guide me to where she had hidden her
little one.

Just above me, and a hundred yards in from the shore, a tree had fallen,
its bushy top bending down two small spruces and making a low den, so
dark that an owl could scarcely have seen what was inside. "That's the
spot," I told myself instantly; but the mother passed well above it,
without noting apparently how good a place it was. Fifty yards farther
on she turned and circled back, below the spot, trying the wind with
ears and nose as she came on straight towards me.

"Aha! the old moose trick," I thought, remembering how a hunted moose
never lies down to rest without first circling back for a long distance,
parallel to his trail and to leeward, to find out from a safe distance
whether anything is following him. When he lies down, at last, it will
be close beside his trail, but hidden from it; so that he hears or
smells you as you go by. And when you reach the place, far ahead, where
he turned back he will be miles away, plunging along down wind at a pace
that makes your snowshoe swing like a baby's toddle. So you camp where
he lay down, and pick up the trail in the morning.

When the big cow turned and came striding back I knew that I should find
her little one in the spruce den. But would she not find me, instead,
and drive me out of her bailiwick? You can never be sure what a moose
will do if she finds you near her calf. Generally they run--always, in
fact--but sometimes they run your way. And besides, I had been trying
for years to see a mother moose teaching in her little school. Now I
dropped on all fours and crawled away down wind, so as to get beyond ken
of the mother's inquisitive nose if possible.

She came on steadily, moving with astonishing silence through the
tangle, till she stood where I had been a moment before, when she
started violently and threw her head up into the wind. Some scent of me
was there, clinging faintly to the leaves and the moist earth. For a
moment she stood like a rock, sifting the air in her nose; then, finding
nothing in the wind, she turned slowly in my direction to use her ears
and eyes. I was lying very still behind a mossy log by this time, and
she did not see me. Suddenly she turned and called, a low bleat. There
was an instant stir in the spruce den, an answering bleat, and a moose
calf scrambled out and ran straight to th